Hey everyone! As many have noticed, the PinePhone Pro is currently out ot stock on the Pine Store. Unfortunately we have to deliver you the following news: the PinePhone Pro is officially discontinued. We were told it didn’t sell well enough to keep production going. But the good news for current owners are that spare parts will still be made for up to two years, depending on demand. Meanwhile, the trusty PinePhone (A64) is still alive and kicking, and Pine Store plans to keep it rolling for about two more years.

Well, that sucks. So I guess the better move here would be to wait for something new? I don’t think the regular PinePhone is at all viable as a daily driver.

One of the most cozy setups I’ve ever seen. Except whatever it is surrounding the cable in the top right. Kinda disgsuting looking.

I’m a huge fan of Pine64, but I wouldn’t expect the PinePhone to be a great replacement for an Android smartphone. Personally I have quite extensive experience with PineBook Pro, PineTime and PineBuds Pro. I haven’t had the chance to try the PinePhone, but I’d definitely go for the Pro.

Even then, prepare for a junky experience and forget about lixuries such as good camera, nice screen, smooth UI/UX. Their devices are great, and the ideas behind them more so. But unfortunately they rarely work well, perhaps with the exception of PineBuds Pro.

As of right now, it’s looking like GrapheneOS will be unaffected, and Google has yet to lock down the bootloader. So this should remain a valid option for at least 2 years.

Other than that:

• Any smartphones with an unlocked bootloader + any ROMs without gapps
• Chinese smartphones with non-Google Android builds
• Linux smartphones
• Bonus: Huawei is about to release their own non-Android OS, but I wouldn’t expect it to be privacy-friendly

Honestly there probably isn’t any good, long-term solution. Personally I’m somewhat shocked we’ve gone this many years with reasonably open smartphones. Next step is probably closing bootloaders in new laptops, as part of the switch to ARM (which is already undergoing).

You’re also massively wrong about DirectX on Linux, DXVK and VKD3D both work to run various versions of it on Linux.

I very clearly wrote that Linux does not support DirectX. Which is 100% true, no matter how you look at it. Just because there are translation layers, it doesn’t mean Linux ‘supports DirectX’, because it doesn’t. It supports Vulkan, which DXVK and VKD3D translate DirectX API calls to.

Let’s say you can’t read Spanish, but you hire a translator to translate a text for you. Now you can read it. Does that mean you can suddenly read Spanish?

They created the Game Porting Toolkit a while ago

Hmm… Must have missed that. I’ll need to take a look. Might be the exact same thing I mentioned and I just had no idea it was already released.

The RaspberryPi has existed for ~15 years at this point, the platform is far more mature than Windows on ARM and rivals macOS for support.

I wrote “From my experience” and “Might depend on the device though.” Also, RaspberryPi is not a daily use device. At least not for the vast majority of people.

If Linux works on ARM for other people - great. I’m hoping to be able to switch to it sometime in the near future. However, the last time I tried it was horrendous. A lot of programs I use were completely unavailable, with no compatibility layer that I know of. That was about 2 years ago.

That said, I also tried Windows 11 on ARM around the same time and it was great. Practically everything worked out of the box and worked flawlessly. It was basically the same experience as on amd64.

After introducing Metal (their own proprietary graphics api), Apple killed OpenGL support and never implemented Vulkan support. Almost every single video game nowadays uses either DirectX (Microsoft’s proprietary API) or Vulkan for 3D graphics. 2D games use OpenGL and Vulkan. OpenGL and Vulkan are both open source and cross platform.

Windows supports everything, Linux everything except DirectX, and MacOS (for Apple Silicon devices) only supports Metal. You can still play OpenGL games on Intel-based Macs. Steam tells you which games won’t work on recent Mac systems.

In order for a game to run on ARM Macs, it has to either be ported to Metal, or there needs to be a compatibility layer like Wine and Proton. However, neither of these two work, since Apple no longer supports OpenGL or Vulkan. Theoretically, it is possible for people to write a new compatibility layer, specifically for Metal. The problem is, nobody wants to, because it’s a lot of work (as usual with development for Apple devices), and you never know when Apple may decide to drop support for some other libraries/APIs/drivers.

Additionally, Apple seems to be working on their own Metal translation layer. Leaks show impressive performance in Cyberpunk 2077. However, nobody knows what the availability will be like or when it releases.

In the case of Macs it’s not an issue with the ARM architecture, but with Apple. Since they dropped support for some libraries a few years ago, new versions of wine (and proton) stopped working on Apple Silicon. That’s the main and pretty much only reason why you can only play like 13 games on newer Macs.

As for Linux, ARM support is still in its early stages. From my experience it’s not even ready for regular daily use. Might depend on the device though. M1 Macbooks run pretty good with Asahi.