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Posted on 2022-08-30
In the last few days I have been distro-hopping my PinePhone across many different distributions and desktop environments to find out what to settle on for daily-driving in the hopefully near future.
The distribution I previously used was Arch Linux Mobile with Phosh. It was working great for me, but did not have full-disk-encryption (FDE) set up, and is therefore not good for daily-driving with somewhat sensitive data. Thus I decided to distro-hop.
My distro-hopping journey went something like this:
PostmarketOS + SXMO + FDE
Arch Linux Mobile + SXMO + FDE
PostmarketOS + KDE + FDE
PostmarketOS + Phosh + FDE
Arch Linux Mobile + Phosh + FDE
As you might see, in the beginning I pretty much focused on SXMO. I must say SXMO is a really great project, but after a few days of usage, the interactions using small dmenu/bemenu popups with hardware-buttons/touch is not as great as I expected. But I really liked the customization that was achievable with SXMO.
I only looked at KDE for just a few moments, as I already knew I was not really going to use it as all of my applications are GTK-based. In the few moments I tested it out, I mostly enjoyed it. The UI was pretty responsive and easy-to-use, but even some of the by-default installed applications crashed after a few touches.
At last, I settled back on Phosh. After looking at the previous desktop environments, this is probably the most simple and boring one. Wouldn't it be for the great adaptive GTK applications out there (including mine), I would probably not use Phosh. I cannot really say I enjoy Phosh, but I also do not have anything bad to say about it and I enjoy the GTK applications built for it, which lead to the logical choice of selecting Phosh. But I must say I am really looking forward to what GNOME might be doing in the future, as they plan to make GNOME itself adaptive for small screens. While I do not really use GNOME on any of my machines, the previews of GNOME on a phone look really impressive so far.
PostmarketOS is a really great distribution, and it would probably the one I would be using right now, if it were not for many minor annoyances. First of all, the sound on PostmarketOS with SXMO was buggy. When starting the phone with audio active (e.g. a music player that was not stopped before shutdown), the audio would completely break after a few seconds after startup. Furthermore, the audio of Clapper was not working at all. But even with Phosh, the experience was not perfect. Maybe the smallest, but also pretty annoying, nitpick is the lack of `!!` in the command line. I know, I could probably just use bash or zsh (honestly have no idea what PostmarketOS is even using for their default shell). Furthermore, one cannot start GUI applications from SSH without setting environmental variables, a similar problem also makes it hard to debug DBUS. Another problem was the lack of systemd. I know that some people would find this great, but I mostly found it pretty annoying, as there do not seem to be things like user services which would be great for some of my use-cases (messenger-notify). Lastly, the usage of musl instead of glibc made it hard to compile some of my applications (messenger-notify) for PostmarketOS. Add another few unexplainable application crashes (Flare in my case), and I decided to ditch PostmarketOS.
Definitely, do not misinterpret me in these words. I would have really liked to use PostmarketOS as I think it is doing some things really great (shoot-out to `pmbootstrap`, I wish something like this existed also for other distributions).
I finally settled back to arch. Everything was just working (apart from minor bugs in Flare that are now fixed), setup was easy as I have already done it before. My only minor critique is FDE, there is some official script for that, but it pulls in pretty outdated (3 months) images and is not comparable to `pmbootstrap`.
I have also done some improvements to my newly Arch + Phosh installation. Of course, like already previously mentioned, I have enabled FDE. But I have also connected the phone to my NextCloud using GNOME online accounts. This works almost flawlessly, I now easily have access to both my calendar and my contacts. Files, sadly, do not work as expected in Portfolio (the file management application), that is something I will need to look into more closely. I have now also connected Geary to my E-Mail account. It seems to work great, it even shows the folders I have set up, which is an improvement to the application I used on Android.
This small section are some of my thoughts on some recent blog posts that centered around Pine64 and its community. I am not really a big part of the community, I just really like what they are doing and develop some application based on the PinePhone.
The thing I will not talk much about is the SPI, as I really have no idea what they are talking about.
I know more about the decision to make Manjaro the default distribution on the PinePhones. I agree that Manjaro is probably the worst one out there they could have chosen (even though I have the Manjaro community edition). For me, Manjaro never survived a `sudo pacman -Syu` and reboot (that is probably fixed as I have not had Manjaro installed for a long wile), it did not even boot when I initially got the PinePhone. I definitely think choosing PostmarketOS (or even better: The PostmarketOS installer image which allows some basic configuration at first boot) would be the best choice, or (like in the Pine64 EU store) let the user choose which OS he likes.
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