It means they can mass manufacture a single board that can be well tested, reducing overall risk and offering an upgrade path for their hardware. I have mentioned a few times in the Pine64 community that they should really focus more on their compute modules. Its a new approach, drop hardware and specs, and embrace community passion, I thought it was a bad idea at the start, but I'm now sure I'm wrong.Ī Kickstarter phone beginning around the same time, custom hardware and OS, even with a budget and price 3x what pine goes with, would have probably far less progress than what exists now with pine devices
Now, as a time-strapped developer, who gets told "if you wait, the fixes will appear, or you can double/triple your effort to manually patch things, and then undo that when those patches go mainline anyhow" like, I would personally be happy leaving my distro broken for 6+ months for that stuff to settle, cause elsewise you are going to be building apps to support APIs that might change completely between patch and mainline, because there isn't an abstraction layer like ios or android. there is a strong kernel which is upstreaming its changes.
Then when bugs are either fixed or deemed not OS issues, you'll have to re-test and re-develop parts of your code to cope with that over and over.Ī proper working dev kit that works as a day to day phone is much more worth developing for, unless you're REALLY into the pinephone and don't mind extra work.įor the pinephone specifically, it feels like its ignoring what does exist? But when bugs with basic features you rely on happen, you'll have to make a guess whether it's your code or the phone's bug. What if your map app crashes when the GPS location jitters too much like in the real world? Or gives inaccurate results when you walk next to high current power line that screws with it's internal compass? It's nearly impossible to simulate day to day usage to catch these things.īut sure, you can develop for it now. If you're not going to be using it like a normal phone daily, you won't find certain bugs. You can test it like someone playing a PS5 would by sitting in front of it with a controller.Ī phone that has trouble with basic features you're expecting a final product to get right is much more effort.
5 second click lag.Ī PS5 dev kit functions as a full PS5 though, so you can be reasonably certain a game developed for it will work on a real PS5. What was neat was running ARM VS Code but it was slow as hell eg. Also the battery even in airplane mode will die within a day or so. Unfortunately my screen is falling apart/peeling near the top edges. Overall I like the idea of the phone/want to learn to develop for it. KDE Plasma was pretty but I couldn't just plug in an external monitor and have it work. I'm not 100% a fan of the Phosh look/how it works multi-task wise but it does work out of the box more than a couple other "front ends" I tried. I also have to restart it several times to get the modem to work. The modem is finicky when it works, seems to need a certain battery charge (like near full). I got a second basic text/call line for my Pinephone but I don't use it as a phone right now. I think it just started doing pre-orders.
Wondering if the thoughts in this thread factor in the Pinephone Pro yet or no? I am looking to get one of those eventually. I could then log in to a text console, using an external keyboard :)
I mounted the resulting SD card and edited the /etc/shadow file to enable root login without a password. Note that the above images have no usable user accounts. This is quite convoluted, but I did this while stuck on a crappy Chromebook ) We can do this while dd-ing the image to our SD card, e.g. nar only contains one file, we can just ignore the header bytes (they're padded to multiples of 8 bytes I think in this case we need to skip the first 96 bytes). We can unxz that, then trim the leading bytes according to the Nar file format (described in Dolstra's PhD thesis, figure 5.2, page 93 ).
nix/store/6py525nywqdbyjs7jy1rm9vw53hmm5f1-pine64-pinephone_full-disk-image.img That links to the latest build for pinephone aarch64, e.g. The mobile-nixos project site links to their Hydra jobs: