Listening and doing your own things anyways is the time-honored way of ignoring people...
Even as an Arch user (that hence "gets" Manjaro) that is sad :(
Much of the device still doesn't even work. And we're talking simple stuff like the cameras. Calling is also super sketchy. You can text but voice calls effectively is a fail.
The IMU does appear to work correctly, for things like rotation. It is pretty fast.
You can also fry your device (hardware damage!) if you get the pinephone keyboard and plug in USBC into the phone port instead of the keyboard port. You read that correctly. Hope you don't mess up if you're tired.
And if your battery on the PPP goes too low, the utter shit firmware goes into a boot loop and can't charge. You have to take off the case and hit the recessed button to put it in DFU mode. That bypasses the firmware causing bootloops. And it's slllloooowwwww charging.
I completely and utterly regret such a shit device. And I say that about the very hardware, AND the reticence in actually putting out base builds of working software.
And if they're choosing unsupported/unsupportable chips without doing the barest of legwork to get them functional (or hell, get docs public), then that's a huge problem.
Pine should be showing on their pages a hardware matrix showing what works and what doesn't. The Pinephone Pro doesn't qualify for the definition "phone".
If they were serious, they'd put this page up front, with a list of all the stuff that they imply works, but doesn't: https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PinePhone_Pro_Software_State
I'm actually on board, but do note that that's going to be a chart full of subnotes and caveats - things like "camera produces an slightly red-shifted but passable image on default software shipped from factory, red-shift is fixed with kernel 5.19-patch-foo but that breaks focus, Mobian ships that kernel with a userspace correction filter that fixes it in the latest nightlies[...]". You'll end up with a small table that's 90% little yellow "works with caveats" boxes and then several pages describing the caveats and various working and shades-of-working configurations. Oh, and it'll need to be timestamped and constantly updated (as in "major bugs fixed, and sometimes added, on a weekly basis")
In short, summarizing active development is never going to be simple.
One day I’ll probably end up with a Linux phone, but I mean, not if I’m worried I’ll get surprised when it arrives
"The PinePhone Pro Explorer Edition is aimed at Linux developers with an extensive knowledge of embedded systems and/or experience with mobile Linux"
To me thats pretty a pretty clear implication that many things may work poorly or not at all.
And, they call it a Pine *PHONE* Pro.
It can't even do the "Phone" thing.
And read up about the hardware critical failures that can destroy stuff when you plug in the wrong usb-c connection.
Yes, I expect a minimum functionality. You know, like NOT FRYING SHIT. They couldn't even manage to do that.
There's nothing wrong about Pinehnone Pro's Type-C port supporting circuitry. It's pretty much a reference design this time.
inb4 What works: You tell me!
Actually camera sensor was changed on request from Martijn. (or so I was told, when I was asked to add support for the cameras in the kernel)
My $200 pinephone can, on a good day, do 0.5hz. I dunno, but I expected more.
That's not a $200 proposition, though. :)
And I guess there's no huge motivation, given the expected quality of the resulting image. Maybe someone will write it for some other similar AW SoC that uses the same HW block.
Such is the power of FOSS.
I used to be all for early adoption, but too many people ran off with my money via Kickstarter and Steam Early Access.
edit- add phase x2 =p
It can make phone calls.
It took a separate $31,000 kickstarter and 4 years of a multi-vendor cooperation to create and upstream then non-existent accelerated stateless video decoding API for Linux. Pine64 would have never released anything if they waited on Linux API standardization process (have multiple users of the API in kernel, etc.). And even after 2 years of availability, the only major user of the API is gstreamer, and it's still bubbling through the stack so that you can just open Firefox and play an accelerated video.
Pushing through this process even nicher accelerated encoding feature, usable pretty much only for the cameras (which are quite crappy on the OG pinephone, so motivation is already low, there), is just not going to happen for giving someone a 7 year old outdated phone worth $150 only to some enthusiasts and $0 to pretty much everyone else, lol. That's just ridiculous.
I’d expect my PinePhone to come with software too. I mean, I guess it did, I think I just expected more from the open source community than from the nameless fly-by-night vendor.
Software takes time. But their plan is "cobble shit together in an untested and unmaintained state and YOLO".
* Didn't have cameras working
* Wifi didn't come back after suspend
* Had numerous modem reliability issues
* Bluetooth, sensors & audio were available but unused by software
* Had some hardware bugs
So this seems about on-par. Though on the userspace side things have of course progressed hugely for all devices.
They claim that it supports eMMC booting natively. I bought 4 of each. And I bought a eMMC USB dongle to pre-liad the images.
And .... No booting off of eMMC. And utterly NO help from anyone. No guides, no nothing.
And that's hardware stuff that Pine attested would work. And it completely doesn't. I still have to boot using mSD at a whole class 10.
Their whole "plan" and company is a shit show. It's all gongkai crap. Using or buying will give you pain and suffering if anything goes even slightly wrong.