PureOS on the PinePhone is currently not being maintained, so it isn’t recommended. I really like the modifications that Mobian made to Firefox so it works well on a small screen and I wish that PureOS would copy Mobian’s Firefox configuration, because Epiphany has too many problem for me in PureOS.
The big problem with Mobian is that you either have to go with an outdated stable version or an unstable weekly version. If you run the latest weekly, you get the latest versions of the apps, so the Megapixels camera works better and you get decent scrolling in Kings Cross terminal, etc., but I see weird bugs in weekly that I don’t see in stable, like sometimes not being able to login because the keyboard won’t appear in the login screen or having to do more reboots to get things working, plus worse CPU performance, which I assume is a kernel config problem.
PureOS Byzantium on the L5 is generally better maintained than the latest weekly Mobian on the PP in my opinion. One of the two principal Mobian maintainers is also a Purism employee, so I suspect that most things that PureOS does will make it to Mobian and vice versa.
As for Phosh on Arch, Manjaro, postmarketOS, Fedora, openSUSE, Gentoo, etc, I haven’t tried them, but I suspect that it largely comes down to whether you like the toolsets that those distros use vs the Debian toolset. I found the Alpine tools in postmarketOS hard to use, but I didn’t take the time to really learn them. Dnf in Fedora has some functions that apt in Debian lacks, but I generally prefer Debian-based distros because I am more familiar with the tools and I generally trust the decisions of a community like Debian more than a corporation like IBM/Red Hat, which was validated by what recently happened with CentOS.
Both companies are careful to not say anything about the other company, which is the proper way to handle the situation. I suspect that the Purism devs like the PinePhone because it has provided the vast majority of users, so Phosh gets more bug testers, volunteer devs, distro packagers and development of apps like Megapixels. It would not surprise me if 50k PinePhones have now been shipped.
However, Purism’s management had to know that the PinePhone 2 would cut out the mass market appeal of the Librem 5, which I suspect is partly the reason why Purism decided to focus on the high-priced security market and convergent phone-PC market.
I am annoyed at PINE64 for undercutting Purism’s market with the PinePhone Pro, but PINE64 is mostly following its own logic of trying to create common platforms based on a single processor with many form factors so hardware tinkers will invest their time in making mods for the platform.
Just a nitpick, the upstream for the package that makes the mods to Firefox is PostmarketOS:
We pulled the debian packaging that mobian made of it, but it seems that we need to update it. I think @dos is the one that updated it in Pureos.
That does happen for several reasons. They are both based on Debian. PureOS and mobian developers do work together with other Debian developers in the Debian on Mobile group, upstreaming packages to Debian:
Mobian devs and some other distros like PostmarketOS also send merge requests to phosh.
That question can be subjective. Manjaro has sometimes taken code that was still un-merged features that were still Work In progress branches, formatted it as patches put them on top of master, and shipped it to users. This might make it more “bleeding edge” but sometimes “has issues”.
This as sometimes resulted in broken features in their version of the phosh stack (phosh, and some default userspace applications).
The deb packaging of phosh for mobian and pureos basically the upstream package.
Ok, I compiled it from sources. But now, every day PureOS Store offers an update to download and install with reboot(!), and it comes the next day again offering update for gnome~power-manader. What should I do to get out of this loop?
One way to get out of it is to install the usual (unmodified) package from the repo again:
sudo apt install gnome-power-manager
After that it should stop offering to update it, but you have then also lost your changes, you are back to using the default version of the package.
If you want to keep your changes and not getting asked to update, it should be possible to instruct apt to skip updating that particular package. Unfortunately, right now I don’t know how to do that. Tried “apt-mark hold” but that does not seem to work. (If others here know how to do that, please show.) The best I can do is to install the default package to avoid being asked to update, but keep the modified deb file so that I can temporarily install my modified version again if/when I want it.
Yes, it’s annoying. I think that is a bug in PureOS Store, it seems to always want to reboot after any kind of update, I think it should not be like that.
I like that idea of a loose partnership between Pine64 and Purism to develop PureOS on Pinephone, where maybe we also get Purism branded Pinephones with a developed PureOS for it while Pine64 gives part of the proceeeds of every Pinephone sale to Purism. The obvious issue with that is Pinephones are like $200 where a new Librem 5 is like $1200 now. So if Purism did this, they might also make their own phone less relevant? But unless there is some organized committment with money behind it, not sure Pinephone will ever have a viable OS?
I would like to see that, but I doubt it will happen, considering PINE64’s partnership with Manjaro, and its promotion of volunteer-based development.
With Mobian, you basically get PureOS for all practical purposes, and if PureOS introduces something important that Mobian doesn’t support, then it is likely that someone will start working on PureOS on the PinePhone again.
Manjaro GmbH & Co is a company that provides professional services for Manjaro. Presumably Manjaro GmbH & Co will be providing tech support for the PinePhone Retail Edition, when it eventually goes on sale for $100 more than the standard PinePhone. PINE64 is not equipped to provide support services to users, whereas Manjaro GmbH & Co is. It also wouldn’t surprise me if PINE64 is currently making a donation to Manjaro for each PinePhone Beta that it sells, like it did with the Community Editions. However, I don’t know whether Manjaro GmbH & Co will do much driver and software dev work. For example, somebody needs to add Bluetooth profiles that support microphones to ModemManager (for Phosh) and to oFono (for Plasma Mobile, Lomiri and Sailfish OS), and I doubt that Manjaro will do that kind of work.
I made a random comment on the PINE64 forum that PINE64 should raise its prices, so that it could hire some people to work on driver and software development. The response was very negative among the few responses that I got. I saw a similar reaction at r/pine64Official to a guy who posted an article a couple weeks ago saying that PINE64 should pay for driver and software development rather than giving donations to distros. I don’t know whether that is representative of what most PINE64 customers believe, but it isn’t encouraging, because mobile Linux needs paid developers if it is ever going to become a viable alternative to the Android/iOS duopoly.
Yes, that’s the article, and I think Drew Devault does a good job of explaining the problem. I was specifically thinking about this response on Reddit:
My guess is the main reason for the difference in price is so that Purism can fund development of PureOS and Phosh. So if you think Pine64 should do the same and increase its price to fund software development, than you can just take that extra money you are saving compared to buying a Librem5 and donate it to the open source community of your choice.
However, there are few conscientious people who are willing to donate money compared to just including money for developers in the price of a product. Even if people are willing to donate, they often don’t know who to donate to, and they often donate to the distros which are duplicating the work of other distros and there is little coordination.
Most of the PinePhone’s kernel work is being done by Megi (Ondrej Jirman) at https://megous.com/git/linux/, but I decided to not give him money, because very few of his kernel changes are being upstreamed to kernel.org, which puts the long-term support of the PinePhone in doubt.
Martijn Braam at postmarketOS commented on this problem:
I’d like to point out that megi (the author of that site/kernel) refuses to upstream the improvements to the mainline linux tree, which is why it’s still impossible to boot the PinePhone with a kernel.org kernel and have things working. This is not even just an issue for the PinePhone but all other Allwinner A64 based devices hit the same issues and now have to pick patches from that kernel.
The second megi decides the PinePhone or the A64 isn’t interesting anymore (since the new one is Rockchip rk3399) that whole tree maintainership will collapse.|
In contrast, Purism is upstreaming its kernel changes for the Librem 5, so even if Purism disappears, it will be possible to keep using the Librem 5 in the future. Given how many PinePhone’s have been sold, I assume that someone in the community will step up and keep maintaining a separate kernel with Megi’s patches for the PinePhone if Megi ever disappears, but this seems like a real mess. This situation must be really annoying for any distro which is trying to merge its own kernel patches with Megi’s patches.
Somebody needs to step in and start working with kernel.org to get Megi’s patches upstreamed, but nobody is doing it, and it doesn’t appear that Megi has delegated anybody to do it for him. I wonder what is the backstory to this.
(In my case, there is one open source entity that regularly asks me for a donation but the only payment mechanism is one that is unacceptable to me. That is just one more way in which things fall down.)
