OQB: @[email protected]
Six years ago the entire Linux enthusiast space was super excited for the PinePhone, then everything fell apart. What went wrong? Was PINE64’s favoritism towards Manjaro the sole issue or were there other problems?
Software. It’s a phone that can’t make phone calls, with a camera that can’t take pictures. It doesn’t matter if some coding genius manages to port Crysis to it, if the phone can’t phone, it’s DOA.
Because Linux on phone isn’t ready. Phone makers only support Android and only project that use Android kernel are anywhere near usable. Mainstream Linux still need work. PinePhone offers a good, cheap platform to keep working on it and progress is being made. Time will tell if we will ever get there. Mobile is 10x worse than Windows was back in the day. A lot of things are tied to Google so closely it will be impossible to replace (Android Auto for example).
I recommend this blog post to get a small piece of the picture : https://blog.brixit.nl/why-i-left-pine64/
Side note : in my opinion the pinephone was always a developer platform and could have succeeded with it’s low specs. It failed because of pine64 lack of collaboration with the community that were building the software.
I’d bet it was the hardware specs, that’s what it was for me, I took one look at the specs and immediately moved on. Clearly, others were thinking the same.
I can deal with immature buggy software, software can always be freely updated. But subpar, underspecced hardware can only be fixed with buying more or different hardware
No linux phone will succeed for as long as they keep making them with shit specs
