For over 30 years I’ve been a *NIX user, and it’s been quite the ride. At first in my teens out of the need to get things working on old hardware back when open source was legally dubious. To today where I have powerful workstations and clusters in the cloud running Linux that seem capable of just about anything. But something has always been missing, and I think I finally found that missing piece to the puzzle.

The missing piece was truly mobile Linux. Sure we’ve had portable computing for quite a while now, from Palm Pilots and Treo’s to Androids and iPhones. But they’ve never really been yours, you could always jailbreak some of the devices and get root for yourself. But that’s always been just a half way path to real ownership and flexibility. And the trade offs of one walled garden for a more open walled garden always had it’s limits and risks.

So in the last couple of years mainstream Linux hardware has really taken off, from dedicated companies for Linux computers like System76 to mainstream companies like Dell selling a line of certified Linux hardware. Out of this atmosphere of "it’s ok to make Linux only hardware" a community effort known as Pine64 seems to have finally produced something that fills that missing piece of the puzzle, the PinePhone. It’s a mobile phone, it runs Linux, it boots straight off a micro SD card, and in no way at all does it stand out as a strange phone.

The current model that I have is the "Braveheart" edition, which is an early adopters model that is basically finished hardware but unfinished software. What this means is that while you can load anyone of the half dozen or so Linux distributions, not much is going to work on it. The most finished distribution is actually Ubuntu Touch, which Cannonical abandoned to community support many years ago. But even though it’s dated and requires a few manual pushes and prods to get working, most core features are working (actual audio of calls over cell networks is still under construction, but calls go through and are sent/received, so almost there). The really great thing about this is almost all the command line *NIX stuff works beautifully already. Need a quick NMAP to find a server on your wireless segment? That works. Need to host a GIT repository for everyone on the wireless network because the corporate firewall is blocking Github? That works too. Want to extract the exif data from a website image while your riding in an elevator? That works. Need a quick 10 line HTML website for a quick proof of concept demo during a meeting. That works.

And it’s just a smartphone that looks like every other smartphone out there. And you didn’t risk carrier support or bricking your hardware to make it do whatever you want it to do that Linux can do. I’ve had mine for about a week and I feel like I’m just scratching the surface of where I could take this. And it’s really not ready for your average consumer yet, so many little things don’t work or require tinkering. And it’s going to take a lot of community volunteer effort to get the software there. I’m all in on the effort, and I think there are now enough other folks working on it too that we’ll start to see real progress in the months ahead.

What is it like to find that thing you were always missing but couldn’t quite figure out what it was that you were missing? It’s "awesome", that’s the word for it.