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Comment by ghoward | Hacker News Reader

Mini Ask HN:

The comments here seem to say that PinePhone and friends are not ready to be daily drivers or even occasional drivers. I think that's fine.

However, I do want to support these people and their work. I also need an ARM machine to do tests on (for portability of software and such), so I'm thinking of buying this Pro version. Yes, I'll spend a lot more than I need to, but I really want to support them.

So question: are the PinePhone and friends good enough to do development on? And not even normal development; just downloading, building, and testing?

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Instead of a phone, pine64 makes a lot of other computers designed more for what you want. They are cheaper and have cases that make it a lot easier to use for what you want. (I'm typing this on a pinebook pro laptop from them)

The only reason to buy a phone vs something else from them is the phone donates a bit of money to some other project. But you can directly donate to KDE or whatever and get the same result.

A Raspberry Pi may be more useful for your ARM build server related tasks, as the PinePhone runs on battery, has only one USB C port, etc. If you are developing applications for the PinePhone or other mobile viewports, then absolutely the PinePhone is for you.

The battery and port is a fair point. Thank you.

I have a PP CE and I'm trying to do Rust GUIs. Now the Rust compiler is known to be slow, and with C (and maybe using an optimized compiler like tcc), YMMV. But Rust development (at least when using any amount of dependencies) is unbearable.

I have hopes for getting cross-compilation working, but no luck so far...

I wouldn't compile things on the PinePhone because of its performance, but I do it just fine on the Librem 5, so I imagine PinePhone Pro should be fine too as long as it doesn't excessively thermal throttle (it may be tricky to achieve that though).

Yes

Thank you!

I have more questions if you don't mind.

Is the experience alright? Are there any gotchas that I would need to know?

An anecdote: my eye opener was when I connected mine (3gb/32gb) to a usb-c hub (after seeing Martjin Braam's YT video on it) and was able to then connect it to my 27" hp monitor via hdmi and attach my keyboard/mouse as well: any complaints I had about Pinephone's 'rough edges' up to that point (which tbh, were plenty) disappeared.

Generally speaking though, the performance will be pretty sad and the device will get fairly hot during normal use. I am looking forward to getting this new device (Pro) at some point to see the improved performance. The software also keeps improving. When I got it (as a ubports 2gb edition, I later upgraded to the 3gb board), the software was in poor shape so I put it away for a bit. Mobian versions starting last summer really improved on the usability though.

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