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Posted on 2022-04-26
In this extremely long blog post I will write about my complete PinePhone setup. This is probably not really interesting for most people, but for PinePhone-users, there may be some gems somewhere in the text. At first, the basic software-side will be described, and based on that all the applications I use daily are listed, each with one or two paragraphs about what they are doing, what is good and bad with them. Afterwards my future journey to move from my Android-phone to the PinePhone will be described, following by a short conclusion. The conclusion might also be interesting for people that do not like to read all the parts of this post.
I own the Manjaro Community Edition of the PinePhone with 3GB RAM and 32GB eMMC. I have already looked at a few PinePhone accessories, but have not yet bought some. The specs of the phone are usable, even though I would have liked better battery live.
The PinePhone (without Manjaro Community Edition as it is not available any more).
On my PinePhone I run Arch that was made for Pine64-products. Of course, initially Manjaro was installed on the PP, but as this did not want to boot up, I tried Mobian and after the PP could not boot anymore after the first system update (happened both on Mobian and Manjaro multiple times), I finally settled to Arch, which was the only distribution I tried that still ran after a system update. Please note that the situation probably improved and that I suspect that system upgrades are now possible on all mentioned distributions.
I use the Phosh-build (more on that later) of the image with only a minor amount of pre-installed apps, most of them seem useful.
The only real issue I had with Arch was, that the phone was not charging at its full capacity after a upgrade, but this had a pretty easy fix using a quick script and systemd.
I have tried all major "desktop environments" for the phone, Phosh, Plasma Mobile and Lomiri (former: Unity8). From all the tested ones, I found Lomiri the easiest to use, but as it was only available on UBPorts (I really did not like theamount of webapps on the store) and Manjaro (still in eary beta and seems to barely be developed any more), I settled with Phosh.
I made a few customizations to Phosh, all using the tweak tool provided by Arch, for example to show battery percentage and full date-time. As Phosh also makes heavy use of GTK, all applications (apart from Firefox) and are GTK, but other toolkits would probably also be possible to run but not that nice.
In the future, I may also try sxmo and (the currently in beta) Maui Shell.
For most of the below-mentioned, not pre-installed applications, I use Flatpak. There is definitely a performance downgrade noticeable, mainly at startup, but as I do not want to spend hours cross-compiling and only Flatpak is available, I just use this.
The only non-GTK application on this list. It has some special patches applied to make it mobile-friendly. Performance-wise it is usable, but I would not want to use it for all my browsing.
Fractal is a pretty good GTK Matrix-client. It has all the features I need, I would only want the read-status of a message but this is not a must. All in all, this is a pretty usable and well-polished application for the PinePhone.
This is a GTK music-player. This is my most recent addition to the software I use so I cannot say too much. It seems good to use, but I do not like some UI-decisions they made. This application is definitely usable.
A video player that has hardware-acceleration on the PinePhone. This is a very welcome addition to the applications as most video players (e.g. mpv) do not support hardware-acceleration on the PinePhone by default, leading to a pretty bad experience. It also supports streaming videos from YouTube (and many other platform) and seems to be also the best application for this use-case (no throttling, etc). Combined with Tubefeeder, that will be mentioned later, this replaces applications like NewPipe on my Android-phone.
The creator of the application is also pretty nice. I sometimes chat with him in Matrix.
The issues with the application are only very minor. Sometimes I get weird artefacts during playback, but this might also be some minor hardware-defect as I seem to be the only person noticing it. Furthermore, probably because of bad WiFi-connection, the video is played back at extremely bad quality. But this likely has nothing to do with the application, just some minor note.
All in all, I think this is my favorite application on the PinePhone, if it were not from my own applications of course.
This is the previously mentioned application I use to watch YouTube on my PinePhone. Note that I am the creator for this application, so I might be a little bit biased. Tubefeeder aims to be a simple client for YouTube, Lbry and PeerTube. Therefore, it is more like a feed-aggregator for previously mentioned applications than a full YouTube client like NewPipe. Therefore, only very simple features are implemented, namely the feed, a watch-later list, filters and subscriptions. Another, if not the main, benefit is that any player can be used to play the videos. This makes the integration between Clapper and Tubefeeder so easy.
Even though this is my own application, I must also criticize it. It has bad UI. But as the bad parts are mostly hidden where I rarely am (adding filters or subscriptions), it is OK.
This is another GTK-application made by myself. It is an interface to a API of the "Deutsche Bahn" from Germany I use to look up travel information when traveling by train. The UI has definitely greatly improved from Tubefeeder.
As I would consider it feature-complete enough (meaning no-one would ask for the minor missing features compared to "DBNavigator", the Android-alternative) this project has pretty much halted, but is still more than usable.
This is a very old application of mine (I think the first I made using GTK). I should really archive the repository for this application as it did not have development in a long while. But I still use it daily to see what is running on television in Germany. Probably a application used by no-one but myself.
This is the newest, and to this day still unpublished, GTK Gemini-browser made with the PinePhone in mind. There were already some Gemini-browsers out there made for that (most notably probably Gerbyl), but as I had a little bit of time, I made one myself. It is also designed to be extremely simple, meaning only features I use like bookmarks and highlighting links as visited. It is also simple in the case that it does not (yet) support the entire Gemini-specifications like input. Error-handling is also not implemented. I will not implement these features any time soon, as I will be busy the next few weeks, but I also did not need most of them yet.
I am still unsure of whether I will actually publish this application as there are already so many Gemini-browsers out there. But if you want it, just write me a E-Mail and I will publish it.
There are some other, but mostly not worth to mention, application I occasionally use. These are all already pre-installed. Here is a list of a few of them:
In the future, I will need to move my E-Mail over to the PinePhone. There is already a E-Mail application pre-installed on the PinePhone, so this will not be a huge problem. The only problem is that for personal E-Mail I use ProtonMail for free which does not support third-party clients. But as I think I do not need to check these E-Mails daily, I can go without them on the PinePhone.
I recently noticed a Signal-application made for the PinePhone, called signal-rs (terrible name). It is a QT-application and will therefore not exactly fit in my desktop but I will try it out if I have time. It also seems to be unmaintained for the last 4 months, but if I find it worth using, I might contribute a few fixes. I am already interested on how this will be going.
I will need to switch out the SIM of my Android-Phone into the PinePhone. This is probably pretty easily possible, but I do not know how the call-quality will be. But as I maybe call someone twice a year, I do not think this will be a big problem.
Currently the most important thing I use my smartphone for, apart from Signal, is sharing mobile data with my laptop (and PinePhone) on train-rides. After switching out the SIM-cards of the phones, the PinePhone will now have to share the data with the laptop (and maybe the Android-phone). This seems to be possible on Linux, but will require some commands and some testing. As I do not like typing commands with the on-screen key-board, I may write a small (meaning just one checkbox) application doing that for me. But this will be a problem of future-me.
As you might have noticed, many of the applications I use daily were made by myself. I am lucky to have the skills to develop such applications, otherwise daily-driving the PinePhone would be nearly impossible for me. The current situation, in addition to the seemingly easy path forwards, leads me to the conclusion that fully daily-driving the PinePhone would be possible for me if I put a little bit more effort in. As I currently do not have time, this will probably still take some months, but I am positive that afterwards I will be much happier with my setup compared to the Android-alternative (I may already be, I am not sure yet).
This also clearly showed that the PinePhone was, and maybe still is, considered as a platform for developers. I have probably spent hundreds of hours writing my own applications for the PinePhone. But as I enjoyed doing that, I feel like not a single minute was wasted.