Most parts work, still not sure why Bluetooth gives me errors in dmesg, audio out works, microphone input not yet… I’m getting there.

But graphics, charging, low standby power consumption, LTE, wifi… those all work already.

The fact that postmarketOS has support and also that there are people working on mainline support, makes this a task that is not as difficult as I thought, as most work was already done for another distro.

Otherwise it runs more fluid than Android ever did on it and it has a great standby time (forgot to turn it off at around 80 % and a few days later it was at 58 %).

For now stuck on merging the Kernel patches from the sdm670-mainline project with those from Mobian, not really something I can do without knowing C. I just hope someone with the right skills does it at some point.

Then I just need to make some smaller merge requests, like one to add a udev rule for vibration support and so on.

Not much missing before I can finally use it as a daily driver.

  • @PowerCore7
    28•3 months ago

    A64 (the SoC for PinePhone) is mostly intended for set-top boxes (i.e. smart TV), so it is really not designed for power efficiency.

    It’s really a bummer that most “smartphone” SoCs cannot easily be purchased, and have no proper documentations. Thinkers and smaller manufacturers are stuck with mostly Allwinner and Rockchip SoCs (most of which are engineered as embedded processors) if they want to design something from starch at all.

    • @lemmeee@sh.itjust.works
      3•3 months ago

      That’s what I thought and it seems like even those SoCs didn’t have very good mainline Linux support.

      Edit: I wonder if it would be possible to take some newer Rockchip SoC and underclock it so that it uses less power? Maybe that would help a little and it would still probably be faster than PinePhone Pro.