Librem 5 Dogwood vs. PinePhone PMOS CE

PMOS is very rough. Honestly I’m surprised they thought it was in a good enough state to ship, but I guess it’s a development version and all.

Still, most of these aren’t issues on Mobian (and I assume PureOS, although I haven’t been able to get it to boot on my Pinephone).

  • Phone calls have some kind of ring indicator. It doesn’t sound like a ring, more of a buzz, but it’s something. Call quality is vastly better than on PMOS.

  • Volume buttons work. No graphical feedback though unless you already have a volume indicator pulled up.

  • Headphone jack works

  • Battery life is much better, I’d estimate around 8-12 hours. I think Mobian implements CRUST, which helps with battery life but means the phone occasionally takes a while to turn back on when you wake it

  • Uses apt, seems to have many more packages available than PMOS

  • Comes with GNOME Web and Firefox. GNOME Web is more optimized for the phone interface than Firefox, but Firefox generally performs better than GNOME Web.

I think the only thing preventing PureOS from working (following the steps from [Successful] installation of PureOS on PinePhone) is a patch to u-boot needed for the RAM to be recognized properly. I don’t have time to test it now unfortunately, but it would be interesting to see how it and Mobian compare, both being Debian-based.

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