I have both a PinePhone Braveheart and a Purism Librem 5. While it is very exciting to see how far both have come within the past few months, my one gripe with both of them is none of them have the complete feature set of a phone, i.e. none support MMS. This means group texts and picture messages are not supported. While I am willing to tolerate a lot to be able to use open source technology, the inability to use it as a basic phone makes it a complete non-starter as a replacement.
It makes it even more difficult as so many of the OS and vendors advertise SMS and voice call support (which they have), so I have had to play the guessing game on a lot of the OSes that advertise SMS as working to discover this.
That being said, it is really exciting to see how far both have come, and I do think they both will be an awesome replacement to an Android phone sooner than later. Even more exciting is that they both are close to and will have mainline (EDIT: Mainline Linux) support, so they will be supported for a long time and not depend on a vendors willingness to support it.
You can get working MMS with a command-line interface using ofono and intel's MMSd, but I'm still working on upstreaming the patches that fix both with T-Mobile. I haven't put much online about this work yet, but if anyone wants to work on fixing the interface side of MMS I'd love some help.
The current interface options are all going through telepathy-ofono, which works with group MMS messaging and attachments, but can't really handle attachments the right way because the telepathy IM framework itself has no notion of media messages (as mentioned at e.g. https://github.com/TelepathyIM/telepathy-morse/issues/21#iss...). Ubuntu Touch replaces MMSd with a Go rewrite called `nuntium` but still relies on telepathy-ofono for plumbing: http://docs.ubports.com/es/latest/systemdev/mms-infrastructu...
I think the right way to handle SMS+MMS, for now, would be to just write a dedicated GUI client for it that communicates with ofono MMSd via dbus. I'm thinking about doing it with Rust+GTK.
That's really good to hear! I was trying to look around to see if there was any effort on it, but I was unable to find anything.
What do you need help with?
Right now I'm setting up a central place to collect all the scattered pieces of related software and their statuses, with info on what's been tested to work and what needs to be done next:
https://sr.ht/~anteater/mms-stack/
You're the first person I've heard from that has both the PinePhone and the Librem 5.
What is your opinion on the hardware and build quality between the two? The Librem 5 seems so expensive for the hardware it includes, but I also don't have a baseline for knowing what is reasonable (since comparing against Android device makers isn't fair).
Both have good build quality. I have a Librem 5 Birch (1st run), so while it has a prototype feel, it still has the build quality of a mid tier Android Device (~$300-400). It uses a lot more metal with a plastic backplate, so I like the weight of it.
My huge annoyance with my Librem 5 is that the Wifi Signal is terrible. I literally have to be within 5 ft of my Wifi AP to have even a useable signal. It won't work if there's any obstruction or if it's beyond 15 ft line of sight. I have tried all of the suggested fixes, but this is still a pervasive issue. I hope it's fixed in a later batch.
The Pinephone has much more of a plastic feel. I have a Google Pixel 3a, and half the time I have to do a double take to see which is which. But the build quality on that is very nice too.
If you have other questions, feel free to let me know!
Awesome, thank you!
Have you tried a variety of distributions on each phone? Is there one that runs better/worse on each? Is there one that works good on both?
It seems like there's a very friendly but intense arms race to get stuff working (which I think is awesome) :-)
I have left the Librem 5 on stock PureOS. It went from being barely usable to pretty well supported (aside from MMS and the WiFi issue I talked about).
On the Pinephone I tried a whole bunch at first, but i haven't done that in a while. So far the front runners for a useable phone seem to be Ubuntu Touch and PostmarketOS. I want to try Sailfish OS again, as that seems very tempting as well. But in either case, I like to see the diversity in the OSes for the Pinephone.
I used to use Google Voice as my main phone number, so MMS being broken is something I'm pretty used to.
I've got my PinePhone early mostly to play with and to support the company, but I feel like it'll probably be at least a year before I'm confident in carrying it around as a daily driver.
What prevents you from carrying it around? I only ask because if the MMS was fixed, I would be carrying around my Pinephone as a daily driver.
I probably need to spend a bit of time determining what apps in my must-haves have workable options on PinePhone yet. The last Ubuntu Touch build I played with was very sluggish, but I've heard really good things about more recent ones. OTA is a big deal, since re-flashing my phone to get software updates is not a workable solution for me.
Probably the toughest thing to lose will be my bank's app... I was used to not having it when I was on Windows Mobile, but mobile check desposit has been really nice to have since I've been on my little iPhone lifeboat.
Ubuntu Touch is a lot more usable and smooth. PostmarketOS still feels sluggish, but when I tried it the first day it was unusable.
Is it possible to emulate Android smoothly enough to make this possible? I'm thinking something like Wine integration on desktop linux, maybe.
There is Anbox, but I haven't attempted it yet.
Not gp, but I have a PinePhone Braveheart currently running Fedora. Battery life and lack of apps is what prevents me. I listen to a lot of podcasts and audiobooks so the UX around those is really important to me. Other than that I could live full time in the PinePhone (and be really happy with terminal access).
Battery life will get there, as will apps I'm sure. The real killer feature will be when Android apps are runnable.
That's fair. There seems to be a lot of work for Anbox, and I have a feeling that will be well supported for the pinephone.
The main thing keeping me from using it as my daily driver is the battery, as others are reporting. Secondarily I'm working through an issue where I can receive calls but not place them which is also frustrating. I would also like to finish building apps for many of my IoT appliances so I can continue monitoring them on the go, like my smart thermostat.
This is also the thing keeping me from using my PinePhone, and my OnePlus One running Ubuntu Touch. I used the latter as a daily driver for a while, but after missing some messages that people sent me (some of which were fairly important)... no, they're not in a usable state for me yet.
Don't get me wrong, I'm really excited about both projects! But in my area (east coast US), people tend to just assume that you can receive MMS/group texts, they'll send them to you without a second thought, and the idea that you might not receive them won't even be on their minds.
Yep, that's the same issues for me. My work, family, and friends all use group texts via MMS. I would switch to a pinephone or librem 5 instantly if they supported it, but this is a non-starter for me.
MMS is an abortion. Plaintext, recompresses images, the works.
But unfortunately it is often necessary.
If a user complains that 'this commonly used feature no longer works,' it is never a solution to tell them they shouldn't use that feature.
That it may be, but it is still the easiest way to have group chats with anyone with a smartphone and a US carrier.
Couldn't we add some feature to upload the image / video on the fly and embed that into the SMS?
Respectfully, please look into what SMS is.
>they both are close to and will have mainline support
Do you mean support in the mainline Linux kernel?
Yes, sorry. I will clarify