---
title: "Pinephone"
date: 2021-10-15T10:20:44-05:00
draft: false
tags:
- technology
- Linux
- gadgets
---

So I recently grabbed a [PinePhone](http://www.pine64.org/pinephone),
because my old Galaxy S9+ has been dying
a slow death. The old one started out being finnicky about docking to the
car, then charging became an intermittent hassle, then the screen started
to die slowly. So it was time to get a replacement. Might as well go with something
very different and out of place, eh? Why not take a look at the only generally
available smartphone that was running an upstream version of Linux?

So I grabbed a PinePhone back at the end of August. It took until late September
for delivery to go out. Pine64 is shipping them out to the US in batches.
But waiting a month isn't so bad when it's a device you've been wanting.

## First Boot

So the phone arrives, I promptly pop out my nano SIM, place it into the
micro SIM adapter, and slide it into the phone. I boot up, connect Manjaro
to my home Wifi, and am ready to upadte. But... I have no idea how to do that.
I'm a Fedora user, and Manjaro is not built on the same technology. OK, so
I finally figure that out.

`sudo pacman -Syyu`

Boom, everything is up to date. I disable Wifi, and try to bring up a browser
to test out mobile data. No luck. I'm not getting anything.

As an AT&T customer, I stopped by the local AT&T store and got them to register
the phone's IMEI and get a new SIM just in case there's an incompatibility
there. Nope, there's nothing. But I'm able to make a phone call. So that's
promising.

After a week of back and forth between Fedora and Manjaro, I did finally get
data working, sometimes, in Manjaro after I ran `sudo pinephone-modem-setup.sh`
from the terminal. It's still more flaky than in Fedora, but it does get
the job done some of the time.

## Fedora?

As I mentioned above, I'm a Fedora user. So I went and grabbed the
[Fedora image](https://github.com/nikhiljha/pp-fedora-sdsetup/releases)
based on Btrfs. I burned it to a spare SD card I have, and dropped that
into the back of the PinePhone. One nice thing about the PinePhone is that
it will boot off the SD card if there is a bootable one in place before
it drops back to the internal ROM. This allows me to test out as many
different distros as I want, easily, without needing to walk through the
slightly more complicated process of burning the images to the internal
memory or losing the step there.

So I boot up Fedora and run its updates.

`sudo dnf update -y`

Error. There is an existing package, `pinephone-helpers`, that cannot
update from 0.2.0 to 0.3.0 because it is... conflicting with itself? OK,
that's weird. But we can work around that very easily.

```bash
sudo dnf remove pinephone-helpers
sudo dnf update -y
sudo dnf install pinephone-helpers
```

Now, my system is fully updated (as of time of writing, these images are
in Fedora Rawhide, which will become Fedora 36; 35 is about to land in
stable). Immediately I noticed an improvement over Manajaro's Plasma
Mobile.

First, and immediately obvious to me, [Phosh](https://github.com/agx/phosh)
has a button in the lower right
that makes it easy to toggle the on screen keyboard on and off. This is
a huge boost to usability. In Plamsa Mobile the keyboard will sometimes
fail to appear when tapping into a text box, most frequently in the
browser. This little button in Phosh, though, allows me to quickly bring
up the keyboard without having to blur/focus/blur/focus until the phone
brings up the keyboard of its own volition. HUGE usability bonus that
Plasma KDE would do well to emulate.

Secondly, and maybe more significantly, Fedora quickly brought up mobile
data on AT&T's network without a hiccup. No switches, no changes, no
questions to ask or forms to fill out. It just comes up and works! So,
that big issue is resolved.

## Fedora's Woes

Except for one thing. I need to chat with my wife, so I gave her a ring
from the phone. No audio. She can't hear me, I can't hear her. Huh, that
seems a bit strange. Phone can do everything but make calls? So I pop
into the settings menu and bring up the sound page. Fedora can't even
see the audio hardware in the device. That sounds like the root of the
problem.

Lots of other people are over in the IRC room for #fedora-mobility are
having issues with their audio switching between calls and playback
when the phone app starts, but no one else is having absolutely no luck
in the audio department. But it's not a hardware problem, as the audio
works just fine in Manjaro.

Based on the discussions in the room, I swap out pipewire-pulseaudio for
plain pulseaudio, then reboot.

`sudo dnf swap pipewire-pulseaudio pulseaudio`

Suddenly my audio is working great, and the Settings app can see the audio
devices on the phone! Huzzah! But it won't switch to call audio unless
you do some finagling on the command line after every reboot. Developers
are working on that.

# Bring the experience together

So here I am, on the one hand I have Fedora

* Audio only working with pulseaudio (funcitonal but laggy)
* Call audio still won't go through, without some finagling
* Data works marvelously
* Phosh is a delight

While on Manjaro

* Audio works fine, including with calls
* Data started working after I ran the helper scripts, but is flaky
* Plasma Mobile is still tough to navigate with

Overall, I prefer the keyboard on Plasma Mobile more, I just wish it was easier to control like the one in
Phosh is. I admit that I'm much more accustomed to Gnome and its apps and navigation than I am to KDE, as I
have exclusively been in Gnome for most of the past decade. So there is a familiarity there. The same goes
for Fedora versus the Arch world that I'm not really familiar with.

I haven't come to a final conclusion which operating system I will use. Some of me wants to stick with Fedora,
both because of their upstream first mentality, and because I am already intimately familiar with their
systems and setup.

Anyway, that's a whole lot of stream of consciousness of what I've been thinking regarding my Pine Phone,
and of course the Pro is now recently announced and I would love to get my hands on that, too, if the existing
one proves to be a reasonable daily driver.
