Bunch of good updates for the PinePhone (including the upcoming keyboard case), PineTime, and news that the next Pinebook Pro production run and shipment is going to occur soon, but unfortunately will be placed on freeze due to a parts shortage.
Now I have some bad news. Pinebook Pro production will be placed temporarily on halt. The current component shortages make it very difficult to source the necessary parts to continue with the manufacture. The production team has done a lot of research in an effort to pump out another batch in late Q2 or early Q3, but ultimately chose against proceeding. In short, even if we resorted to work-arounds and use alternative parts and electronics, the end-result would be one of many compromises, which simply wouldn’t be fair to our community. On top of this we would have to significantly increase the asking price for the Pinebook Pro. I know that this is disappointing news but ultimately it is also the right call.
If you are on a fence whether you want to pick up a Pinebook Pro, then I strongly suggest you make a decision fast: the Pinebook Pro stock will last no longer than a few days. At present time I cannot say with confidence how long the Pinebook Pros hiatus will be, but I suspect it will be no less than 3 months before we can even start considering spinning up production again. Mind you, this statement is based on the current market situation. The component availability situation is presently very volatile and highly dynamic. The outlook may change at any time, quite literally. Rest assured that as soon as production becomes viable again, I’ll make sure to let everyone know.
I know the feeling! I ended up on Debian for a reason, it's stable enough, even on sid, and it's easy to fix. I work in IT for a living so when I come home to my main computer I just want something I don't have to fuck around with to get working if I want to stream something, do some work, or play a quick game. For the Pinephone, I have one and it's almost at daily driver level with the current release of postmarketOS but it's still not something that if you made it your main device you'd be happy with it. Still quite buggy, camera needs a lot of work (plus it's cheaper hardware anyway so only so much you can optimize in software), and apps need to be optimized further for the hardware. The distro I'm more excited about, Mobian, needs even more work as it's not as far along as postmarket is with its development, but it's a fun hacking project or experiment to see where things might end up in a few years with more development.
Not sure what device you have at the moment, but you could look at flashing another ROM on it to get some of the Google bits away. LineageOS has a lot of compatibility with phones, and the MicroG project even makes builds with that in place of the Google components for compatibility to certain Google services. Over on /c/libre CalyxOS and GrapheneOS are also highly recommended but have a lot less device support, I've only used the latter but the former gets high marks as well. Check out the free software Android guide over there if you haven't already, it's quite good!
Yeah. I stopped rooting around ICS era of android but have always used cyanogen/lineage roms up until my current phone, the S10+. At the time it was the only phone available on my carrier that had a headphone jack, and they were out of pixels so i just grabbed it. It's not horrible but I'd definitely be happier without a lot of the extra Samsung shit on it