Phosh is the favorite mobile Linux interface

Librem Phones (Librem 5)
1

As a Xmas present to the Phosh developers, I just wanted to share the current results of this poll on the PINE64 forum. 68% of PinePhone users selected Phosh as their favorite mobile interface, compared to 17% for Plasma Mobile, 13% for Lomiri and 11% for Suckless buttons.

Here are the results from the poll:

Poll: What is your favorite distro/interface for the PinePhone?

Distro + Interface      | Votes | % votes | % voters
----------------------------------------------------
Mobian (Phosh)          |    21 |     30% |      40%  (With j8m2p6f’s vote added)
Manjaro (Plasma Mobile) |     8 |     11% |      15%
Arch Linux (Phosh)      |     5 |      7% |       9%
Manjaro (Lomiri)        |     5 |      7% |       9%
Manjaro (Phosh)         |     5 |      7% |       9%
Sxmo (Suckless buttons) |     5 |      7% |       9%  
PureOS (Phosh)          |     4 |      6% |       8%
LuneOS (Luna Next)      |     3 |      4% |       6%
Ubuntu Touch (Lomiri)   |     3 |      4% |       6%
Fedora (Phosh)          |     2 |      3% |       4%
postmarketOS (Phosh)    |     2 |      3% |       4%
Sailfish OS (Silica)    |     2 |      3% |       4%
KDE Neon (Plasma Mobile)|     1 |      1% |       2%
AVMultiPhone (Mate)     |     1 |      1% |       2% 
Gentoo (Phosh)          |     1 |      1% |       2%
GloDroid (Android)      |     1 |      1% |       2%
postmarketOS (Plasma M.)|     1 |      1% |       2%
------------------------|-------|---------|---------
Total votes             |    71 |       
Total voters            |    53 |

Here are the results disaggregated by interface:

Interfaces              | Votes | % votes | % voters
----------------------------------------------------        
Phosh                   |    40 |     56% |      68%  (4 double votes removed in % voters)
Plasma Mobile           |    10 |     14% |      17%  (1 double vote  removed in % voters)
Lomiri                  |     8 |     11% |      13%  (1 double vote  removed in % voters)
Suckless buttons        |     6 |      8% |      11%
Luna Next               |     3 |      4% |       6%
Silica                  |     2 |      3% |       4% 
Android                 |     1 |      1% |       2%
Mate                    |     1 |      1% |       2%

And disaggregated by distro:

Distros                 | Votes | % votes | % voters
----------------------------------------------------        
Mobian                  |    21 |     30% |      40%
Manjaro                 |    18 |     25% |      30%  (2 double votes removed in % voters)
Sxmo                    |     6 |      8% |      11%
Arch Linux              |     5 |      7% |       9%
PureOS                  |     4 |      6% |       8%
LuneOS                  |     3 |      5% |       6%
postmarketOS            |     3 |      5% |       6%
Ubuntu Touch            |     3 |      5% |       6%
Fedora                  |     2 |      3% |       4%
AVMultiPhone            |     1 |      1% |       2%
Gentoo                  |     1 |      1% |       2%
GloDroid                |     1 |      1% |       2%
KDE Neon                |     1 |      1% |       2%

I think this poll is a testament to the hard work of @guido.gunther, @adrien.plazas, @dcz, @dos, @mohammed.sadiq, @tobias.bernard, Alexander Mikhaylenko, @evangelos.tzaras, and the rest of the people that have developed the Phosh mobile environment for us.

Of course, this poll isn’t scientific and the sample size is small, and some people may be voting for the distro more than the interface, but its results are similar to the previous poll, that found that 70% of PinePhone users report using Phosh, compared to 27% using Lomiri and 16% using Plasma Mobile.

Edit: Just updated the poll results with votes from today.

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2

Well done, @amosbatto!

The most evident change appears to be the free fall of Lomiri, while Phosh and KDE remain more or less stable. However it is true that the sample is small.

As for the distro used, the apt vs pacman numbers seem to reflect the numbers of the desktop landscape, almost as if people sticked to their desktop habits in choosing the distro to use for their phone. But I am not up to date with DistroWatch statistics, and I might be wrong on this.

1 Like
3

Unfortunately, the volunteers at UBports are having a hard time maintaining that massive amount of siloed code that Canonical created. However, UBports made the good decision to work on porting Lomiri to Arch/Manjaro and Debian, and it looks that is paying off, since it allows people to use Manjaro+Lomiri while they wait for UBports to fix the bugs in the Ubuntu Touch port for the PinePhone.

4

In the interest of fairness, I should mention that I think that Phosh has an advantage over the other interfaces, since it is the only good option for people who want to use Mobian, PureOS and Fedora, so I think that helped inflate its numbers in this poll. Of course, the reason why Phosh has been ported to more distros than the other interfaces is because Phosh was designed as a thin overlay on top of an existing desktop stack, so that it is easier to port.

Eventually I assume that Mobian and Fedora will offer Plasma Mobile and Lomiri, and PureOS will offer Plasma Mobile, so Phosh may lose votes to those interfaces. If we look at just the Arch family (Arch+Manjaro) where all three interfaces are offered, we see that Phosh is still the most popular interface, but not by a wide margin like in the Debian family.

Distro family                | Phosh | Lomiri | Plasma M. | Other | Total
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Debian (Mobian,PureOS,KDE N.)|    24 |        |         1 |       |    25 (1 double vote removed in Debian+Phosh)
Arch (+Manjaro)              |    10 |      5 |         8 |       |    21 (2 double votes removed in Arch Total)
Alpine (pmOS,AVMultiPh.,Sxmo)|     2 |        |         1 |     7 |    10
Red Hat (Fedora)             |     2 |        |           |       |     2
5

One might argue that the choice of installing Mobian or PureOS is a consequence of favoring Phosh, and if a person installs these two distros it is because of the latter. In this case Mobian and PureOS would be the ones that have an advantage (they specialize in Phosh).

But I guess unless you ask explicitly we have no way to know.

6

Interesting results!

I really wonder who still uses AVMultiPhone, a distro that has been abandoned since July or August of 2020.

With Lomiri, IIRC current Manjaro images don’t really work (and have not worked for a long time) as the person helping Manjaro out with packaging (it might have been Gripsgard himself) stopped working on Manjaro packaging, which due to upstream changes eventually broke packages. Thus, less people that are having any good experience with Manjaro Lomiri. While Ubuntu Touch improved on the PinePhone, this is not true for the stable channel, which by now is completely outdated (but log-spamming on a few devices prevents the rc-image to be promoted, it’s complicated). With most people trying stable and not switching channels but giving up, it makes perfect sense that people are less enthusiastic about Lomiri.

Plasma Mobile has improved significantly with the recent 21.12 release, so has Sxmo, so I wonder how this is going to look the next time. I think the vote should be hosted somewhere else next time (where all options can be in one vote, FramaForms may be an option), and I would like to help with promoting the vote on my blog and LinuxPhoneApps.org.

2 Likes