Masked Witch
@maskedwitch@fe.disroot.org  ·  activity timestamp 6 days ago

Some people on activitypub seemed a bit interested in mobile linux, so I decided to share a bit more of my experience on here. I will break it up into different posts covering different aspects.

I have been using a PinePhone 1.2b (3GB of RAM, 32GB eMMC storage) as my daily driver for roughly four years now. That may sound impressive, but I only really use a phone so people can reach me, for music on the go, and for a browser in a pinch. I'm not on my phone all that often.

PinePhone: https://pine64.org/devices/pinephone/

Currently, I have Mobian (based on Debian) Trixie installed on the internal eMMC storage and a 512GB microSD card mounted at /home, both utilizing full-disk encryption, for plenty of storage for my use-case. I'm using the Phosh interface, since it is more stable in my experience than plasma mobile currently. I also mostly use GTK software since they tend to integrate better with Phosh. I do not have cellular service on it, I even have the entire cellular modem disabled via the hardware dipswitch on the back currently.

Mobian: https://mobian-project.org/
Phosh: https://phosh.mobi/

#mobian#debian#linux#mobilelinux#pinephone#linuxphone#phosh
Masked Witch
@maskedwitch@fe.disroot.org replied  ·  activity timestamp 6 days ago

Connectivity

I'm not using cellular service with it at all currently. Back when I did use T-Mobile with it, it was unreliable. However, that was back at the end of Buster and early months of Bookworm, so that might have changed significantly. I currently just use public wifi on the go.

On the wifi front, it has been solid for only supporting 2.4GHz. There were some issues with WPA3 and moving between connections, but Trixie brought fixes that resolved those.

Bluetooth on it works well. Though, if it's actively using bluetooth for something more intensive (like audio) and wifi, then I recommend keeping it to the SBC codec instead of SBC-XQ. It starts having connectivity issues if both of them are actively being used.
Masked Witch
@maskedwitch@fe.disroot.org replied  ·  activity timestamp 6 days ago

Camera Support

I'll post about bigger downsides first. Currently, camera support is lacking. An app called megapixels worked back on the previous version of Mobian (Bookworm), but GTK4 dropped support for OpenGLES 2.0 and some apps, like megapixels, depend on being able to utilize OpenGL. You can patch GTK4 to add support back in, but that's just a bandage for now. You might be able to get it working with millipixels or Gnome Snapshot, but I have not had success with them yet.

Megapixels: https://gitlab.com/postmarketOS/megapixels
Millipixels: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/millipixels
Gnome Snapshot: https://apps.gnome.org/Snapshot/

If you want a PinePhone and want to use the camera, sticking to Mobian Bookworm or looking to see what PostmarketOS are doing are probably your best options for now.

PostmarketOS: https://postmarketos.org/

That said, when I was running Mobian Bookworm, it could actually take some decent pictures, assuming the lighting was usable. It's by no means what you could get out of a Google Pixel, but it was fine for most situations. There was no decent way to record video with it, though, nor did it work for video calls.