It’s been more than two years since I daily drove the PinePhone, what has happened since? What happened to it? How daily drivable is the PinePhone as of today?
Afterwards, I decided to go back to an Android phone. The entire reason I had daily driven the PinePhone in the first place was because I had smashed my android phone into a car door (don’t ask how that happened). Over time I had gotten used to using Android phones again and it had become a lot harder for me to go back to using the PinePhone as a daily driver since the Android phone was obviously a lot faster and reliable than the PinePhone.
The issues with the PinePhone that stop me from daily driving it
As of the release of my article and now I have tried to daily drive the PinePhone again 3 times. But I always ended up switching back within a week or two. This was due to a couple of factors.
- Battery life
The main issue I had and still have with the original PinePhone is battery life. For most people it will suffice if they don’t touch their phone much. For people who do such as myself, it might last half of the day and then need to be charged before it goes flat.
On the same topic, last week I did a test with the PinePhone to see how long it could last playing a 720p video on medium brightness with modem (with a sim inside) and Bluetooth on.
For the test I used Firefox on PostmarketOS v22.12 playing a 720p video on YouTube. The PinePhone (2GB) lasted one and a half hours before automatically turning off.
- The hardware lacks power
The original PinePhone struggles to run a lot of modern software, just using Phosh and Plasma Mobile used to end up constantly crashing the phone. Sure, the PinePhone Pro exists, but it still hasn’t reached the level of software maturity the original has.
Currently best options for the original PinePhone are Sailfish and SXMO for usablilty. There are other projects like Ubuntu Touch and Maemo Leste that have the potential to improve the user experience in the future.
So, if I still wanted to, could I?
I’d still say that the PinePhone is daily drivable, but I still can’t recommend it to consumers wanting to move away from big tech. Buying an Android phone that supports mainline Linux is still the way to go in my opinion, at least for now.
Camdens guide to PinePhone (OG) operating systems in 2023
If you do want to daily drive your PinePhone, here’s what I recommend.
Right now, I can recommend Arch (Danct12), PostmarketOS, Mobian and Sailfish.
Danct12’s Arch builds are reliable and I’ve used them over the years and I haven’t had many if any issues with them in 2022. The builds come with a basic suite of apps, and your choices of interfaces include Plasma Mobile, Phosh and SXMO.
PostmarketOS is still my top recommendation, it has a 6 month major release schedule with a new service pack every month or two. Vigorous testing is put into making sure that breakages don’t make it into these releases. The builds come with a basic suite of apps, and your choices of interfaces include Plasma Mobile, Phosh and SXMO.
Mobian builds are also reliable, Mobian has made great contributions to the PinePhone and mobile Linux community and I haven’t had any breakage on Mobian for a long time. The one thing that you need to remember is that you need to install towboot after you install Mobian otherwise your PinePhone won’t boot. The builds come with a basic suite of apps, and Phosh is only interface.
Sailfish has recently gotten a lot more stable and reliable for daily usage. Performance is great and SMS and calls come through fine during sleep for me. The only drawback I have is there isn’t a camera app yet. The builds come with a basic suite of apps including chum the community app store for Sailfish.
Manjaro
Now you’re probably wondering why I don’t recommend the default operating system for the PinePhone. I personally haven’t had a good experience with it, they still ship software that the developers told other mobile Linux projects not to ship. Manjaro shipped the gesture update when the developer for Phosh explicitly said NOT to ship the branch yet since it was not finished yet.
I don’t respect what Manjaro does, and due to personal morals can’t recommend their system.
The conclusion
So, to conclude. The original PinePhone is hard to daily drive today due to the high battery drain and low hardware performance. But is daily drivable depending on what you want to do with your phone. If you’re just using it to call, text and read emails it’s good enough. More than that (YouTube, games) you may be disappointed (though emulators work quite well!).
And that PostmarketOS is still my favorite mobile Linux system for the PinePhone (I swear I’m not biased).
