Picked up a PinePhone a few months ago but didn't get a chance to really play around with it until the last week or so. It shipped with postmarketOS which I played around with, but I had some issues pulling down software from the distro's repos even after manually updating to the current version of it, and distro hopped over to Mobian since I'm more familiar with Debian, and it rules. I never thought I'd see a real commercial phone running Linux outside of some limited run novelty phone or an Android environment running X11. Apps are mostly responsive, and the shipped apps are (mostly) very touch screen friendly. The coolest part of this for me is you can use a USB C hub on the PinePhone to connect this phone up to a real screen and keyboard, like you can on some Android phones, but it's a real Linux desktop and not an approximation of one.

I'm going to pick up a pay as you go SIM card to toss into this thing and see if I can use it as more of a real phone rather than just a wifi device sometime this week.

    • goatman93 [he/him]
      ·
      4 years ago

      If you want to try it out and have an old phone sitting around, you might be able to throw postmarketOS on it and get the same experience! They have a dozen devices or so that are in varying states of usable, and a lot more that you can boot or do limited things on it. I threw it on my N900 and it works pretty well.