I have spent enough time fighting with pulseaudio and pipewire on desktop machines. I don't want to do it on my phone. Drat. I'm still waiting for a reason to use my pinephone. It's incredible that the one thing you need for a phone, the audio, is so hard to get right.
> I hate that I still feel bad using it as a phone (terrible audio)
If there are some handcrafty people on Pinephone Pro around: try some opensource denoiser like rnnoise. If it works, then it's probably worth the effort to integrate a opensource software VoWifi (using doubango IMS -- even if it's to do VoWifi over LTE), since that will allow you to use the denoiser (and the codec!) of your choice, rather than using whatever Qualcomm has in that quectel module.
In my opensource software VoWifi for Android implementation, I already implemented rnnoise, because I know that the denoiser you get on smartphones vary wildly, and there is a nice "unprocessed" audio source on most smartphones to bypass the vendor denoiser.
I've had various issues with vendor denoiser, going from, no denoising and no silence injection at all, but with AGC, so when I stop speaking the other side hears the noise very well. I've had vendor denoiser eat some very specific pronunciations: my guess is that it was calibrated for CN languages rather than europeans. And then, there is Qualcomm which have various levels of denoiser ("fluence"), which costs more or less, so if OEM is cheap... well denoiser is cheap.
On the rest of the article, despite my love for opensource software, PPP is nowhere near usable for me, so I commend the author for sticking with it so hard. I've tried PPP a bit, but the form factor alone kills me (well my daily driver is smaller than anything you can find.
Camera is really an issue, we really need opensource software processing pipelines -- that'd be slower, but much easier to improve, evolve and customize, and you can do the processing "later" (save only 10 raw frame burst, and process them during the night into merged photos). That's my wish, though sadly I tried doing it and so far failed spectacularly...
> are also getting completely open source firmware, like the Modem itself,
yeah... it isn't. opensourcing the AP of the modem is not very interesting, since you just end up with something as open as a smartphone. The modem's modem is still closed source.
> Texting in SXMO happens through the Linux console, neatly wrapped up in scripts and menus that make it easy. All you need to know, is that the text editor requires one press of the "i" key, before you can start writing.
Uh. That's next level usability... Don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of vim, but uh maybe not on a smartphone. At least that's not a selling point.
I'm daily driving a Librem 5, with Phosh and PureOS. Unlike PinePhones, it's using pulseaudio-module-echo-cancel to handle audio (the modem is seen as just another I2S card on the system) which seems to do its job well. Nobody complains at least. You can, of course, easily replace it with any other kind of processing you'd like to have there.
> Camera is really an issue, we really need opensource software processing pipelines
Since the camera app already stores raw DNG files, what I do when I want to share some nice photos is to load them into darktable, which is an easy way to make them look much better: https://dosowisko.net/l5/photos/
You could prepare some reasonable template and run darktable-cli on the phone itself in a script.
> Don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of vim, but uh maybe not on a smartphone. At least that's not a selling point.
It sure is for the kind of people that opt to use SXMO. Back in the Openmoko days there were people who used Emacs as their phone interface too. There are more conventional DEs out there though:)
Really glad to see PostmarketOS becoming more viable as a daily driver - there are so many devices which should still work well, if not for Google making OS updates dependent on SoC vendors and carriers...
(e: yes I know there's Treble now but you'd really hope "multiple SPoFs who would all rather you bought the new phone" came up earlier as an issue with updating)
Admittedly not familiar with Mobian - I think the biggest differences are that postmarketOS is based on Alpine Linux (and musl in turn) and encourages porting to a wide variety of devices, while Mobian builds on Debian and attempts to provide more complete support for a smaller number of phones
> Is there a competent well-known group implementing things like Asahi for Mac?
Not that I'm aware of. Pine's model seems to be "Lob hardware over the fence with some limited but reasonable documentation and hope everyone else takes care of it" - which has worked surprisingly well for things like the PineBook Pro. But phones are a lot more complex, as there are more moving parts, and a lot of those moving parts are almost entirely black boxes to people who hack on them. Cell modems, audio pipelines, all of that is rather different on a phone, and those seem to be the main problem points on the PinePhones. They're a usable enough wifi pocket computer with poor battery life, but working in the way one expects a phone to work is a challenge.
Unfortunately, I'm not sure what's going on with Pine right now. All their information wikis and communities are offline and have been offline for over a week now: https://pine64.org/2024/01/21/outage_january_21/
It doesn't give me great hope in their long term viability right now that they've lost all their community facing infrastructure, which is literally the only thing that makes their products workable.
I think what you're asking for is pretty much Librem 5. It had a team of developers (including myself) working on developing things like Phosh and polishing hardware support up. Some of that work has spilled over to PinePhones, but anything that's device specific did not. PinePhones have always relied entirely on community engagement, and I can tell you from experience that some of the issues I've been solving for L5 I would never been able to solve if I had to do it on my spare time alone. I may be biased, but my impression is that Librem 5 is commonly regarded as more mature than any of the PinePhones, and that's the only reason IMO. The community is doing great things, but I don't think it's anywhere big enough to sustain itself on its own at a reasonable pace yet (any kind of help is welcome:))
(whether you'll consider Librem 5 as already mature enough when switching from, say, Android is another matter - I personally do, but people have varying expectations and the L5 team is just a handful of people after all, which contrasts hard with what resources have been poured into Android and iOS)
I have an iPhone 6s, just looking for something in the ballpark to replace it.
I've seen this Librem before but thought the company's approach was impractical. As in perfect is the enemy of the good. They seem to be focusing on things like secure supply chains and local manufacturing—resulting in one/two thousand dollar+ devices.
Don't get me wrong, sounds nice... five to ten years from now? I need a mostly working mobile today at a reasonable price. Something like an updated Pinephone Pro at $400 and I'm willing to throw in an extra ~$200 for R&D.
Believe they would be much better served by the common mobile strategy of, get a shitty phone out, sell them, reinvest profit, and improve every year. That probably means hardware built in Asia first.
But on their site I see a four year old phone at $999 with lower specs than the Pinephone Pro.
Maybe someone would like to start a company reselling Pinephone Pros with various value add, and capture that two or three extra hundred dollars per device? Might get a discount in bulk.
...and without economies of scale, which is probably the biggest factor. There was a significant investment in R&D and software, but it doesn't really smear that much over the number of devices produced; and production costs skyrocketed after COVID-induced shortages which resulted in splitting production batches into smaller ones.
Oof. I'm tolerant of a lot of "broken stuff" in software (I've run ARM SBCs as desktops for quite a few years, though I'm off that because QubesOS doesn't work on ARM yet), but that's an impressive pile of "almost, but not quite, sort of barely working."
Unfortunately, stuff like this is a dealbreaker for me:
> The bad news is that currently the Pinephone Pro picks up your audio as if you're talking underwater (that's what I'm told I sound like) and the receiving end gets an echo on their own voice. It works, but it's quite the bad quality.
I've set personal limits on my "phone experimentation" that I can't irritate other people too terribly badly. For me, this means "Voice calls have to work and be understandable," and "I have to be able to interact with MMS based group text chats" - and I've briefly used some devices that I stopped using because it wasn't able to meet these requirements. I can work around just about everything else, be less contactable, etc, but if I'm going to have a phone number, raw basic "voice, SMS, and MMS" have to be working.
> But apart from that, it performs excellent as a smart device. There is a host of awesome apps that provide the usual smartphone services, like train and plane tickets and travel routes, calender functions, weather, podcasts, etc.
You shouldn't need a smart device for any of that stuff, though. I've mostly "gone back to paper" - I don't carry a smartphone anymore (even though I was very into them for quite a few years), and I'm able to be a bit pointed when places don't consider the possibility that someone doesn't have a smartphone *. I don't want to live in a world in which "everyone must have a smartphone or they can't participate in modern life," and I see fighting against that best accomplished by "not having a smartphone" - as opposed to trying to find a somewhat less-evil device that can do most of what you want a smartphone to do. Been there, tried that, realized I was spending most of my CPU cycles building kernels and software so I could try to debug yet another weird issue...
Besides, I get about two weeks of battery life on my flip phone. ;)
EDIT:
*: To expand a bit, "have a smartphone and be willing to install whatever apps they ask you to." In terms of practical technical outcome, "I have a device that can install apps and refuse to do so" is the same as "I don't have a device that can do this." But from a human interaction perspective, the first is often enough perceived as just being a jerk, whereas the second typically gets a bit more of a baffled response - I think there are quite a few people who genuinely don't realize that there are non-smart-phones still in use, because their entire social circle has them. The second opens up a more productive conversation in my experience.
I've said before that I use my phone very little, but it really needs to work when I need it, like to make or receive an urgent or emergency call or message (or increasingly, unfortunately and to your point, to authenticate myself somehow). To be assured of that, it seems like one can't stray very far from the mainstream. I only go as far as using MVNOs (to get my cost down to $5/month) and Google Voice (because I don't want my primary phone number and data tied to a particular device or MVNO). Even those choices lead to some glitches that I can tolerate but, say, my wife wouldn't.
I agree that all non-emergency things are better done on paper or on my laptop rather than on a 6" touchscreen. If that's where a phone excels, it's missing the point.
Having the baseband modem crash on you is incredibly bad, and reminiscent of the early 2000s (when I was doing radio testing) What chipset are they using?
