Fanboy alert…
If you decide to give it another go, try the Tutorial app for an introduction to how things work. The UI is mostly swipe based, rather than tap based, which works really well.
Most actions are swipe up or down, and you will notice a thin bar appearing the top and/or bottom of the screen to indicate this. Normally, you grab the screen at almost any point and swipe, you often don’t need to reach for those bars.
Detail pages have back/cancel and forward/accept actions that you can tap, but it’s much faster and more convenient to just swipe the page right or left.
(Yes, the UI is based on Qt and closed source, which clearly is a drawback.)
Yeah, I think it launched the tutorial automatically on first run. I generally liked it, but I’ll need to repeat the tutorial and just immerse myself in using the OS for a while to get used to it.
I don’t understand why they blame desktop Firefox (and want to have mobile Firefox) on Pinephone. Isn’t it one of these things people want to have on there Linux phone? Same with “better to use a free Android instead of not optimized Linux”. It’s like they totally missunderstand the reason why people are creating such phones. And such unprofessional text is hidden by paywall (data or abo+less_data).
That is a real shame cause honestly, Sailfish’s UI is where it’s at. When you use it for awhile it’s hard to go back… The more Phosh takes inspiration from it the better.
Thanks for sharing your experiences by the way. Much appreciated.
PMOS seems pretty static, and not much fun. I installed PureOS which was much, much better, in terms of installed/available software, but it locked up or rebooted rather frequently.
So… I tried Manjaro/Phosh. Wow! I’ve never used Arch or a rolling release before and I’m impressed. Manjaro for PinePhone has a bunch of software installed and a fair amount in their repository.
Phosh Torch - (in the top pulldown)
4G voice/data -
Camera - (crappy resolution, f-stop, etc, but it takes and saves pictures.
Sound Recorder -
Podcasts - (some is off-screen).
Firefox - (best experience on PP, yet).
Fractal (it’s pre-installed, but I haven’t used it)
Telegram (also pre-installed, but I haven’t tried it)
Authenticator (also pre-installed, but I haven’t tried it)
GNOME Maps - (no turn-by-turn navigation, but OSM is good and it does generate directions)
Shortwave - (I had to install flatpak using pacman in the terminal, but works great!)
But I’ve saved the best for last… Battery life is almost as good as my Android. I’ve left it on overnight at 90%, with random programs running. Not only was it still running in the morning, but it still had 70% remaining. Just a personal observation, but pretty consistent. Whatever Manjaro did, it had a dramatic effect.
I look forward to all these improvements and software being available on my Evergreen.
One of the devs at postmarketOS is working on a camera app, and postmarketOS has its attention divided between many phone models, so they are doing good work, but they haven’t spent enough time optimizing for the PinePhone.
I would be interested in hearing your evaluation of Manjaro/Phosh vs Mobian/Phosh, since most people on the PINE64 forum praise Mobian as the best port.
“But I’ve saved the best for last… Battery life is almost as good as my Android. I’ve left it on overnight at 90%, with random programs running. Not only was it still running in the morning, but it still had 70% remaining. Just a personal observation, but pretty consistent. Whatever Manjaro did, it had a dramatic effect.”
Thanks for the report. Does the rported charge percentage seem accurrate?
Regarding rolling release model experience, does that mean you did an update after install?
Also, is your Pine Phone the convergence model or the standard model?
I’m not sure how to go about testing that rigorously, but it hasn’t surprised me so far. I take that consistency to mean that it may be offset, but it’s not crazy non-linear.
Yes. It’s one of the first things I do when trying out a distro on the PP. I usually do it from the command line.
So far as I know, the “convergence” phone is the same phone with 3GB instead of 2GB and an included USB-C video adapter. Funny, but I haven’t tried that out yet.
@amosbatto wanted to hear about Mobian/Phosh, so I flashed the image to SD a couple of hours ago. Truth is, I am way more at home with Debian than Arch, so Mobian is a bit of a natural for me.
Mobian first impressions:
It feels a bit snappier than Manjaro, which felt snappier than PMOS.
Just as much software installed, slightly different mix
Just after the intro setup, it popped a notification that system updates were ready. I finished messing with Geary (never got it to like any of my accounts), then went to the Software app and selected Updates. It listed over a dozen very nicely. I clicked the button and it downloaded. Instead of installing from there, like PMOS and Manjaro, it said that it needed a restart (very unexpected). I let it do so, but instead of a standard Linux reboot, it popped an “installing updates” notification on the boot/splash… and it tooook a loooooooooong time. Now that I have unlocked it, the Software app was already running and it listed the updated stuff – in duplicate. It also seemed to indicate that King’s Cross was the item that needed the restart. Hmmm… “sudo apt update | sudo apt list --upgradable” said that King’s Cross could be upgraded, so I did a “sudo apt update”. It did upgrade kgx, but didn’t say anything about a restart. Whatever.
I’m going to open a bunch of Firefox tabs and Maps, then put in on the nightstand to see if it is still alive in the morning.
Maybe I’ll try OpenSUSE/Phosh this weekend (I have one more SD card!).
There has been an allegation on the Pine forum that I/O is faster on the 16GB eMMC. In addition idle power drain will certainly, if perhaps negligably, be greater with 3GB RAM than 2GB RAM.
There have also certainly been cases where some software had problems with the “convergence package” devices that that did not happen with the baseline package.
Thanks, that’s very interesting and useful information.
My question was based on my possibly mistaken impression that the %charge reported by the the various OS on the multiboot SD card are not consistant with each other or the actual battery state.
Ah. I don’t have the the lower-spec phone (too bad!) to compare with, but I’m happy so far with the performance Manjaro and Mobian on the higher-spec phone, even running from the SD card.
Last night’s Mobian nightstand test started at 99% on the battery (running Firefox (with about 7 tabs open) and Maps (with GPS locked)) and it was still 80% 7 hours later. That is almost exactly the same as Manjaro. PMOS and PureOS would die in 3 hours with the phone on/locked and no apps running. Neither has an an updated image; I expect a big improvement when they do.
@amosbatto, I subjectively like Mobian better than Manjaro, but not by much. I give points to Mobian for my relative familiarity with the Debian base, and it hasn’t locked or re-booted yet. I run Mobian as hard, yet and Manjaro only locked up on me once so far. I dock points from Mobian for the really slow update using the GUI (I’ll go directly apt next time).
My impression was that all of them on the p-boot image were horrible with respect to battery life. But to be fair, I lost interest quickly with the distros not using Phosh.
It’s not as simple as that. Earlier versions than 1.2a actually had broken USB-C video out. It was fixable by the user on the older versions though by soldering, but not all users know how to handle a soldering iron.
Finally (at this point of time), as based on link within post #54:
umount Pinephone partitions sudo apt install bmap-tools sudo bmaptool copy https://images.mobian-project.org/pinephone/f2fs/mobian-pinephone-phosh-20201117.img.gz /dev/disk/by-id/usb-JumpDriv_e_eMMC_Jumpdrive-0:0 bmaptool: info: discovered bmap file ‘https://images.mobian-project.org/pinephone/f2fs/mobian-pinephone-phosh-20201117.img.bmap’ bmaptool: info: block map format version 2.0 bmaptool: info: 927735 blocks of size 4096 (3.5 GiB), mapped 750504 blocks (2.9 GiB or 80.9%) bmaptool: info: copying image ‘mobian-pinephone-phosh-20201117.img.gz’ to block device ‘/dev/disk/by-id/usb-JumpDriv_e_eMMC_Jumpdrive-0:0’ using bmap file ‘mobian-pinephone-phosh-20201117.img.bmap’ bmaptool: info: 100% copied bmaptool: info: synchronizing ‘/dev/disk/by-id/usb-JumpDriv_e_eMMC_Jumpdrive-0:0’ bmaptool: info: copying time: 7m 20.8s, copying speed 6.7 MiB/sec sudo fdisk -l /dev/sdX Disk /dev/sdc: 14.68 GiB, 15762194432 bytes, 30785536 sectors Disk model: e eMMC /dev/sdc1 * 16384 524287 507904 248M 83 Linux /dev/sdc2 524288 7421874 6897587 3.3G 83 Linux
But instead of putting here related image straight to the phone eMMC one could replace above command part with /usb-JumpDriv_e_microSD_Jumpdrive-0:1 of course (to get a bit less snappier f2fs partition). Anyway (perhaps), having fun is all that matters here, isn’t it! I’d qualify above procedure as freedom anyway. And, is there some easier way to perform new distro installation for the current Linux smartphones offer?
P.S. Brand new feature (for myself) is that by swiping up gesture I’m able to close open programs (apps), under Phosh of course (0.6.0-1 version), just by swiping up with my finger and they close, great!!!
Same with “better to use a free Android instead of not optimized Linux”. It’s like they totally missunderstand the reason why people are creating such phones. And such unprofessional text is hidden by paywall (data or abo+less_data).
(in the top pulldown)
for the current Linux smartphones offer?