 Hello and welcome to yet another episode of iField! I came up with a video idea that sounds very cool daily driving a linux smartphone but I wasn't able to so this video talks about what I tried to use it, what I actually did and worked and at the end what made me not use the linux phone as my daily driver. So let's go through it starting off with the first install. So as a bit of context this is the pine phone pro made by pine64 and you know it's a pretty cool linux smartphone and I think it's one of the nicest one if you want linux support out of the box. So what I did was simply to choose manjaro with plasma mobile edition and then I just went for it. You install it on a sd card and then you put it into the phone that's pretty much it. So the first time you boot the phone you get a welcome application that guides you through the first steps to set up your phone which is actually pretty nice. It's something that I didn't know existed for plasma mobile. I know it's coming for plasma desktop with kd plasma 5.27 but plasma mobile has been there for a while apparently. You get to choose the basic stuff as an example choosing the wifi and connecting to it but also choosing the time zone and of course the user configuration like your name your pin and that's mostly like only the basic stuff but I was actually quite impressed by how smoothly everything went. The keyboard worked nicely and there was uptick feedback and I didn't have any major issue even when writing passwords and such which is already a great start. If we want to go with like user experience status then I have to notice that there's a lot of black screens with a lot of terminal comments going on but you know you just have to wait until it finishes off. It's probably going to scare a bit of people but you know it's still in development so I really wouldn't care less about that. So let's start off by actually seeing how the interface of plasma mobile works and then we'll get into the applications because you know the shell is still pretty important. As an example the login screen is majestic like you have this blurred wallpaper which looks super nice and you have big buttons to choose your pin and it's just perfect I love it. You do also have a nice clean home screen by default with an arrow that tells you that applications are on the right so you swipe right you see the list of applications and you can hold into an application to add it to the favorites and that's going to add it to the main screen which is a pretty good experience. Yes when scrolling the list of applications sometimes some touches will be recognized incorrectly and that would actually open an application but again these are rather small things. By the way in the videos that I'm showing about the pine phone you can see that a lot of clicks are being missed a lot of taps and that's actually due to magic like the pine phone pro is camera shy so whenever I try recording it stuff starts not to work but it's not like that on a day-to-day experience so don't worry about that. Another pretty cool thing that you quickly discover is that if you drag down from the main home screen you get access to K-Render which is super nice it's floating at the top you can just type whenever whatever you want to search and it's a pretty cool experience really and there is a bot which is not all runners are active that's probably because of performances or maybe not all runners are compatible with plus mobile yet but as an example I couldn't use the dictionary I couldn't spell words I couldn't convert between number formats like one centimeter how much is that in meters I don't remember that sort of stuff is apparently of limits but I would guess that would be very easy to port to plus mobile in the near future you can of course search through applications which is probably the main feature I guess and you can also do some basic mathematics like adding numbers dividing them so you don't really need a calculator that you don't need it there's K-Render now here is another super cool thing of the interface if you press and hold the wallpaper you get the option to change the wallpaper obviously but you can also get the option to customize the home screen and when you do that you can firstly change the wallpaper type so if you prefer a slideshow instead of an image that's supported or if you want automatic picture of the day that's also supported and the coolest thing is that you can already download from the app itself new kind of wallpapers which is something that is supported in plasma desktop and allows for a lot of cool modularity in wallpapering because you know I guess we have linux phone writers too and if that's not enough for you you can also change the kind of home screen that you have currently you have two options what I've shown so far is the default one but you also get another which was I think the previously developed one which looks a bit different you can swipe up to see all the applications and it's more like android so you can actually drag and drop an application from the application screen to your home screen and there's a so-called you can actually add widgets the same widgets on plasma desktop on plasma mobile as well just like android and of course if this is modular there is no reason why a third party couldn't add another type of home screen so similarly to android launchers I guess that you could have various kinds of plasma mobile home screens next up is quick settings which you can access just by drag and dropping from the top and they actually look very good in fact they look so good that I've had for quite some time in my to-do list the idea of bringing those into the system tray for kitty plasma desktop but I've done videos about that so you know about that already they allow you to do pretty much anything from opening from opening up settings to enabling caffeine which you know doesn't allow the screen to turn off automatically but all sort of stuff you can also obviously change the brightness and in theory the volume that's not there though but cool thing about the volume if you do change the volume then you also get a button that if you click it there's a drop down for your entire screen with all the options that you normally find in plasma desktop for volume so the ability to choose from what input source to use for audio but also the outputs and all the applications that are currently playing sounds and the ability to choose the volume of each application individually that is awesome and something that as far as I know only exists in plasma mobile so 10 out of 10 what else of course you get controls at the bottom to you know switch between applications and such they are not in my very honest opinion as good as ios android or even conom shell or fosh but you know they do their job you're you're able to close the application see your multitasking view those kind of things there is a little issue which is a bit annoying but I can live with it that is sometimes application glitch in their size and you know maybe just occupy half of the screen instead of the whole screen that is very weird and sometimes happen I guess that not everything is perfect yet as we'll see now a shawl in itself is completely useless unless you have applications so what application did I need and what was I actually able to install on this phone so let's start off with my most used application ever which is telegram desktop or telegram general and of course the panophone pro comes with telegram out of the box already and it's telegram desktop which in theory should be convergent enough to be on a phone already how does it work so I was able to login flawlessly which is nice in the past there was some issues but then I realized that telegram desktop didn't fit the screen like it was too large there was you had buttons out of reach so what I did very simply was to change down the scaling in system settings this made everything a bit smaller but it also allowed me to use telegram desktop how does it work not nicely as an example you do have a bit of issues on showing the keyboard not showing the keyboard those kind of things and also some controls that require hovering obviously don't work as an example sending emojis is painful but it's it works like it's not the things that are deal breakers so I could send messages I could read messages and I did also receive notifications out of the box with a nice sound which is nice there is a known I think issue which is that by clicking a notification the application that did that notification won't pop up which is a bit annoying but again not a deal breaker okay so next up is basically the app store but for plasma mobile which is discover and discover actually looks pretty good on the plasma mobile phone it's very nicely convergent however I think it doesn't quite know it's on a phone which means that it suggests as an example to install blender and yes the pen the plasma mobile convergent concept is super cool but no I'm not going to install blender on my phone but nonetheless it's pretty cool that I can't do that however whenever I try to actually install anything I was greeted by a lot of errors and again I guess that happens but I just decided to use the terminal because you can understand that it's a bit easier I'm honored anyway so my worry number one is social networks I spend time on social networks and although I couldn't use tiktok which is actually my most used social network yes insult me but it's tiktok that wasn't like there's no wait just forget about it facebook let's forget about that too twitter yeah let's try not to use that master on okay so let's try to use master on on the pen phone luckily kedi has developed an application to use master on on any device which is called tocodon I think it's mostly developed by karsan but I could be wrong so what I did is just to install it through a flat back using console and then everything worked super nicely out of the box I had of course to log in by copying a link to angle fish which is the browser everything went smoothly I could copy paste without any issue which is actually quite impressive I was expecting to having to go some troubles nothing like that everything worked out of the box and I could see all my feed and my notifications my polls everything was there so 10 out of 10 next up is music did music work so we do have so we do have out of the box a youtube client application which I guess is fine like personally I use youtube music I pay for it and I mean I would prefer to use that but if you're just using a third-party application that uses youtube anyway I guess it's the same and you know everything went quite smoothly I did sometimes get some super weird loud sounds but just by changing the volume that just fixed itself so fair enough I could just listen to my music so 10 out of 10 again it just worked chess that is super important to me I have to play chess by the way today I have a chess tournament just after recording this video so chess there is as far as I know no native client for leachess which is you know open source chess on linux but I could just use the website and I took it and as occasion to try out web applications so I went to the leachess website and I just asked angle fish which is the browser that was out of the box please add this to my homepage and it just worked I went to the homepage I opened it and it felt like it was kind of an application so again 10 out of 10 experience it worked pretty nicely out of the box however this is the point where I realized that all the other important applications that I have on my daily phone which is this one well they don't have any linux alternative to make some examples apart from tiktok which I again am addicted to it this is called habits you habits and it's my habit trigger application where I write everything that I do and for me it's pretty important and it only works on android and there is not a single good linux alternative to make another example this is focus meter which is a pomadro time tracker which I use to time track all of my time like all of it and well again no good alternative on linux so I mean I could go on this as an example is my task manager and it's tasks.org again android only yes alternatives on linux but not as good as this one so I thought okay I just need some android applications and that's not at all uncommon I mean probably if we want to switch to a linux mobile world then we will need a period of a transition where we use some android applications so luckily there's a tool for that and that is wedroid so I was actually expecting to spend like hours trying to get wedroid to work because it's not out of the box so I just went there and said okay let's do this and it worked it just worked and it worked with gpu acceleration I had googled some forums it said no you don't have that no you you do you do have that that is so cool and in fact just with a couple of lines to code from the arc linux from the arc linux wiki you know everything just works nicely and you have android and you can install any android applications so I went ahead I installed android uhabits as an example and foxmatter and it just worked which again is pretty cool of course there is some applications that I do use here but that I didn't even try to use on wedroid because they weren't going to work as an example my bank my bank application that that was not going to work so it can never be a full replacement but it's already pretty nice also things that I didn't expect to work people Netflix and tiktok actually maybe that one works but it's still it's not native so it could be slow but you know you get the idea I didn't want to install tiktok on the pineapple board that that would be a crime against humanity anyway finally we get to phone stuff like it's a phone how does it work as a phone can it call can it do messages okay so let's start with photos does it take good photos the answer is no not at all I kind of expected this and the issue isn't really on the sensor of the phone itself like yes this one is not going to be this one but it shouldn't be this bad either the issue is software a lot of what makes a good image from a phone is software after you take the picture and currently the most use application to take photos megapixel is not good to do that I think that's the issue however however pure is that you might know because they also do a linux phone did a fork of megapixel and did their own application which is called something like micro pixels I don't remember so I tried to install that but luckily let's say that time ran out it took too much time to try to install it so I wasn't able to test it but that could be a way that you could improve your image quality if you're into that secondly calls can you call yes can you receive calls also yes can you actually understand what's going on not quite and other will get to that you probably want to be able to receive calls either if the phone is sleeping I tried to talk to somebody through a call it just I just couldn't understand what was going on so I think there is still some room for improvements but luckily enough I almost never do calls so that wasn't that big of an issue and SMS I wasn't even able to test that because I don't use that at all I don't even have like the ability to send SMS so yeah maybe however after a long list of things that worked and I felt like I was there there the deal breaker which is battery battery and sleep so this phone here what do I do like I use it sometimes I charge it every morning and then I just use it throughout the day and it is as any phone very reliable at showing me how much battery do I have and dying only when it reaches zero battery I don't feel like the pineapple is there yet and it's and it's quite an issue let me explain firstly it often happened that during testing the phone would just die and that I would discover that battery was empty and I was like wow you could have told me that and also sometimes it went to sleep and although the battery was still full it just wouldn't wake up so I had every time to turn it off and turn it on again by the way fun fact if you just download the manjaro image as it is and you just do an update like literally just update out of the box everything breaks you can't log in anymore everything is broken so don't update I guess throughout testing this for the video I had to reinstall the operating system two times and I had to reboot basically every time I wanted to use it after one two hours of not using it which is obviously a deal breaker that's not going to work for me but still nonetheless I felt like I was so close like everything almost works and maybe it's just some hardware support that's that's almost there but not quite there so you know what this experiment was meant to be plasma mobile and I think it went really well actually yes I couldn't use it as a daily driver but it's so almost there everything worked except for one thing that was unlikely a deal breaker but what about what I didn't try that is other linux smartphone ecosystems like the economical not yet but fosh as an example or sailfish os or boon to touch those kind of things I'm a kitty person I tried plasma mobile but what about everything everything else so you know what I could try this again same phone different operating system would you want to see that are you interested if you are interested which operating system of the one that I mentioned would you like to see desktop not operating system do you like fosh do you like sailfish do you like open to touch but what should I do next I've seen a lot of enthusiasm when I proposed the idea of this video so if you still have after watching this long video some interest left to sing other kind of linux smartphones let me know and I'll do that