I have ran this on a variety of phones and would say this is the most polished with the best app support.
Definitely interested in plasma mobile and postmarket os as well.
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I’ve been following this for a while now, I’m just waiting for it to be able to recognize Android sim cards. It still can’t yet right?
@TeckMonster if you do install sailfish recommended you install harbor which is an unofficial app store/repository. Lots of interesting apps there.
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I just went down to the store and got a standard sim card popped it in and it worked. It was an AT&T compatible sim.
I tried looking for a download this morning, but I wasn’t able to find one. I think it’s still pretty new for the PinePhone. I will try it as soon as I can find it.
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Tried out Debian. Despite being promising at first, it really went downhill very quickly.
I’ll probably give Ubuntu a real shot next.
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I don’t wish to crash your thread, so please tell me to hit the road if I should not post here.
I also recently received my UBports PinePhone and have just taste tested a couple of OSs on it. My assessments and opinions are from the perspective of never having daily driven a smartphone, so I will likely be much more positive about the PinePhone since I am not intimately familiar with “the way things are supposed to be.” I am not a linux pro by any means, but I’ve dabbled intermittently for over a decade. That said, I’m kind of a curmudgeon with regard to newfangled/bloated stuff like Ubuntu’s Unity back in the day, Gnome 3 still hasn’t won my heart, and while I have near zero in-the-trenches experience with Android, the Java-ness has kept me far far away, not to mention the spywareness. And yes I hate windows 10 for becoming pretty much just as bad about exfiltrating/advertising/etc. and the start menu inflicts upon me a combination of remorse, fury, and physical illness… but I’m way off topic.
I was pleasantly surprised by the solid feel of the PinePhone. It’s not “premium” in the apple-esque fashion of increasing manufacturing and material costs for no functional benefit, but it feels pretty solid to me.
I too am not much a fan of ubuntu, though I was back in the Gnome 2 days. I told myself I would wait for a different Community Edition PinePhone before ordering one, but I’m not a good listener. I like the aesthetic well enough, and am willing to give it a chance on the PinePhone, but I expect I will end up with something more lean and mean. Headphone jack seems not to be hooked up in software. I don’t think I like the way their AppStore seems to be a separate walled garden from the typical .deb repos, making for many programs I’ve come to expect being readily available, not being readily available.
PostmarketOS July 26 image - very barebones loadout - no file browser, no music player, and seemingly none available thru their app store. I’m sure programs can be added in other ways, but I didn’t try. Seems like it has a better control over the power management than ubports. Can manually route audio to the headphone jack, but doesn’t autoswitch upon plugin, and left and right seems to be reversed.
Mobian July 16 image - much more complete loadout than PostmarketOS, but much more sluggish. Headphone jack auto works properly though.
I’ve not yet tried cellular. SIM will arrive next week. Hopefully one of the OSs works properly with cellular calls.
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Plasma Mobile/KDE Neon - Same headphone situation as PostmarketOS including the channel inversion. Seems fleshed out about to the same degree as Mobian, maybe a bit more. Not as smooth as Ubuntu but perhaps a bit more performant than Mobian. Seems like it’s a more traditional phone UI than Lomiri is, but I’m kinda out of touch with what Android looks like these days. I am a bit lost with the KDE App library as I’ve mostly been in the GTK world, but that’s not their fault. Performance isn’t great. I think so far Postmarket has been the best in power and performance, but is the most barebones, yet has several things functional that aren’t hooked up yet in Ubuntu.
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No worries. I renamed this thread to PinePhone Hub. I’d love to welcome more perspectives.
I will figure out a good way to quote you in the OP under the appropriate OSes.
Manjaro Phosh works pretty flawless from what I’ve seen so far.
I look foward to reading more of your experiences. Thank you!
Edit: I’ve quoted you in the OP, but I trimmed the Ubuntu one down a bit to save space in the OP. Please let me know if you want me to change anything about it. Also Thanks for adding the image date. I will do the same for mine. Great idea!
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Holly cow! I just got an update for my Manjaro Phosh, and it made it sooooo much smother. They also implemented auto rotate, but… it’s upside down in landscape. Lol
I might actually try to Daily this.
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I got my PinePhone Ubports edition back at the beginning of July and have had a chance to play around with quite a bit and can share some of the experiences with it.
Ubports
despite all the hate for it at the time I really quite liked Unity on Ubuntu and used very early versions of Ubuntu Touch on my 2012 Nexus 7, Ubports has came a very long way since those times. The interface is very intuitive once you get used to it with most actions being done with swipes and gestures and as a pure phone experience is very good if not a little slow and sluggish when using it though I believe some of that is due to the lack of good hardware acceleration support currently, but my biggest gripe with the OS is just how locked down it is. most all apps have to be installed with the openstore and while it does have support for containers to get standard apps with libertine (which is currently broken on the PinePhone) and you can remount the rootfs as rw and install software normally with apt it just clearly wasn’t designed with it in mind and is a big sticking point for me.
postmarketOS
I really like postmarketOS and it is the OS I have spent the most time with on the PinePhone, It is very lean and fast coming from its Alpine roots and out of most of the OSes I’ve tried has support for all major hardware on the device (though some things like the camera and flash only via the terminal) and comes with full disk encryption as standard which is a nice touch. I’m running it with Phosh currently and coming from the locked down Ubports its a breath of fresh air being free to install any standard Linux software using the apk package manager, the only down side is that many of the desktop programs weren’t designed for a phone screen and thus don’t scale properly though apps that do like the native Firefox work great on the device.
SailfishOS
I tried SailfishOS upon recommendation from a friend who uses it on an OnePlus One, the philosophy behind its design and usage are very interesting. I love the way the UI and UX has been designed and is one of the best and slick experiences I’ve had with everything being done with gestures you can get proficient and fast with it.
sadly though, Sailfish is one of the most unstable OSes I’ve tried on the PinePhone. It will regularly crash for no reason just opening apps or trying to browse the appstore with the only good point being that its very fast boot time means you can get back up quickly, the browser hasn’t been updated in what seems very long time and won’t load most web pages because of OCSP errors and the sites rejecting it due to security reasons and its app support for the PinePhone specifically is terrible. most if not all apps were compiled against armv7hl and with the PinePhone being aarch64 will either straight up not work or if they do are very limited in function.
What are my future adventure with the PinePhone? Right now I’m sticking with postmarketOS. I plan on doing the VCONN mod very soon and de-soldering the switches that prevent USB-OTG and HDMI display support from working ready for full desktop support which I’m very much looking forward to.
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I got some of these breakout boards made for working with the pogo pins on the back of the phone. it breaks out the pins for 5v, 3.3v, ground, and i2c and interrupt into headers for easier development.
Not entirely sure what I’m going todo with it yet though I have an teensy LC I want to play around with and maybe make a keyboard out of.
git repo for the board can be found here:
I have a couple of spares because of the minimum order quantity so if anyone in the UK and possibly the EU (depending on if I’m able to send them) wants one let me know.
or if you want to get your own made I got mine from aisler.net here:
https://aisler.net/Michael4720/sandbox/1f3257d0332f6c6c499689e80abae959/board?timetravel=392607 or if your in the US https://oshpark.com/shared_projects/7lpl9ukD.
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I received my PinePhone with PostMarket OS. Unfortunately most functions were unusable and there was very little in the way of apps beyond installing via the command line and weird UI issues abound like controls going off screen. After some reading here and elsewhere, I tried installing Manjaro arm alpha 2 and it is a huge improvement. Many functions actually work. I’m actually excited for the future of Android phones though it still has a long way to go.
Only major issue I’ve had with Manjaro is after trying to update via the app store, wifi isn’t recognized. I may have to re-flash the SSD.
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In a strange twist you use arch btw because it’s the only one that actually works.
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I got my Postmarket Edition today.
My first impressions exceed my expectations and I haven’t even turned it on yet.
It feels good in the hand. I’ve read some reviews that said it feels cheap, but I don’t think so.
I prefer the coating on the back over the metalic case on my Redmi Note something something, but I miss the cool feeling of metal. Black annodized metal with this grippy coating might be the “ultimate” upgrade.
When I first plugged it in, it powered on rather quickly and then launched an installer! This is awesome. It’s not a configuration for my already-installed operating system… it’s the installer for it. 
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pine64-pinephone:/home/anon# apk upgrade --update-cache --available
fetch http://postmarketos1.brixit.nl/postmarketos/v20.05/aarch64/APKINDEX.tar.gz
fetch http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/v3.12/main/aarch64/APKINDEX.tar.gz
fetch http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/v3.12/community/aarch64/APKINDEX.tar.gz
(1/40) Upgrading openrc (0.42.1-r10 -> 0.42.1-r11)
Executing openrc-0.42.1-r11.post-upgrade
Wait a minute…
Is my phone running Linux and systemd-free?
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I’ve played around with the default install of Phosh on postmarketOS a bit.
My definitive impression is “I don’t like Gnome any better on phones than I do on desktops”. Everything except the GUI seems to work well after updates.
gnome-settings stands out as being particularly terrible. I’m pretty sure it’s currently broken. Everything that relies on gnome-settings UI is a bad experience, slow, prone to crashes, and inconsistent.
I’ll try Phosh again when I get to PureOS, since it’s the reference implimentation, but I’m underwhelmed so far.
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Just wait till you put Manjaro on it. All that systems free ness is out the window.
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Manjaro… kind of half interested
put Manjaro on it. All that systems free ness is out the window.
Manjaro… kind of half interested
I’m not sure where the issue is, but I’m unable to boot from two of my SD cards.
They were “bottom of my junk drawer” SD cards, so they might just be bad.
Tried flashing Postmarket + Sxmo and PureOS + Phosh, both failed.
Manjaro’s downloading now, maybe that’ll work.