loopgru

Always nice to meet another dad.

This is 100% the way.

Pine hides their hobby-grade hardware behind in-development software. I owned both a PBP and PPP and much as I’d like to say otherwise, really can’t say anything to recommend either.

All things you mentioned are hardware issues. […] Because no one will buy an expensive GNU/Linux phone.

There’s a difference between budget or low end components and flawed implementation or design. I didn’t go in expecting a newer Snapdragon and a 144hz display- but neither did I go in expecting that it couldn’t charge when dead. I didn’t go to Denny’s expecting filet mignon, but neither was I expecting a dirty tennis shoe on a plate. That was the whole point of my comment. The last thing mobile Linux needs is for people’s first experience of it to be a semi-functional piece of hacked-together hardware- even if someone’s willing to deal with in-dev software, when the thing straight up won’t work it’s not a good look.

I owned a Pine Phone Pro for a while and it was a disaster. The software is still coming together, which is expected, but the hardware was also hobby project grade. As the previous poster mentioned, battery, camera, and screen were all bad, and on top of that the phone would refuse to charge with most chargers and could not charge at all while not booted, so once the battery was dead you had zero recourse beyond an external charger. The clamshell keyboard also wouldn’t work without shimming the pogo pin connectors forward, and even then it was hit or miss. The company was terrible to deal with and only finally accepted a return after escalating a dispute with Paypal. I hate dumping on a company providing hardware for mobile Linux, but these guys seriously do more harm than good.

This is it for me, too. Back before I got into Linux I was forever tinkering with third party stuff to try to make the UI more efficient with things like Enso and Docker, and make it prettier with other stuff, but it was always a ramshackle cludged together mess. GNOME just resolves all of those issues neatly for me, runs faster, and isn’t crammed full of bloatware ad crap like modern versions of Windows. And it’s more secure, free, and ethically satisfying as a cooperative, trans-national project.

My absolute, #1 biggest recommendation is to male separate partitions for / and /home.

What does this mean? In short, you’re telling the system to treat different sections of the hard drive / ssd as entirely separate buckets. In this case, you’re putting all of the operating system and programs in one bucket ( / ) and keeping all of your files and settings in another (/home).

Why does this matter? As someone learning Linux, you should tinker with things, learn what they do and how they work. Sometimes, that means breaking things, occasionally in spectacular ways. Having your files and your OS separate means that you can completely wreck your OS while you learn without losing your data in the process- you can reinstall from scratch or even distro hop (try out a new version) without having to stress over losing anything. In short, you can learn and play and blunder and explore without risking anything more than a 20 minute reinstall if you can’t figure out how to fix it.

I appreciate the fact that the distro community is diverse enough to accommodate even people whose personal preferences are this objectively wrong. ;)