I recently got a OnePlus 6 for the purpose of running Debian, here’s the Debian wiki page about it [1]. It runs Debian nicely and the basic functions all work, but the problem I’m having now is that AldiMobile (Telstra) and KoganMobile (Vodafone) don’t enable VoLTE for that and all the Australian telcos have turned off 3G. The OnePlus 6 does VoLTE with Chinese SIMs so the phone itself can do it.
The OnePlus 6 was never sold in Australia by the telcos, so they are all gray-market imports which aren’t designed by OnePlus to work in Australia. Until recently that wasn’t a problem, but now that the 3G network has been turned off we need VoLTE and OnePlus didn’t include that in the OS. Reddit has documentation on how to fix this but it has to be done on Android [2]. So I had to go back from Mobian to Android to get VoLTE (and VoWifi) working and then install Mobian again.
For people with similar issues Telstra has a page for checking which phones are supported [3], it’s the only way to determine if it’s the phone or the network that makes VoLTE not work – Android isn’t informative about such things. Telstra lists the OP6 as a suitable phone.
Now after doing this I still can’t get the OP6 working for phone calls on Phosh or PlasmaMobile and I’m not sure why. I’m going to give the PinePhone Pro another go and see if it now works better. In the past I had problems with the PinePhonePro battery discharging too fast, charging too slowly, and having poor call quality [4]. The battery discharge issue should be at least alleviated by some of the changes in the Plasma 6 code that’s now in Debian/Unstable.
I’ve also been lent a PinePhone (non-pro) and been told that it will have better battery life in many situations. I’ll do some tests of that. The PinePhonePro isn’t capable of doing the convergence things I was hoping to do so the greater RAM and CPU power that it has aren’t as relevant as they otherwise would be.
I have a vision for how phones should work. I am not discouraged by the Librem 5, PinePhonePro, Note 9, and OnePlus 6 failing in various ways to do what I hoped for. I will eventually find a phone that I can get working well enough.
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