Awesome news! I've been testing it on my RTX 3070 laptop for a month or two now and most games seem to work with it now, but performance is quite lacking vs. the proprietary driver. However, the proprietary driver is borderline unusable in a lot of games even though it pumps out high frame rates because something weird happens with render offloading and I end up with really bad frame tearing and out-of-order frame pacing that makes stuff jitter around. GNOME Wayland with mutter-vrr, AMD Ryzen 5900HX with integrated graphics powering the laptop's 165Hz VRR panel. With NVK, there is zero tearing or weird display pacing and VRR seems to be working so once the performance is better it would hopefully make gaming on my laptop viable in Linux. Tired of having to game in Windows on that PC when all my other systems I can game just fine in Linux.
CalcProgrammer1
Cloud gaming is a plague. More fuel for the "you will own nothing and be happy" camp. Let it die. GeForce Now was at least one of the better options since you just use their servers to play games from your owned library, but the whole concept is a plague nonetheless. Let streaming nonsense die. Streaming from your own PC is the only streaming solution that doesn't exist to weaken consumer ownership of their gaming experience.
Any dock that lists Steam Deck support and has the ports you want should be fine honestly. USB C docks are very standardized, so as long as it supports 45W charging or more it'll almost certainly be fine. I have a bunch of different docks and they all work fine with the Deck. The OLED model doesn't change this either, any dock that works with the original should work with the OLED.
I had this issue using the libre modem firmware on both phones. I'm not sure if it's a modem side issue or a Linux side issue. I haven't used either PinePhone with a SIM card in almost a year though so my knowledge could be outdated.
I want to do a follow up eventually. I have some free time next week, might try to finish up the keycaps. I have the standard size cap that most of the keys use done and a spacebar that is the right shape and size, just needs attachment points for the stabilizer.
I had call drops on both the original and the Pro. They both use the same USB-attached modem and the modem has (had?) an issue where it would lose USB connection to the main processor sometimes, so you would just randomly lose cell connectivity. Sometimes the USB connection would restart right away and sometimes it would not and you'd have to restart eg25 manager to reboot the modem.
Not really, it's been a hassle to get them consistent enough to match the default ones. The small scale makes printing them difficult even after I got a resin printer for the project. I settled on a two piece design that works pretty well but the resin material is not as smooth as the injection molded stock caps.
I went through probably 20 different iterations of keycaps and got close to one I liked, but haven't gotten back to finishing the project since I haven't been using my PinePhone much. I think the main remaining thing is to make an Enter key model and a Tab key model. I want to get back to that project eventually but haven't had time.
AOSP and even factory kernel source tends to be only mildly useful for proper Linux phone use. Android phones tend to ship with old kernel revisions that the chip maker forked a long time ago and developed their chip drovers on without following accepted kernel conventions or submitting any code to the actual kernel maintainers for proper review and integration into the most up to date "mainline" kernel. Due to this, and the fact that phone makers need to constantly ship new products out the door, the quality of this code added into the old kernel is often garbage, poorly commented and with no documentation. Usually no git history either.
There are other teams of people trying to clean up and/or rewrite these drivers from scratch in a way that is reviewable and acceptable in mainline. Only a small handful of the vast number of phone chips have such support, so proper Linux phone is limited to a small selection of hardware. The designed-for-Linux librem and PinePhone models intentionally chose old chipsets because these chipsets had good mainline support and thus could receive actual kernel updates rather than being stuck forever on an ancient kernel release from the manufacturer that has long since been abandoned.
Lately the Qualcomm Snapdragon SDM845 chip is seeing growing mainline Linux support and quickly becoming one of the most viable chips for mobile Linux that isn't a complete dinosaur in terms of performance and power draw. The OnePlus 6 and 6T, which both use the SDM845 chip, have become quite popular as Linux phones now despite not yet having VoLTE and thus being useless for calls. I carry a OnePlus 6T as a secondary non-phone pocket PC because the Linux experience is very good other than the lack of phone and camera functionality. It's fast and can do all my terminal and coding stuff as well as run full fledged web browsers well.
Nice review. I agree with others here that this phone is borderline scam for the price and with all the delays people had in receiving them. Performance seems on par with the $200 original PinePhone which I had a similar experience with.
The one good thing that came out of Purism/Librem 5 is Phosh. It's a pretty good phone shell/UI for other more capable Linux phones to use. I particularly like Phosh for its on-screen keyboard Squeekboard which allows for custom keymaps.
Then you run far, far away from that app. Even on an Android phone I don't trust garbage apps that require locked bootloader and no root. There are plenty of banks out there and paying with your phone is not a necessity.
I am not in love with the idea of pure hydrogen cars due to the inefficiencies involved, but I can see a hydrogen/BEV plug in hybrid being a good option if hydrogen infrastructure gets built out. As is, I drive a Chevy Volt, and while its battery range is low it is enough for the majority of my daily driving. The biggest downside of pure EVs is charging time when you're driving on long trips, and in my Volt I don't have to worry about that as I can just fill up with gas. Well, do the same thing but with hydrogen rather than gasoline and you have a car that can refill quickly like a gas car but can be powered entirely from renewable energy sources like a pure BEV. You need some lithium but less than you would for a full size battery. You still have the capability to charge at home and assuming the battery can do a reliable 50 miles or so you would only need hydrogen for longer trips. You could leave the hydrogen tank empty to avoid leakage and safety issues when you aren't doing a road trip. Also, hydrogen cars are EVs anyways so the drivetrain doesn't need the extra complexity of a conventional hybrid, just switch power between the battery and hydrogeb fuel cell.