So i have not bought a GNU/Linux phone for several reasons, one of which is that neither the ecosystem nor the devices themselves seem to be mature enough to have a stable experience.

To begin with, GTK3 is far from ideal on these devices, and many applications have not migrated to GTK4 which does take advantage of the GPUs… more or less. I don’t know exacly what the status of the drivers is like, but i’d assume that the pinephone doesn’t support vulkan.

But i’ve heard that AMD and Samsung will collaborate to bring AMD RDNA2 GPU’s to Samsung devices, which in my opinion, it’s the game changer that we need. This is completely theoretical but we lose nothing by speculating.

So AMD is great on x86 right? you have very powerful graphic cards compared to intel’s which have open source drivers and implementations like intel, namely MESA with RADV, unlike Nvidia, a company that offers very powerful cards with closed source drivers.

I’d assume that these new devices will be able to run a full GNU/Linux distro with open source drivers and all the subsequent tools. You would get finally a powerful device withouth compromising privacy from the software perspective.

I understand that the kill switches are something unique that gives the Librem 5 and the Pinephone an advantage in terms of privacy, but using a real GNU/LInux distribution on a powerful and potentially popular device is a big deal.

What are your thoughts on this?

  • poVoq
    6•3 years ago

    I don’t think the Pinephone is even targeted as “stable-first” users like you seem to be. And to be honest I don’t quite get why a fast GPU with Vulcan support (which the Pinephone indeed doesn’t have) would be a relevant criteria for a phone? For gaming? (hint: there are basically no compatible games) The GPU the PinePhone has is plenty fast to drive an mobile optimized UI like seen with the Ubuntu Touch or SailfishOS ports.

    If you never the less want to try out something that comes close to what the PinePhone could offer in theory, get an old UT supported Android device and use the super easy Ubports installer to reflash it.