this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2024
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I was downvoted before for suggesting the Pinetab is not a viable Android or iPad replacement. That thing doesn't even have a working wifi driver yet, you have to plug in a dongle just to connect to wifi. I'd love to have good smart devices running Linux one day, but we're not there yet.
I think you are talking about the recent Pinetab 2 and it seems that the situation has changed: https://www.reddit.com/r/PINE64official/comments/1akjlwu/tutorial_wifi_and_bluetooth_on_pinetab_2/?rdt=46684
The goal of GNU/Linux has never been convenience, but freedom.
The thing about convenience vs freedom is that, why can't we get freedom if we choose convenience as well? I don't feel like messing around with my phone to setup the basics, and the closest thing freedom-wise would be a de-googled rooted android phone. It would be nice to have an inbetween.
It's just that freedom sometimes requires sacrifices. Switching to GNU/Linux is also not easy. It requires that a person learns to use a completely new operating system (schools usually only teach Windows). This is hard even for many technical people and it requires time. Windows users can also say that GNU/Linux is just not ready yet or that it's too inconvenient (and some of them do). But if we don't fight for freedom, we will never get it. Through hard work of many people over decades, we managed to get freedom on the desktop. Now it's time for phones. After that becomes easier, there might be some other, new challenge. Maybe firmware or something else. But it will probably always be inconvenient in some way, because you will have to switch from something you already know to something else that is new, even if it has similar features. Just like Reddit users could switch to Lemmy, but they won't. So they will not have freedom and Reddit continues to have power over them.
I guess maybe Ubuntu Touch would be something in between. It uses Android kernel, so some Android phones support it.
I don't know if PinePhone would work for you, but you can check my short review and my other comment for some information.
Good to know that there is now a testing branch for a wifi driver. That wasn't the case when I wrote the original comment I was talking about. Still, this took almost a year of selling a tablet with no working wifi. There is inconvenience and then there is a product just being in an unfinished, effectively unusable state. I don't really see how having no wifi driver is "freedom". The freedom to code my own driver? I guess, but that doesn't make for an actually usable device.
Still many people bought the thing, because they wanted the freedom of GNU/Linux. They were willing to sacrifice something to get it. Sometimes that's what you have to do. Pine64 makes the hardware and does not contribute to the software development. That sucks, but there is nothing we can do about it, since they don't have a lot of competition.