Ask HN: Know any non Librem5 PinePhone for Mobile Linux? Legacy devices too!
https://store.planetcom.co.uk/products/gemini-pda-1
https://store.planetcom.co.uk/products/cosmo-communicator
Older Android devices supported by PostMarketOS are also never mentioned, such as these Xiaomi devices, with better specs and will be better devices for general usage, I see GNU/Linux on Android as the natural response to my generally seen Linux usage (longevity of hardware and software support for devices you already own, rather than buying new hardware to run linux).
https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices
https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Xiaomi_Poco_F1_(xiaomi-beryllium)
https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Xiaomi_Redmi_2_(xiaomi-wt88047)
I've used Ubuntu Touch with supported devices through Hallium ase well. If any of your old devices support these or you want to talk about other Linux mobile hardware, please do, I think there is too much bias and assumptions that only those 2 are "Linux phones".
https://devices.ubuntu-touch.io/
65 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 124 ms ] threadThis is because they lack the main advantage of L5 an PP: all free drivers allowing to run mainline Linux kernel (or install other operating systems) and therefore guaranteeing lifetime updates. Lack of planned obsolescence and verifiable security. Same with the other hardware.
More reasons: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Freque....
https://www.xda-developers.com/android-project-mainline-modu...
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Android-...
How many years of “lifetime” do you realistically expect out of the slow Pinephone or Librem 5 hardware? Even sold new they’re ancient parts, how is using old weak hardware and selling it as a new smartphone of all electronics not obviously planned obsolescence? It’s possible someone will volunteer to keep updating the hardware drivers to phones that will be killed by the minimum requirements being raised and network changes but I see the hardware as obsolete already.
How long is a single Linux version supported? My 12+-year-old laptop currently runs latest Debian, and I don't expect that it's support will end soon. Why would the phones be different? The whole point of L5 and PP is that they are like desktops running desktop OS. Even old Raspberry Pis can serve for good today. The Moor's law is gone.
> How many years of “lifetime” do you realistically expect out of the slow Pinephone or Librem 5 hardware?
I expect >10 years. Why do I have to change my phones every 3 years and multiply e-waste? The phones (especially L5) can do practically everything, except heavy calculations. They can also serve as thin clients for the latter. Much older Linux phone OpenMoko is still supported, and there is a community for it.
> how is using old weak hardware and selling it as a new smartphone of all electronics not obviously planned obsolescence?
It sort of is, but it's due to the lack of modern free-software-supporting vendors. By buying these two phones, you vote for such hardware with your wallet (I did).
How is selling old nonfunctional hardware not planned obsolescence?
At the time it was a high-end laptop with perfectly functioning Windows out of the box. Debian still allows to browse the Internet (not bloated websites), use ssh and Libreoffice. The camera does not work anymore, because the Linux driver does not exist and the Windows driver was proprietary with undisclosed documentation. This is the same planned obsolescence I am talking about.
> What can that laptop, openmoku or a raspberry pi do that someone would care about?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20264911
> How is selling old nonfunctional hardware not planned obsolescence?
Who is selling nonfunctional hardware?
And the installation process was so easy. No fiddling around "rooting" a phone - just "pmbootstrap init" and answer a few questions.
I've not actually used it as a phone yet, so for me so far the usefullness is limited, but I read it works, and I can write graphics to the framebuffer. Of my own phone! How cool is that!
It also boots into a variety of desktops in various states of usability.
As for the cosmos, from what I've heard their linux support is lackluster (as in non-mainline and with a bunch of functionality missing) but that might be outdated. Anyone has first-hand experience?
I haven't used a Cosmo; perhaps it's better. I do, however, own a Gemini (the first generation of that series), which is the reason I don't own a Cosmo.
> https://store.planetcom.co.uk/products/gemini-pda-1
This is actually a great example with which to answer your question. So this device, the Gemini, sells today, in 2021, for $680.00 (or right now $400 with a black Friday deal). The most recent Android version for it is an Android 8.1 image from 2019[0], using a kernel that doesn't even try to match upstream, also last touched in 2019[1]. Now, they ship an official Debian image, which is super cool! Of course, it still uses the same ancient out-of-tree kernel, and they somehow managed to ship an official image with apt broken. To reiterate: This is the best software officially available for that device, which they are still selling for $680. Okay, so forget the vendor; maybe others have filled in its failures? Well... XDA is dead [2], and PMOS is doing better but the device is still mostly broken[3] and running the same ancient kernel[4].
So: Having owned a Gemini, I decided that unless I had some specific reason to think the situation was going to be better, I wasn't going to waste money on another Planet Computers product. And to your general question, AFAIK this is the reason in general why Pine and Librem as such a big deal: The software doesn't suck; you have an actual hope for getting updates and things working nicely. Hallium might let you use something better than Android, but it still kinda sucks because it just lets you bolt a nicer userspace to the awful base that the vendors ship.
[0] https://support.planetcom.co.uk/index.php/Gemini_Firmware
[1] https://github.com/dguidipc/gemini-android-kernel-3.18
[2] https://forum.xda-developers.com/f/planet-gemini-pda-roms-ke...
[3] https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Planet_Computers_Gemini_P...
[4] https://gitlab.com/postmarketOS/pmaports/-/blob/master/devic...
>The software doesn't suck; you have an actual hope for getting updates and things working nicely.
I would also say this is also not true, the software sucks, the hope of getting things working nicely is the same as hoping an device sold with outdated chromebook hardware sold as a new device from a linux hardware seller that sold them without a functional operating system will work with today's modern applications.
I do, however, think you're underselling the importance of the kernel; not only is 3.18 a complete security disaster, it's so old that it's starting to actually miss features that I would care about. And yes, strictly speaking any device with the source available or perhaps even without the source available can eventually be made to work, and if I ever manage to find the time and develop the skill I'm happy to port the patches myself, but in practice if there's not a community of other people already working on it I tend to avoid the hardware because the odds of me personally maintaining the whole thing is effectively zero.
Off the top of my head, mostly container features, plus some compression and encryption features for filesystems. Also, 4.x and 5.x baked in more features that anbox needs, which previously needed DKMS. Probably none of this is a hard requirement, although I've not used a 3.x kernel in such a long time that I'd have to test it again, but it is a quality of life issue.
> I don’t think there’s much interest in this device,
Right, which is why I don't like it; no community means no updates and no fixes.
> I guess I don’t care about the kernel because I’ve used old ones with no issues.
I guess if it works then it works. Even if I could live without the newer features I'd worry about security issues, but if your workspace works then it's fine.
https://www.pine64.org/pinephonepro/
It's still not crazy-fast, but it's definitely more competitive than the original PinePhone.
> Rockchip RK3399S 64bit SoC – 2x A72 and 4x A53 CPU cores @ 1.5GHz
> ARM Mali T860 4x core GPU @ 500MHz
> 4GB LPDDR4 @ 800MHz
> 128GB eMMC flash storage
> Optional micro SD card (SDXC up-to 2TB)
> 6″ 1440 x 720 in-cell IPS with Gorilla Glass 4™
> 3MP Sony IMX258 main camera
> 5MP OmniVision OV5640 front-facing camera
> Samsung J7 form-factor 3000mAh
> $399
“Linux hardware” has no real world benefits but many more problems. Most people won’t buy it either, and rightfully so. This is why Linux on mobile will never be served by crappy hardware. It isn’t production ready and at best it’ll be really competitive for phones from 2015.
I could at least expect a working phone, but I doubt they can install spyware when they can’t create an OS.
Hardware features do not matter if there’s no software support.
Also, at least the OG PinePhone works. It’s slow, screen-on battery life is lackluster, and some carriers are a pain, but it’s usable if you know what you’re doing.
> Hardware features do not matter if there’s no software support.
That’s why Linux isn’t better than an android custom rom for modern devices. There are zero benefits, many more problems, no apps, and on worst more expensive hardware. Who benefits by using Pine or Linux mobile if they can run more on android or iOS? It’s why the hardware and software currently both do not matter, and the current dated hardware looks even worst when everyone knows it’ll go to better hardware; pine knew it was useless to stay on the hardware themselves. Support on owned or cheaper used devices is much more interesting, with unsupported hardware gaining new life rather than buying new devices that don’t work and are the equivalent of an untrained retiree becoming a perfect worker around retirement age.
Why are PP and L5 mentioned so often? They are available as new devices and that apparently has some value of its own in our society. They also have "unique" hardware features of arguably questionable usability (hardware kill switches), and are being used by many mobile Linux developers. That's why they are popular. It's not a conspiracy.
Regarding the Gemini and the Cosmo: While nice products in principle, they by design only attract a niche of users that want this form factor. While they in theory have Linux ports, these (except for the Sailfish X port for the Gemini) are unmaintained. Debian 9 "Stretch" is just not enough these days. Therefore and because the main Android OS also feels rather abandoned, there's not much interest in these devices. I would love to use them more, but there's just no interesting software and I don't have the time and resources currently to get that Debian port back to an acceptable state.
With regards to postmarketOS or Ubuntu Touch devices, especially those that also run postmarketOS stable (Community devices) I wholeheartedly agree. They do deserve more attention. These are really nice devices that are well supported and cheaply available.
But, sadly, having been a content creator in that field for a while I can tell you: Videos about these devices get way less clicks. This might be the self-amplifying effect that leads to less interest into these devices. It's sad, and if I ever make another video, I'll make it about a non-PINE, non-Librem phone only to then be asked in the comments why I don't share an update on the PinePhone or Librem 5 instead.
I don’t think it’s a conspiracy as much as an irrational trend. I learned here why the Cosmo and Gemini aren’t good, but it’s not the only device that came with Linux that was ignored, there was a Meizu MX4 Ubuntu Edition with kernel code available but no interest. https://github.com/meizuosc/m75
To me it looks like it’s just marketing that those 2 are popular.
And that's the killer feature! Librem/Pine have managed to build a community around their hardware. In theory, I could buy a Meizu phone and pick up its PostMarket OS port at the point where the last guy who tried it gave up. But trying to do it without a community would be no fun at all, and finding answers once you run into a roadblock will be an uphill battle. For instance, one of Meizu's kernel repositories has an unanswered issue from a few years ago, asking if they can release more up-to-date kernel code.
You're just focusing on the hardware's specs, but the community is what gives Librem/Pine's hardware its value.
At $450, the PinePhone Pro with Pine64's keyboard attachment has roughly comparable hardware specs to the Gemini that you link to in the original post. The Gemini sells for $680.
The state of hardware support in regard to the OnePlus is exciting - nothing wrong with going that route if you want more bang for your buck on hardware specs. Personally, I've opted for the PinePhone Pro because I don't need state-of-the-art hardware, and I value the community and the option of using FOSS firmware on its cell modem.
Let’s look at the subreddits for real user experience, who is using it daily? Where are the good experiences? Everyone is selling their L5 or getting a refund, and saying stuff like this;
> You will not get a full day of charge out of one battery, but you can take spare batteries to swap out. I'm not sure if there's a direct way of running Signal, but it looks like you can bridge it to Matrix using mautrix-signal. I have a similar setup to use WhatsApp (with the Android app running in a VM on a VPS).
>Everything else you listed works, but it may be a bit rough around the edges. I've been daily-driving my PinePhone (running Mobian) since May, so it's certainly possible, but don't expect the experience to be anywhere close to a modern Android or iPhone.
> Don't. This is beta level hardware with an alpha level OS and Software. If you're looking for functionality, you're in the wrong place. Check back in a couple years.
So you can daily drive a battery killing device if you want a bad experience if you want to use apps you rely on VMs, Anbox which doesn’t work, swapping batteries, and yes it technically works if you don’t value modern benefits like a good keyboard, browser, it’s not a standalone functional device like a Linux desktop.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Librem5
https://reddit.com/r/PinePhoneOfficial/comments/qknefi/think...
Can you cite some sources for this? I believe, for example, that Qualcomm Snapdragon SoCs have a degree of Linux support which literally allows you to boot up a mainline kernel on most of their boards. But to the best of my knowledge, only a handful of devices have anywhere close to full support for sensors, cell modem, wifi/bluetooth, buttons, suspend, etc. In general, obtaining support for these missing hardware features requires someone to carry out unpaid reverse engineering work. Even the PinePhone, which was specifically designed around the goal of being easy to mainline, required quite a bit of reverse engineering work from the community, and isn't yet fully mainlined.
> Do you use them PPP daily?
I don't; as far as I'm aware, the dev units haven't even shipped yet. Its device drivers are still a work in progress, and that will probably be the case for the next month or two. But I've pre-ordered one, and I plan to use it as my only phone starting early next year. (To be clear: I'm a very abnormal phone user. I never owned a cell phone until a few years ago; I now own an iPhone, which I literally use for nothing except texting and calling.)
> Everyone is selling their L5 or getting a refund
Much of the Librem 5 criticism is totally justified; they over-promised and under-delivered. They accepted payments on orders that they weren't able to ship, and they promised an unrealistically polished product which they weren't able to produce.
On the other hand, Pine64 has been unambiguous in their messaging: the PinePhone is a phone for hackers, not for average consumers. Some people ignore the messaging, buy it with unrealistic expectations, and then complain about it on the internet; but that's life. If you need Android apps, if battery life is a high priority for you, or if you want iOS-tier polish, then Linux smartphones are the wrong choice for you. It's the right choice if you value software freedom, enjoy hacking, don't mind getting your hands dirty, and don't need Android apps or multi-day battery life.
https://www.xda-developers.com/android-project-mainline-modu...
> It's the right choice if you value software freedom, enjoy hacking, don't mind getting your hands dirty, and don't need Android apps or multi-day battery life.
All this can be done in android. It runs real Linux, Android like OPO 6T is older released hardware with much much better specs.
It's 13MP, I freaked out at first!
SailfishOS is not completely FLOSS, but it's real Linux, and it's polished enough to be a daily driver (I've been using it for 7 years).
However, I found it extremely disappointing that they didn't cater to the FOSS community by making it easy to reproduce and iterate on the OS. If Nokia with the N9 took an approach to the OS and community akin to what Pine64 has been doing with the Pinephone, we would be in a very different place today with Linux phones.
The software from the N9 became what today is SailfishOS (mostly FOSS, but UI closed), and for something fully FOSS, Nemo is also derived from Harmattan, https://nemomobile.net/
True, but Pine64 facilitates the FOSS community in spades when it comes to shipping a hardware profile with mainline support, and ensuring it's trivial for Pinephone users to run alternative operating systems down to the boot loader.
I'm a developer and the N9 was completely opaque, it would have required spending significant time just to even begin figuring out how to replace the OS.
They're fast, stable, and if you can live without camera, cellular and fast charging, (which yes, I realize means it's more like a tiny tablet than a phone) everything works beautifully.
EDIT: Cellular Data works, just not phone calls, so if you have a low latency/reliable 4G connection you could make VoIP work probably :)
This OS on a phone is "close to daily driver" and yet phone calls don't work.
I mean this not as a slight, I'm a huge fan of Linux on mobile devices, using them since Maemo, Moblin, webOS, SailfishOS, Jolla, and now postmarket and Pine.
People here definitely tend not to be average, myself included. However, I think for the "average" HN user, it's at the point where you could make it work if you wanted to.
For the global average user, it's not "technically" far off, just practically since most apps are only for iOS and Android, so even with perfect hardware support the OP6/6T or really any mainline kernel linux device wouldn't be a good fit.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Mediatek...
They are the easiest to root on Android too.
https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/amazing-temp-root-for-med...
For these two, see https://maemo-leste.github.io/
You can text and use gps on both of them, as well as make voice calls on the Motorola Droid 4 (calls work on N900, but you need complex audio routing and audio filtering. If anyone has experience with Linux audio, the project will appreciate their assistance)
Yes, they both have non-free PowerVR GPU, but its blobs work on Linux mainline, at least
And there's a good reason for that. I'm in mobile GNU/Linux space since 2008 when I got my Neo Freerunner and I've been involved in many mobile GNU/Linux projects since, so I've seen plenty of approaches being tried and tested. postmarketOS has made amazing progress, but it would be nowhere near as far as it is right now without native devices which facilitated software progress the most (even inside postmarketOS itself). Why? Porting is always a game of catch-up which more often than not gets abandoned before getting complete as people move to more recent devices and the cycle starts anew. In contrast, devices like Librem 5 or PinePhone (and Freerunner or to some extent even N900 in the past) offer either a good support from the start, or at least a clear maintainable path forward for things that don't work yet, which is something you don't get at all when you have to rely on bits of Android infrastructure.
It isn't a coincidence that there are only two phones in the "main" category of postmarketOS-supported devices: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices
You say you’re been in GNU/Linux on mobile but assert PMOS didn’t have significant progress, had other running phones way before like the Nexus 5 and assert these new phones were the drivers of progress, what evidence is there they didn’t just drain resources from other projects?
I remember when postmarketOS has been created, but that was already pretty late in my book :) You completely forget about earlier porting pioneers, such as SHR that worked on devices like HTC Dream, Nexus S or Palm Pre (and GTA01/02/04, obviously); or even projects that predate my personal involvement, like OpenEZX. We've seen it happening multiple times by now, so there's a lot of insight to take from that already.
> had other running phones way before like the Nexus 5
It is pretty clear that you haven't actually used pmOS back then (2017-18), as none of the supported devices could even do phone calls there, and that was far from the only missing basic feature. Which DE would you even run on it for daily usage, Hildon? ;) It sure was an amazing project with a lot of promise already, but absolutely nowhere near being actually usable (aside of some PDA-like use cases). Back then the only linuxy OS that you could actually use on some real-world devices (not counting proprietary ones like Sailfish or already obsolete ones like SHR) was Ubuntu Touch, which was pretty far from the regular desktop architecture (still is and doesn't intend to change that) that's pitched by distros like pmOS, PureOS or Mobian. Things started to move with the advent of Librem 5 (2018) and PinePhone (2020), thanks to Purism investing resources into creating phosh and maintaining supporting infrastructure in GNOME, and Plasma Mobile experiencing an influx of new developers and moving away from Hybris when PinePhone started to become widely available. That work is now directly consumed by ports of pmOS to other devices as well.
> what evidence is there they didn’t just drain resources from other projects
So, considering all I said above - which other projects? Distros like postmarketOS have been fueled by L5 and PP, not drained. Work on mobile GNOME has been paid for with Librem 5's price. Plasma Mobile was a tech demo until more people started to hack it on the PinePhone. This should be evident to anyone who actually watched that space unfold across the last 15 years. These days we can even start hoping for working phone calls on ported devices like OnePlus 6T, but where do you think the ModemManager code to handle phone calls actually came from? ;]
How usable is it? Does it have power management? I heard it still doesn't have good battery life or... anything. Did the switch from N900 hurt?
>I still keep my N900 around as a backup.
How can you when 3G will be sunsetted?
I didn't mention other projects, but speaking of them why didn't you ever get interested in Replicant? I didn't forget other projects, but it makes little sense to mention them when they aren't relevant.
>It is pretty clear that you haven't actually used pmOS back then (2017-18), as none of the supported devices could even do phone calls there, and that was far from the only missing basic feature.
I've tried it then and tried it now. Phone calls don't matter to me, I only used VOIP, but my point is that there was work on GNU/linux phones way before L5 or PP, which still has many missing features. With all new android phones being mainlined as well as "old" ones like the S9 way before either was released. https://github.com/exynos-linux-stable Samsung DEX is much more useful and interesting to me than having partially running 2005-2015 hardware that has weak functionality.
>Which DE would you even run on it for daily usage
None of them then, or today either. Maemo was partially propietary, did it stop you from using it? If not, why ignore Sailfish and not count it?
https://www.xda-developers.com/android-project-mainline-modu... This project is the most interesting.
That all being said I do admire your dedication to using gnu/linux, but my question is what do you gain from using it? I can use the CLI tools I care about with both iOS and Android, what is the benefit to running Linux that made you ignore iOS and Android? It was awesome having mobile Unix in an iPhone in 2007 with a jailbreak with easily ported tools and apt since the first jailbreak, it was also great to have them on android. What does mobile linux do better?
It's perfectly usable in my eyes - well, at least as long as I don't break anything, which can happen :) Lasts on a battery around 10-15 hours, less when under heavy use. Generally long enough for my needs, and there's still a room for improvement in software, so that will likely get better with time. The switch from N900 did not hurt at all (maybe aside of losing the hardware keyboard and having to get used to a 5" phone in my pocket).
> How can you when 3G will be sunsetted?
I'm not aware of any plans to sunset 3G where I live.
> I didn't mention other projects, but speaking of them why didn't you ever get interested in Replicant?
I used to play with Replicant a bit on GTA04 and Galaxy S3, but in the end I'm not interested in Android at all (it's a cool project though and I fully support it).
> With all new android phones being mainlined as well as "old" ones like the S9 way before either was released.
That's far from enough to have a properly functioning GNU/Linux userspace on them (although it is much better than it used to be indeed).
> but my point is that there was work on GNU/linux phones way before L5 or PP
Of course there was, I spent years of my life on it.
> Samsung DEX
Isn't that discontinued?
> Maemo was partially propietary, did it stop you from using it? If not, why ignore Sailfish and not count it?
If you read carefully, I haven't mentioned Maemo at all, for exactly this reason. I only mentioned N900 which I got to port SHR to, but ended up using it with Maemo as my daily driver - which wasn't ideal, but was best that was available back then (I switched to it pretty late anyway, since I stayed on a GTA02 for a few years). I didn't want to switch to more of the same; I wanted to do an upgrade, which is why I only switched when I got a Librem 5.
> That all being said I do admire your dedication to using gnu/linux, but my question is what do you gain from using it?
I am the administrator of my system, just like I am on my desktop, and I find that incredibly powerful. I can easily patch and replace every part of it, even right on the phone, while Android build system is a massive PITA. I often build deb packages straight on my Librem 5. I don't have to break into anything, it's mine. In the past, I made a mistake of getting a Kindle and at some point updating it to a version that didn't have a jailbreak available yet, so I told myself to never willingly rely on jailbreaking again.
Do you see a problem with using chroot on android?
>Isn't [Samsung DEX] discontinued?
https://insights.samsung.com/2021/08/20/the-beginners-guide-...
>I am the administrator of my system, just like I am on my desktop, and I find that incredibly powerful. I can easily patch and replace every part of it, even right on the phone, while Android build system is a massive PITA. I often build deb packages straight on my Librem 5. I don't have to break into anything, it's mine. In the past, I made a mistake of getting a Kindle and at some point updating it to a version that didn't have a jailbreak available yet, so I told myself to never willingly rely on jailbreaking again.
I feel the same on iOS with jaibreak, Android with root, but with good hardware, and software support.
>I can easily patch and replace every part of it, even right on the phone, while Android build system is a massive PITA.
What do you want to patch or replace? On Android I use a browser with desktop extensions, have the battery set to charge to 80% for longevity, and I don't really see the benefit of gnu linux on mobile if it doesn't offer anything substantial to users, it hopes to do this with an android emulator that doesn't even work on desktop.
>I made a mistake of getting a Kindle and at some point updating it to a version that didn't have a jailbreak available yet, so I told myself to never willingly rely on jailbreaking again.
Serial jailbreak would have worked, but better to get open hardware like kobo to install koreader. ;)