Having poked around with it for most of the day, Megi’s pboot is not a daily driver. In fact, it’s not even a good environment yet for anything other than testing multiple distros.
By that, I mean that the distros themselves really have no concept of the btrfs snapshots or the fact that they’re in a snapshot-aware install.
Most of the distros, once updated via package manager, develop severe breakage issues. Many will not come back from a reboot.
It is a very fun way to test the progress of various things. Including a few things I hadn’t played with before.
Including the Ubuports Pinephone version of Lomiri, which works slightly better than Manjaro Lomiri at this point. Call handling felt like it actually worked. Dial tones and audio settings felt snappy and familiar, which hasn’t yet been the case anywhere.
I now feel like I’ve done enough distro hopping to know that none of them fit quite right for me. I want a radically different experience than LineageOS can give me.
So, I’m taking off my tester hat and going to put on my developer hat. Or at least my package maintainer hat.
Having a snapshot-aware bootloader is kind of a great thing for the Pinephone. Hopefully that mechanism gets adopted by the various community Pinephone distros.
Immutable, revertable software updates on the Pinephone combined with Time Machine-like rollback of user data should be the norm.
Fedora Silverblue FreeBSD’s ZFS snapshot integration tries to do some of this, but it’s easier with Linux phones because there’s less baggage (technically and psychologically).
Wow. I’m playing with Posh again and I opened Firefox up and it actually feels pretty dang good all of a sudden (I think it auto updated). I’m going to try and daily it again.
I guess no one here knows how that’s going. I started this thread as a PinePhone thread, but I wanted to open it up to other Linux phones. I would love to know if anyone had a Librem phone. Also I know a lot of Sony phone can have Linux put on them pretty easily. I haven’t heard anything about these other phones here though.
Well, I dailyed the PinePhone running Posh for a 3 days.
Calls: not getting them
Texts: fast and reliable (yay!)
Web: Usable but still far from pleasant
Battery: It was consistently getting me half a day with probably 3hr screen on time (that’s a guess though)
All connectivity would die every once in a while and the phone would need a reboot. This seemed to happen once a day, but it did happen twice in one day once.
I’m very confident my package manager broke at some point, so that ends this daily trial. Got to say it’s close, very close. I just need calling, and for the phone to stop breaking stuff when I update it.
At the core of our philosophy is the notion that PINE64 is a community platform. A simplistic point of view, often offered up and referenced online, is that ‘PINE64 does hardware while the community does the software’. While this depiction is not inaccurate, it is also a gross oversimplification.
