So i have not bought a GNU/Linux phone for several reasons, one of which is that neither the ecosystem nor the devices themselves seem to be mature enough to have a stable experience.
To begin with, GTK3 is far from ideal on these devices, and many applications have not migrated to GTK4 which does take advantage of the GPUs… more or less. I don’t know exacly what the status of the drivers is like, but i’d assume that the pinephone doesn’t support vulkan.
But i’ve heard that AMD and Samsung will collaborate to bring AMD RDNA2 GPU’s to Samsung devices, which in my opinion, it’s the game changer that we need. This is completely theoretical but we lose nothing by speculating.
So AMD is great on x86 right? you have very powerful graphic cards compared to intel’s which have open source drivers and implementations like intel, namely MESA with RADV, unlike Nvidia, a company that offers very powerful cards with closed source drivers.
I’d assume that these new devices will be able to run a full GNU/Linux distro with open source drivers and all the subsequent tools. You would get finally a powerful device withouth compromising privacy from the software perspective.
I understand that the kill switches are something unique that gives the Librem 5 and the Pinephone an advantage in terms of privacy, but using a real GNU/LInux distribution on a powerful and potentially popular device is a big deal.
What are your thoughts on this?
i think smartphones don’t need to be powerful. That only means short battery lifetime. I only need my smartphone to communicate with people and some organizational things. I don’t play games, etc.
I understand your point, but smartphones are and have the capacity to be more than just a phone, reducing their spectrum of capabilities IMO does not solve anything. I also don’t want an RX6700 on a phone device, it would be too expensive, what i am arguing is that if possible, a linux friendly and powerful ARM device would help more than what we have now.
I have an Android phone and my father has an iPhone. Both are sheer crap, really. So I can’t wait for having enough money for buying a PinePhone.
I will be honest with you, it’s not the same to say “this sucks” because the quality sucks than saying “this sucks” because there are political reasons behind it.
Apple and Android devices have much higher quality compared to what a Pinephone can offer. I am not even talking about the software, the pinephone is a seriously underpowered device. I personally think that regardless of how much the software can improve, we need something more powerful, hence my post.
As far as I understood the Pinephone is a community project which delivers these phones very cheap in order to try to get a community of programmers and testers together to work towards a future with more and better Linux phones development.
And so far it has worked very well, but i think at a certain point we will need something more usable in terms of performance while providing FLOSS drivers as i assume the Pinephone does, in that regard it’s weird to see Samsung’s new project to be the perfect fit.
I wonder how a Pinephone 2 would look like tho.
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I don’t know how the OP thinks. But for me there aren’t political reasons. Instead I mean the quality. There are severe bugs (like losing phone contacts) and badly designed GUIs (both Android and iPhone.)
I use Android as everyone does and some of my family members use Iphones, i pretty much can say that that mobile GNU/Linux will pobably have more severe bugs and a worse UI desing at the beggining, because all the first versions of all products have rough corners. I wouldn’t use mobile GNU/Linux for the current quality, but for privacy and freedom reasons.
No, it will have better design decisions from the beginning. What you are talking about are bugs. Yes, first version (of iPhone or anything else) has those bug-problems. But I mean the way the user is treated by the OS. The Desktop GNU/Linux experience is different from the Android Linux or Apple iPhone experience. You like the Android/Apple way (when it comes to practical things), I don’t.
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Well ARM is not the point, but phone devices, and i don’t think it’s especially targeting Chromebooks, i think Samsung wants to enhance their ARM chips to make competitive smartphones, both Snapdragon and Apple devices have better GPU’s than the Exynos chips.
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Well it might sound petty, but good 3D effects and smoothness is what makes Iphone devices so popular. I think having fluid GTK apps is important. Mi point is not “we must have gaming GPU’s on GNU/Linux phones”, my point is “we need AMD on the mobile market since they provide really decent drivers”.
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To begin with, GTK3 is far from ideal on these devices, and many applications have not migrated to GTK4 which does take advantage of the GPUs… more or less.
Luckily most phone interfaces available use Qt instead, like Plasma Mobile. I recommend checking it out 😉
Well GTK4 pretty much does what QT does and with Libadwaita you can make your traditional desktop app a mobile ready one, so honestly i would go on that direction. But QT seems to be another good option. Now making brand new mobile apps would take more time than adapting already existent ones.
plasma mobile looks pretty nice, and pine 64 recently selected manjaro as default distro and plasma mobile as default graphics shell… Qt then looks like a pretty good alternative.
