The Pinephone Thread

Hardware Adaptation
26

Driving a PPP daily myself, I would say: for the bave ones possibly yes. As usual depends on which functionnality you require daily (obviously). It kinda works (with some annoyances here and there) for me. But I am not the typical user and willing to put a lot more efforts and workarounds, just for the sake of running some Linux distro instead of Android on my phone (I never daily drove an Android in my life. Before SailfishOS, it was webOS).

TL;DR: In short: it can kind of work for the bravest, but you either might need to jump through some hoops (or have some Android/iOS smartphone in your backpack for fall-backs).

Here’s my personal experience (though part of this might vary, depending on how you tweak your device):

  • It can be crashy

    • Mesa EGL crashing the Lipstick interface and restarting to home screen, ?specially on “go to home screen” right edge inward swipes gestures?
    • more rarely the whole phone freezing and the watchdog rebooting it).
    • so if you absolutely need an uptime counted in weeks, you might reconsider.

  • Internet works (with Biktorgj’s 0.7.4 os running inside the modem) and has actually been a better roaming abroad experience than SailfishX on my Xperia 10iii.

  • Call work most of the time (on occasion audio is completely missing, but fixed with a quick reboot).

  • SMS are a mixed bag for me as SailfishOS Community uses ofono unlike most of the other distros’ NetworkManage + ModemManager - thus I’m hit by a few ofono-exclusive bugs, e.g., “Stuck message”

    • (this can be problematic if SMS are your only 2FA option)
    • (“Stuck message”: instead of SMS showing up normally, they show up in the “chat” with the modem)
    • (“Chat with the modem”: Biktorgj’s os on the modem support a chat/command line interface over +223344556677)
      edit: Biktor has an update in the pipeline: the upcoming version 0.7.5 should fixe this problem.

  • But still occasionnal “SIM Card is Missing” disconnection from the Modem. Usually restarting eg25-manager and ofono fixes it: internet is restored, but then subsequently SMS (and sometimes calls) are broken.

  • Internet sharing works (and Piggz has fixed the “mainboard goes to sleep while it should be staying awake and routing traffic”)

  • USB networking works too

    • (minus the broken udhcpd on SailfishOS, my workstation uses a static IP in the udev rule instead).
    • (though apparently not everyone is affected by this)

  • I use wired earphones so the absence of Bluetooth call audio routing isn’t problematic

    • (note: the mono channel of voice calls is only routed to one ear)

  • Battery life and heat disspation are good

    • (using Megi’s rk2aw+variant of U-Boot with Rockchip’s ddrbin with support for sleep and DRAM downclocking)
    • (using Biktorgj’s modem os with support for 100Mhz modem downclock).

  • I haven’t test Waydroid yet

    • (so problems getting in touch with friends who insist on only using WhatsApp)
    • (will also try a few apps: train, bank (that work without camera), etc.)

  • Can’t get GPS to work (so no “X” marking the spot on PureMaps).

    • apparently Bitkorgj will try to fix it is some future version of the modem’s os.

  • Camera is problematic

    • (sometimes Shutter can’t switch to the world camera and gets black ; I can’t get it to save pictures)
      Edit: piggz is working on an updat that successfully saves images, after some tweaks (of either resolution in his experience or pixel format in mine).
    • (also libcamera isn’t plugged into the SailfishOS standard API so other apps relying on camera don’t work - e.g. Barcode reader.)
    • (There is a fork of Waydroid that attempts to use a libcamera-based HAL driver so once that is fixed, this should allow, e.g., Android app that use QR-Code for logging in).

  • Wifi and/or Bluetooth disconnection upon sleep.

  • troubles sometimes reconnecting to my smartwatch (PineWatch running InifiniTime and Amazfish on SailfishOS).

  • on some reboots some services simply don’t restart. In my experience, SSHD and Plymooth are affected. Happens less when rebooting on charger (probably some dependencies not waiting for devices to settle?)

  • there is no community solution of OAuth2 on Microsoft Exchange / Office365, and Jolla isn’t selling its commercial software on community port (yet)

If you look closely, most of these are problem that can eventually be fixed by the relevant devs.
Community is very responsive. It’s possible to debug and log problems (you don’t depend on some large blob by some corporate vendor).
In fact it’s in a state where, imho, even Jolla could realistically think polishing it up into an official SailfishX target over the coming months (trying to “wink, wink, nudge, nudge” someone at Jolla into considering this?).

Note:

  • I have formatted my root partition as btrfs (this might affect the path settling?)
  • I have reformatted the encrypted home as btrfs and tweaked the encryption systemd unit accordingly (checksum and CoW means it survices crashes differently then ext4).
  • As mentionned above, I have replaced both the boot firmware on the mainboard, and run a community alternative os inside the modem, which (positively) affect power, heat and sleep.
  • My use is called “nemo”, not “defaultuser” :stuck_out_tongue:

Hope this helps. Ask me question if you want to know more details.

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