As my Samsung Note 9 continues to age, I consider which phone to get next. My original plan was to have my Librem 5 by now, and to adjust my life to make the Librem 5 be my daily driver, one way or another. I would still like to see that plan work.
With my Librem 5 not yet sent to me, I am considering getting a Pinephone Pro, to get an early start before the Librem 5 shows up. I am a semi-proficient Linux user. Does anyone here have enough user experience using the Piniphone Pro, to let us know here, its state of readiness as a daily driver?
I don’t do social media. I am willing to give up banking apps in exchange for privacy. I use SMS and MMS routinely. I use navigation a few times per month and guess that opening up the phone to turn the GPS and data on and off routinely might be inconvenient. I do use my phone to shop on Amazon a lot.
Also, has anyone here used AwSim on the Pinephone Pro and if so, how has that worked out?
I have a Pinephone Pro, i not using much, it mostly saved. The last time i used the PPP the battery life it terrible, the cpu speed it terrible too. The PPP screen it running at 53FPS which feels slow at contrary Librem 5 it running nicely at 63FPS, the battery life of L5 it huge better, L5 CPU it huge faster too. L5 GPU running lot better too than PPP.
More terribly the Pine64 company is not responsible for anything on PPP.
Also all the develop of PP,P it not being mainlined ATM, like kernel, bootloader.
I took the same approach you are suggesting and bought a Pinephone Pro while (still) waiting for my Librem 5. My advice is don’t. No where near ready fir daily use.
I ended up repurposing my old Moto G5 and installed Lineage on it. I’d put the money to a second-hand phone like a pixel, or moto and put a non android os on it. Save your money with the pinephone.
Or, seriously, dm me and for postage I’ll send you mine (that’s from Australia).
Having the same issue. Waiting for the Librem 5 with my lineageos phone dying.
My pinephone (not pro) however is evolving and getting better every day. I am using postmarketos and it’s really nice. However the pinephone is not a flagship phone and slower than the pro or the librem 5. You will notice this. Apps load some seconds before they start.
However I still love my pinephone and the postmarket / linux phone community has very capable devs as one can see in the monthly pine64 blog. The phone also brings a lot of extras or one can buy more extras. Like the pinephone docking station which works even with 4K monitors (very slow), a keyboard extenstion which is in the build, protective covers which can be bought directly from pine64, wireless charging can be bought… I cannot imagine how nice it will be finally having my Librem 5 having an even better experience. I guess the pinephone pro will also be a lot faster and is also part of the wide range of tinkering which is done in the pine64 community as it’s compatible on all the hardware developed for the pinephone. However I already spent quite some money on linux phones and my next upgrade will be the Librem 5 ^^. If I would not have a pinephone yet, I would probably buy a pro now.
I have a PP to. And it can do much. But it is relatively slow. But also cheap. The battery time would probably not hold a from morning to evening under active usage. For me it is not a daily driver, yet. It still has bugs that made me not trust it to handle calls 100% reliably. Actually a bug that I’ve read others in this forum talk about regarding the L5. That depend on the software you run on and the PP there are plenty of OS built for this device.
And I think we should be fair to the PPP, too. Is has different hardware and therefore the development of software and maybe firmware started from behind the PP. I think it is just a matter of time that the PPP will outperform the PP in many, if not all, criteria. How long that actually takes? I don’t know.
A performance comparison between the PPP and the L5 has been debated elsewhere in this forum.
I have a PinePhone, two Librem 5 and a PinePhone Pro and some more phones, a few of them supported by postmarketOS. I’d suggest getting a PinePhone (if you want to play with Convergence), or a Xiaomi Poco F1, which is quite nice and versatile, as it is being supported by postmarketOS, Mobian, Droidian, Ubuntu Touch and maybe even more projects and works as a Phone, even with a really close to mainline kernel (Snapdragon 845 column).
The PinePhone Pro OTOH is not ready yet, don’t buy it unless you want to help work on its hardware enablement. I could make a video of me browsing the web to run down the battery if I were a mean person, it would likely not even take me two hours… This is going to improve, people are working hard, but as this is mostly (if not entirely) unpaid community work, things take their time and reliable estimates are impossible (time, burn out, … these are just regular humans).
Another thing to consider is if the PPP will get updated hardware revision before marketing is beeing targeted for general availability. I can’t judge if that will be the case, but it is the reason for me to wait and let the experts do their work on the lower levels. I don’t want to block that. If I remember correctly they wrote about PPP availability in their last community update blog post.
I’ve also been looking at deGoogled phones. The most secure one appears to only run (ironically) only on a Pixil (Google) phone. It’s called GrapheneOS. I guess you can unlock your boot loader routinely on this model without needing to use an “exploit” and then run something called “MicroG”, and use the “Aurora Store”, Google won’t be able to tell who you are, even when using apps that need a connection to Google. These tools spoof your identity and block snooping for you (if as reported). Apparently, there is not even a log in to the phone itself. But you can’t use a carrier phone. You have to buy it directly from Google and load the GrapheneOS yourself. But you can be tracked if you log any apps in using your real accounts. Has anyone here used this method?
Also, if you use LineageOS, what is the best and biggest phone that will work? I like big phones and plan to buy a new phone for this purpose. I prefer a Linux phone. But they don’t appear to be ready yet.
Root access gives you full Administrator access on your phone. It’s the highest permissions level there is. No one can lock you out of everything.
None of the carrier phones allow this. I have cracked in to root access on a few phones by introducing an exploit via the USB cable. But it’s generally unsafe because you never know what the author of the exploit from some website might have included in his exploit. Maybe it gives him remote access and root privileges too. You’ll never know. But on some phones (never the carrier phones), there is a safe and sanctioned method by the phone manufacturer to give you root access.
Graphene OS is nice, they allow for sandboxed Google Apps for the people that need it - I have it on a Pixel 6, which, like others (make sure to do research beyond initial reviews here) has its issues: Bad wireless connectivity, occasional overheating while recording 4K video. (Also, the Pixel 6 is too big for my taste, but that’s seemingly not going to be an issue for you.)
Therefore, I can’t recommend a Pixel 6, but Graphene is worth a recommendation. Older devices are bound to be cheaper anyway.
microG is a great effort, I used it in the past myself (on LineageOS), but be aware that it requires signature spoofing which has serious security implications.
Regarding LineageOS: It’s nice, but if security matters, better go Graphene. That said, I recommended the Poco F1 (should be quite cheap used) earlier for being supported by so many GNU-like mobile Linux projects - and of course it’s also supported by LineageOS.
Generally, since you seem to be worried about Google tracking, don’t go the Android route. Just too many apps require at least some shim of Google services (e.g. microG), eventually tempting you to install Google Apps if that fails - with Mobile Linux you have a better chance to not eventually give in.
PS: Never get a Carrier phone if you can avoid it and worry about privacy, customizability or security at all.
I have managed to get by without MicroG. I recommend installing F-Droid, and searching for apps there first. If you can’t find what you need, then use Aurora Store. In my experience getting an app in the F-Droid repo, they really do look through the code to verify that it is FOSS. They spotted that we were using some proprietary library to do downloading in our app, and informed the users that the code isn’t 100% FOSS, which makes me appreciate their thoroughness.
GrapheneOS only runs on Pixels (probably due to attitude of its chief developer), and I refuse to buy any phone that doesn’t offer expandable storage, since I see it as promoting planned obsolescence, so I have crossed Pixels and OnePlus phones off my list, but they do have good support for running AOSP derivatives.