CalcProgrammer1

CalcProgrammer1, 2 months ago

I mostly use Linux but have a Mac Mini as a TV PC. I use the same browser everywhere - LibreWolf. It’s Firefox but with Mozilla’s bullshit adware/sponsored garbage removed and some extra privacy-focused features/default settings. Firefox has become adware itself, with its home page having sponsored garbage and suggested stories from partners. I generally love what Mozilla is doing and we need competition in the browser space, but I don’t want Mozilla spamming up my homepage with their “suggestions”.

CalcProgrammer1, 2 months ago

Not on my 1080Ti. I have serious flickering on certain apps when using the latest NVIDIA proprietary drivers on Arch Linux with GNOME Wayland. Steam flickers and sometimes seems to fail to redraw properly. Had some issues on Discord as well.

CalcProgrammer1, 2 months ago

How did they determine these numbers? I have postmarketOS on my OnePlus 6T but I have LibreWolf user agent set to Android Firefox because it makes portrait formatting better on some sites, though I switch it to desktop on sites with bad mobile UIs. Also, even with default user agent how do you distinguish a Linux phone from a Linux desktop or laptop other than just lumping all arm64 devices into “Linux phone” category?

CalcProgrammer1, 2 months ago

I really got into the Internet in the mid-00’s and I would say the early days of YouTube, Digg, and most things still being pre-social media with forums being widespread was my favorite era. However, my second favorite era is going on right now. I always wished open source services would be more popular and even back then there were issues with corporate controlled services screwing over their users (see the Digg Migration). I’m so glad to see the Fediverse finally taking off, with self hosting options and no centralized entity who can shut the whole thing down at the flick of a switch. Leaving Twitter and Reddit behind has been very refreshing.

CalcProgrammer1, 2 months ago

If their birthday is really % 80 then they reset to a newborn after age 79.

CalcProgrammer1, 2 months ago

Awesome news! I’ve been testing it on my RTX 3070 laptop for a month or two now and most games seem to work with it now, but performance is quite lacking vs. the proprietary driver. However, the proprietary driver is borderline unusable in a lot of games even though it pumps out high frame rates because something weird happens with render offloading and I end up with really bad frame tearing and out-of-order frame pacing that makes stuff jitter around. GNOME Wayland with mutter-vrr, AMD Ryzen 5900HX with integrated graphics powering the laptop’s 165Hz VRR panel. With NVK, there is zero tearing or weird display pacing and VRR seems to be working so once the performance is better it would hopefully make gaming on my laptop viable in Linux. Tired of having to game in Windows on that PC when all my other systems I can game just fine in Linux.

CalcProgrammer1, 2 months ago

Cloud gaming is a plague. More fuel for the “you will own nothing and be happy” camp. Let it die. GeForce Now was at least one of the better options since you just use their servers to play games from your owned library, but the whole concept is a plague nonetheless. Let streaming nonsense die. Streaming from your own PC is the only streaming solution that doesn’t exist to weaken consumer ownership of their gaming experience.

CalcProgrammer1, 2 months ago

Trident Z RGB falls under ENE DRAM and should work fine as long as you have the appropriate i2c driver loaded for your motherboard.

CalcProgrammer1, 2 months ago

Can you post the output of lsmod | grep i2c?

CalcProgrammer1, 2 months ago

Oh, you have a Gigabyte motherboard. These have a quirk with i2c where you have to add a kernel command line parameter. I forget exactly what it is, maybe “acpi_enforce_resources=lax”? I think this is mentioned in the Readme on Gitlab.

CalcProgrammer1, 3 months ago

Nice review. I agree with others here that this phone is borderline scam for the price and with all the delays people had in receiving them. Performance seems on par with the $200 original PinePhone which I had a similar experience with.

The one good thing that came out of Purism/Librem 5 is Phosh. It’s a pretty good phone shell/UI for other more capable Linux phones to use. I particularly like Phosh for its on-screen keyboard Squeekboard which allows for custom keymaps.

CalcProgrammer1, 3 months ago

AOSP and even factory kernel source tends to be only mildly useful for proper Linux phone use. Android phones tend to ship with old kernel revisions that the chip maker forked a long time ago and developed their chip drovers on without following accepted kernel conventions or submitting any code to the actual kernel maintainers for proper review and integration into the most up to date “mainline” kernel. Due to this, and the fact that phone makers need to constantly ship new products out the door, the quality of this code added into the old kernel is often garbage, poorly commented and with no documentation. Usually no git history either.

There are other teams of people trying to clean up and/or rewrite these drivers from scratch in a way that is reviewable and acceptable in mainline. Only a small handful of the vast number of phone chips have such support, so proper Linux phone is limited to a small selection of hardware. The designed-for-Linux librem and PinePhone models intentionally chose old chipsets because these chipsets had good mainline support and thus could receive actual kernel updates rather than being stuck forever on an ancient kernel release from the manufacturer that has long since been abandoned.

Lately the Qualcomm Snapdragon SDM845 chip is seeing growing mainline Linux support and quickly becoming one of the most viable chips for mobile Linux that isn’t a complete dinosaur in terms of performance and power draw. The OnePlus 6 and 6T, which both use the SDM845 chip, have become quite popular as Linux phones now despite not yet having VoLTE and thus being useless for calls. I carry a OnePlus 6T as a secondary non-phone pocket PC because the Linux experience is very good other than the lack of phone and camera functionality. It’s fast and can do all my terminal and coding stuff as well as run full fledged web browsers well.

CalcProgrammer1, 3 months ago

I tried to daily drive a PinePhone for a long time, then a PinePhone Pro. It is not really ready. Too many dropped/failed to answer calls and missed texts. I love having a fully capable Linux PC in my pocket and am typing this on my OnePlus 6T with postmarketOS, but as a phone it is not ideal. My setup now is that I have a OnePlus 6 with stock Android and my main SIM for doing phone stuff (calls, texts, some apps, Bluetooth handsfree) and the OnePlus 6T with pmOS for Linux experimentation and doing pocket computer things (browsing, coding, SSH, VPN, testing Waydroid). I got a second cheap SIM so I can have service on both devices, but as the 6T with pmOS can’t receive calls in 4G mode it really doesn’t work as a phone. The PinePhones can work as a phone but the modem dropouts make it less than ideal and their battery life and performance leave much to be desired while the OP6T has fairly good performance and battery life on pmOS.

CalcProgrammer1, 3 months ago

I haven’t used it on the PinePhone or PinePhone Pro in a while, but Waydroid is solid on my OnePlus 6T with postmarketOS. Android apps that only need an Internet connection work fine. I installed microG and have push notifications working for Discord and Teams. However, notifications don’t get passed through to the Linux side so they only show if you open the Android UI. Screen rotation doesn’t work on Waydroid which can be very annoying. Apps that use other hardware features such as location, Bluetooth, vibration, access to calls/texts won’t work properly.

CalcProgrammer1, 3 months ago

We have Waydroid which is close enough. It needs some quality of life improvements for better integration with the native Linux ecosystem but it runs Android apps just fine on Linux phones.

CalcProgrammer1, 3 months ago

Then you run far, far away from that app. Even on an Android phone I don’t trust garbage apps that require locked bootloader and no root. There are plenty of banks out there and paying with your phone is not a necessity.

CalcProgrammer1, 3 months ago

I went through probably 20 different iterations of keycaps and got close to one I liked, but haven’t gotten back to finishing the project since I haven’t been using my PinePhone much. I think the main remaining thing is to make an Enter key model and a Tab key model. I want to get back to that project eventually but haven’t had time.

CalcProgrammer1, 3 months ago

Not really, it’s been a hassle to get them consistent enough to match the default ones. The small scale makes printing them difficult even after I got a resin printer for the project. I settled on a two piece design that works pretty well but the resin material is not as smooth as the injection molded stock caps.

CalcProgrammer1, 3 months ago

I had call drops on both the original and the Pro. They both use the same USB-attached modem and the modem has (had?) an issue where it would lose USB connection to the main processor sometimes, so you would just randomly lose cell connectivity. Sometimes the USB connection would restart right away and sometimes it would not and you’d have to restart eg25 manager to reboot the modem.

CalcProgrammer1, 3 months ago

I want to do a follow up eventually. I have some free time next week, might try to finish up the keycaps. I have the standard size cap that most of the keys use done and a spacebar that is the right shape and size, just needs attachment points for the stabilizer.

CalcProgrammer1, 3 months ago

I had this issue using the libre modem firmware on both phones. I’m not sure if it’s a modem side issue or a Linux side issue. I haven’t used either PinePhone with a SIM card in almost a year though so my knowledge could be outdated.

CalcProgrammer1, 3 months ago

I have Waydroid set up on my postmarketOS OnePlus 6T mainly so I can use the Discord app. Waydroid still needs some integration issues worked out (access to location, access to Bluetooth, access to calls/texts, ability to forward notifications to the Linux side) but otherwise it runs quite well. Performance feels pretty similar to native. I also have a OnePlus 6 running stock OS for my main phone tasks as pmOS doesn’t have VoLTE support for the 6T so is kinda useless as a phone right now.

CalcProgrammer1, 3 months ago

I’ve had an A770 Limited Edition since its release in late 2022. Overall, I’m happy with it. The drivers were a mess at launch but now everything works as expected. Performance is decent in the games I play, though I have a 144Hz 4K monitor and it’s not really capable of that resolution and refresh rate except on the lightest esports games so I use FSR on most games. My most played game is Overwatch and it hits 144Hz with dynamic resolution scaling on and medium settings. I want to buy a higher end GPU eventually to really push this monitor but waiting to see what happens with the next generation of Intel and AMD cards (NVIDIA is not even in the running unless NVK suddenly gets performance parity with the proprietary drivers).

CalcProgrammer1, 3 months ago

Steam Deck is an open platform because you can run any OS, launcher, etc. on it. It’s just a handheld PC. Steam itself is a closed ecosystem but the Deck is very open.

CalcProgrammer1, 3 months ago

That’s why I mentioned the “without an OS installed already” though a corrupt OS is another possibility that would need some other system available (whether phone, tablet, another Deck, or PC).