Consider this article a part two to my first blog post detailing my Pinephone set up. After going to college for a year at BYU-Idaho studying Computer Engineering I learned a bit more about what it's like using mobile Linux in the real world. It wasn't all sunshine and roses, but I'd say that the good outweighed the bad in my experience and the future of mobile Linux seems brighter than ever.
My use case
The scope of functions for which I used my phone definitely expanded once I was living apart from my parents for the first time. Suddenly, reliable communication became a whole lot more important. The ability to connect with my peers for social and academic reasons was necessary for college life. Also, my family needed to be able to reach me at all times not being physically with them. Navigation became important too, being in a new area and needing to walk to places I hadn't been before. The possibility of using my Pinephone Pro to complete my schoolwork was also promising. I have a ThinkPad but it's very bulky and barely fits in my bag, being able to run desktop programs on my phone using the NexDock was another use case I was interested in.
The phone functionality
The actual telephony capability of mobile Linux continues to be a struggle. There were many times when I tried to make a call and it simply wouldn't go through, or I had to reboot my modem for the call to connect. But in the end, this was only a very stressful annoyance that never prevented me from eventually contacting someone who I needed to reach.
Texting on the other hand always worked. As is the case with most people of my generation, texting is the means by which I contact most people I need to reach anyway. Writing out and sending a text using Vim in sxmo is always a treat, and after doing this every day for over 2 and a half years it's hard to think of going back to a normal messaging app.
For video calling I used the Jitsi web app on my ThinkPad, although in a pinch Jitsi did work on my PinePhone Pro using Firefox. Video using Firefox wasn't supported at the time. However, this may have changed. Idaho doesn't have the best cell service, so at a friend's house one time I was able to reach my parents using this method and it worked great.
Navigation, Calendar, and Other Necessities
Some ways that I used my Linux phone didn't necessarily change with the start of college, but became more important. One of these uses is navigating using mepo, the fantastic OSM viewer built by Miles Alan. When I first got to Rexburg, I used mepo to gather my bearings; Getting directions to the local library, finding the most efficient routes to class, and finding local restaurants that friends recommended. mepo was more than up to the task, and allowed me to fully participate in campus life without getting held back by not knowing where a particular event took place.
I started using the when command-line calendar app a lot more too. Being able to set recurring events helped me keep track of my ever-changing schedule, and pulling up when every morning before leaving the apartment was a habit that helped me not to miss any important events I planned on attending.
On-campus activities included roller skating in the student center ballroom, cultural nights, dance classes, and more. Each of these activities required a QR code to be displayed on your phone screen that they would scan to let you into the event. To get these QR codes to display, I had to make a Google account using my campus email which I resisted for a few months at the start. I find some comfort in that after I graduate that Google account will be deleted along with my campus email, so in the long run there's not much Google can trace back to me considering I put as little personal information on there as possible, and really only use it for tickets to on-campus events.
Other things on campus like obtaining information about student clubs and the like required scanning a QR code. Because the Pinephone Pro camera was working off-and-on for both semesters of college, I often just had a friend scan the link and text it to me. Although not perfect, this worked fine. As a last resort I could always use megapixels on my original Pinephone to get the job done.
Online Communication and Collaboration
I'm still using tut as a mastodon client, gomuks for matrix, and newsboat for RSS. I've been happy with all these TUI apps as they adapt well to the PPP screen in portrait, landscape, and connected to a monitor like the NexDock. I don't have much to say with any of these other than that they work well and are reliable means of collaborating with people on personal projects.
Another necessary tool for college these days is email. Although disregarded as obsolete by the Slack, Discord, and MS Teams enthusiasts of the world, I'm still a firm believer that email is the best way of reaching out to a professor or peer about an assignment or group project. aerc just works in this regard. The keybindings are simple to use with a virtual or physical keyboard and it even has some touchscreen integration that make it easier to use on mobile.
Camera
As previously alluded to, the Pinephone Pro's camera is pretty inconsistent in whether it works or not. snapshot has been broken on the Pinephone Pro for some time, and megapixels on the original Pinephone usually gives better results in my experience anyway. This isn't a big deal for me, as I'm not much of a picture taker anyway unless I need to for an assignment. I don't carry my original Pinephone around with me, so any time I needed to submit a picture of a physical worksheet for an assignment I'd take the paper back to my apartment, boot up my OG Pinephone, snap a pic and turn it in from that device.
Gaming
Midway through my second semester of college, I decided to pick up Waydroid and give it a whirl. It worked so much better than last time I tried it out on my original Pinephone, and on the Pro it performed shockingly well. I initially installed the non-gapps image as a fail-safe in case a class required me to download an Android-only app or something, but I ended up reinstalling some video games I used to play including Clash of Clans. Running these games caused the phone to get a bit hot at times, but never enough to trigger the device's automatic shutoff. Waydroid did actually come in handy a few times where I needed to install an app like Remind to communicate with faculty, but it was never a major part of my workflow.
As for native games, the two I found that work best and are actually fun on mobile Linux are Super Tux Kart and Shattered Pixel Dungeon. Shattered PD in particular is a ton of fun, and I play it frequently trying to see how far I can get in the randomly generated dungeon levels. It's everything I like in a roguelike game, and it works well in both mobile and desktop form factors on the same device. For both native Linux games, when I plug my Pinephone Pro into the Nexdock, the game automatically resizes all UI elements and switches controls over to the desktop version. In all, native gaming on mobile Linux can be a really smooth experience for the select few games that adapt for all platforms.
Schoolwork on Mobile Linux
During my first semester of college, I dragged my 5-and-a-half-pound ThinkPad P52 around campus every day, and it was kind of a pain. Software I need to do my schoolwork included an office suite, a web browser, the C/C++ IDE Eclipse, Logisim for digital logic simulation, and LTspice for circuit analysis and simulation. I realized that all these tools were just as easily available on my Linux phone as they were on my Linux desktop. I installed Eclipse, Logisim, and Libreoffice from the Arch and AUR repos, and they all just worked when connected to my NexDock. I went from carrying around my phone and giant computer every day to carrying my phone and lightweight NexDock, a huge quality of life improvement that made my second semester a lot more enjoyable. I wasn't able to install LTspice on my Pinephone Pro however, that would involve some combination of box86 and Wine that I'm not technically proficient enough to figure out. Maybe I will in the future. If I do manage to get an x86 Windows program running on my Pinephone Pro, I'll definitely make a blog post about it.
Other applications I sometimes used for schoolwork included Rnote and Gimp. These were more multimedia-oriented note taking and image editing programs that I didn't use very much. They were nice to have though, because I did use Rnote to draw out circuits and save them as PDFs sometimes. However, I generally prefer physical notebooks because I feel like I retain the information better when I write it down with pen and paper. Gimp came in handy a few times too, but for the most part I used ImageMagick's mogrify command to rotate or compress images via the command line because it was easier for simple image manipulation.
Wrapping Up
Using mobile Linux in the real world went surprisingly well these last 9 months. There were definitely some rough spots that don't quite live up to their Android counterparts, but I feel comparing mobile Linux and Android in this way isn't particularly productive. Mobile Linux is made for a different, more technically oriented audience. Sure, I use my Pinephone Pro for some functions that overlap with other more traditional mobile OSes. Telephony, image capture and manipulation, navigation, and web browsing all fall into this category. But I also use my Pro for way more than I could ever hope to use Android for. This includes designing and simulating circuits, playing desktop games, and coding in an IDE. My Linux phone is far more than just a phone, and using it for my first year of college helped me to realize just how much potential mobile Linux as a whole has for the future.