I am so happy to hear this.
Manjaro started working on this, but they ended up dropping it.
I really want to run sway with sxmo touch gestures and an on-screen pop-up keyboard on a x86 tablet, but I don’t want to run alpine (pmos) underneath. I like alpine and I use it on certain stuff, but the repo (even with community one enabled) feels lacking (I could enhance it with nix, but I haven’t tried running nix-daemon on non-nixOS systems just yet).
PostmarketOS has some extra stuff in their repos on top of what is already in the Alpine repos. Then there’s also Flatpak and Distrobox for everything else. I was able to run FreeCAD on my phone inside of a Debian distrobox container lol.
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https://blog.mobian.org/posts/2023/09/30/paperweight-dilemma/
solemn thought. i guess i never considered that the theoretical talk of the pinephone becoming mainline kernel was just theory and that it was not even on that trajectory.
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How is the fluidness of the animation in the OG pinephone? I mean honestly its a silly thing to ask but still.
System ui interaction is smooth and responsive on Phosh/Mobian, even if e.g. firefox is chugging on loading a tab.
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rip pinephone
(Mine is already in a storage tub, effectively out of service, with my PineBook Pro.)
Ooff, did it just die, didnt meet your expectations or just done playing with it?
well, i hope it’s not rip, and that this just a notification of being an endangered species. I still daily-drive mine, and will continue to do so for a good while, even if development peters out. Maybe someone will take up the task of getting back to something mainline-able.
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I had gotten the impression from the Mobian blog post that Megi was discontinuing development. Reading Megi’s blog: sounds like that’s not the case. Megi has made their work less open/accessible by moving off of github, but distros other than Mobian will surely continue to use Megi’s kernel wholesale, so it’s not rip pinephone, but it could be that mobian may drop support for it.
maybe time to try ub touch again. wonder if it supports docking yet. Ubuntu Touch 20.04 OTA-3 release adds support for PinePhone and PineTab devices - CNX Software
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This looks pretty cool. Hopefully getting it to work with Sway won’t be too hard.
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Well I was hoping to join the Linux Phone gang…but…
3 years ago I ordered the Pro1x after this review:
Now normally I wouldn’t do crowdfunding, but given that fxtec had successfully produced the previous model and proven they could deliver. This was supposed to be an iteration of the previous model, plus it had backing from XDA with official support.
So I figured why not take a leap of faith…
Well, first they downgraded the SOC from SD835 to the SD662, because the SD835 hit EOL:
How they didn’t know this ~3 months before production makes no sense… but fine manufacturing is difficult. I’ll take the performance hit because the rest of the phone still looks solid. However the SD662 doesn’t support HDMI out. This was a key selling feature for me. So that’s gone too…cool. Fine maybe the phone will still be usable (foreshadow).
What is not OK to me tho, is that they STILL list HDMI support on their website where they are selling it, which is pretty blatant false advertising of a key feature.
Fxtec is a UK company, I believe this to be in violation according to gov.uk:
I have called them out for this on their own forums and on IGG, no response. what ever i guess…
Also their performance graphs on the IGG would be for the 835, not the 662. They have not updated them. More falsehoods.
Then 2 years pass, and these devices show up on a site called Expansys.
Expansys seems to no longer exist, but luckily the wayback machine has my back:
proof they sold at least one on here by this review:
I paid $719USD and have not received the device, yet here they are selling the SAME DEVICE for LESS THAN HALF WHAT I PAID!?!?!? (HK$2249 = ~289USD)
This is really the icing on the cake, a slap in the face. I don’t know how that happened, I’m no laywer but it smells like fraud at this point. They sold backers phones before delivering to backers…
Note also how they continued to falsely advertise HDMI out in the specs on expansys too, well after the SOC change.
And all this while they have been not great with communication, and by indie gogos own terms of service they have to update at least once a month. They didn’t do that for almost 3 months before their most recent update, and that wasn’t until multiple people in the IGG comments section started contacting IGG and IGG forced them to update (according to the comment section). There are also mentions of legal action in some threads on fxtecs forum but I don’t know if we can do anything really given the nature of crowdfunding we accepted that risk. Oh well.
It appears that devices are FINALLY starting to roll out (terribly slowly of course) as confirmed by some of the IGG comments and fxtec forums. …and of course they have issues.
Reports of fingerprint sensor not working, poor wifi and cellular, and completely depleted batteries out of the box bricks.
Apparently the battery charge controller or something is missing that is supposed to prevent the battery from draining completely. People are receiving bricks that wont charge because the battery got too low. There is a work around to manually charge the battery with a powersupply: On charging a depleted battery - Support - F(x)tec Community
XDA seems to have washed their hands of it, absolute silence from them. granted its not XDA’s fault but they could at least acknowledge the situation.
Here is a recent review that covers some of the issues:
That’s a $719 USD lesson to never crowd fund. Not impressed fxtec…
If mine ever shows up I’ll be sure to drop a review here. I do still want to experiment with Ubuntu Touch and SailfishOS.
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I was tempted to buy one at the time. Good thing I did not had disposable income at the time.
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Manufacturing hardware is really really hard. While it is possible that they are engaging in fraud, it’s more likey they’re just incompetent.
Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity.
That’s a $719 USD lesson to never crowd fund.
I would just make it a point to not pre-order anything. Don’t hand over your money until you know what you’re getting in exchange and how to return it for a refund if you’re disappointed.
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Manufacturing is very hard and the pandemic certainly didn’t help.
I am trying to be fair to them. I don’t beleive they are a fraud company, but its specifically the expansys thing triggered me.
I don’t believe its unacceptable to sell devices to randoms before fulfilling backers. Those were our devices. I could have bought one on expansys and had it delivered before IGG one. That’s not a manufacturing problem.
This was the first, and last time I will preorder anything. I broke my rule, lesson learned.
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OTA-3 is the first Ubuntu Touch based on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS that will become available for the PinePhone, the PinePhone Pro and also the PineTab and PineTab 2.
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https://blog.mobian.org/posts/2024/01/08/highlights-of-2023/
We managed to rebase the kernel for our supported hardware to Linux 6.6 in Trixie. This was not an easy task, giving all the ongoing work. Especially on sunxi64 (the OG pinephone kernel) it needed lots of work. Shoutout to Andrey Skvortsov for his efforts!
Mobian rebased to kernel 6.6, including the original Pinephone.
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They didn’t manage to ship the first version before the pandemic either, when selling it as a real product with on their site and not a preorder…
Wendel only got one because Linus gave him his review unit … i was jealous at the time, but given the software support I’m pretty sure he isn’t using it already
I got my money back after month of delay waiting for the “shipping in 2 month” while they never provided honest intel about what was going on.
When you repetitively lie to avoid looking bad, it’s no-longer incompetent, it’s malice.
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Hmm. Had I known this maybe I wouldn’t have backed.
Good call that you cancelled. You’ve dodged a bullet. And had I seen your thread before maybe I could have saved myself…
Summary
It’s not just me. Many (most?) backers haven’t gotten their devices ether.
I only backed because of XDA’s official involvement.
This was to be the first “official LineageOS” device. I had been playing with Lineage since it was called CyanogenMod and been using XDA for years so I thought this would get great community support since it was “official”.
I had really wanted this phone to succeed. But it’s not looking great.
They stopped responding on their own community forums. It’s been 3 months since their last update. Once again they have broken the IGG monthly updates terms and aren’t doing the minimum requirements.
The IGG comments section is starting to turn:
Summary
Someone even pointed out that its still a Team Favorite despite not having delivered, which also shows IGG don’t seem to care:
XDA has been completely silent about it too. No response on their forums, and no announcements since that first article. Are XDA even involved anymore? No one knows.
This came out recently featuring an interview with the creator of cyanogenmod, which covers some of the history of android modding and rooting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDOMekBPR4U
I guess alt roms and rooting are kinda dying as that title suggests. It’s sad that not even an official lineage device backed by XDA themselves was feasible…
It’s tough in the alternative phone space. Does nobody want to own their own devices and OS anymore?
Maybe I would have ordered a PinePhone instead…