Some people on activitypub seemed a bit interested in mobile linux, so I decided to share a bit more of my experience on here.

[maskedwitch@fe.disroot.org]

Some people on activitypub seemed a bit interested in mobile linux, so I decided to share a bit more of my experience on here. I will break it up into different posts covering different aspects.

I have been using a PinePhone 1.2b (3GB of RAM, 32GB eMMC storage) as my daily driver for roughly four years now. That may sound impressive, but I only really use a phone so people can reach me, for music on the go, and for a browser in a pinch. I'm not on my phone all that often.

PinePhone: https://pine64.org/devices/pinephone/

Currently, I have Mobian (based on Debian) Trixie installed on the internal eMMC storage and a 512GB microSD card mounted at /home, both utilizing full-disk encryption, for plenty of storage for my use-case. I'm using the Phosh interface, since it is more stable in my experience than plasma mobile currently. I also mostly use GTK software since they tend to integrate better with Phosh. I do not have cellular service on it, I even have the entire cellular modem disabled via the hardware dipswitch on the back currently.

Mobian: https://mobian-project.org/
Phosh: https://phosh.mobi/

#mobian #debian #linux #mobilelinux #pinephone #linuxphone #phosh

[maskedwitch@fe.disroot.org]

Connectivity

I'm not using cellular service with it at all currently. Back when I did use T-Mobile with it, it was unreliable. However, that was back at the end of Buster and early months of Bookworm, so that might have changed significantly. I currently just use public wifi on the go.

On the wifi front, it has been solid for only supporting 2.4GHz. There were some issues with WPA3 and moving between connections, but Trixie brought fixes that resolved those.

Bluetooth on it works well. Though, if it's actively using bluetooth for something more intensive (like audio) and wifi, then I recommend keeping it to the SBC codec instead of SBC-XQ. It starts having connectivity issues if both of them are actively being used.

[valhalla@social.gl-como.it]

@maskedwitch /me waves the secret pinephone daily driver¹ salute :D

I'm using cellular service rather than wifi more than half of the time, and I feel that these days it's way more reliable than it used to be: lately the main reason why I didn't have data service has been because I had not paid for it (ehm... :D ), or disabled international roaming because I live close to a border and then traveled internationally (double ehm...)

to be fair, I never use it for phone calls, only data, so I don't know whether receiving calls is reliable

(and I suspend a lot, because battery and not wanting notifications anyway)

¹ for values of “daily” where I don't use a phone every day