Some "tricks and tips" for Manjaro Plasma Mobile

[acrux]

1. Keep in mind that PinePhone components were originally not intended to use in mobile phones, so set your expectations accordingly.
2. PinePhone software has not reached even a "release candidate" level, so set your expectations accordingly.
3. The following reflects my experience. Your mileage may vary, so do not blame me if something goes wrong.
4. The PinePhone preloaded Plasma Mobile (PlaMo) operating system may be outdated, so it is good idea to do a fresh start. All information how to install is listed here.
5. Manjaro provides different PlaMo Development Pinephone Images to install. There are Development Pinephone unstable images which are based on KDE unstable branch and Plasma-Mobile "daily build" unstable images which are based on KDE stable branch. However - there could be from time to time several problems with these images (eg non-booting or something broken etc), so it is good idea to test them installing to the sd card.
6. At certain intervals Manjaro team is releasing Beta releases. If you want something that is close to "stable" to install to the eMMC, then I'd recommend to use these. The latest beta is Release Beta 14 and is located here. The announcement is here. Be prepared that for beta the updates are arriving less frequently as it has it's own updates channel.
7. While PlaMo software manager Discover has great potential, it seems that it is not ready yet. It does not list all software and from time to time may fail in some extent in software update. Instead Discover I'd recommend Manjaro commandline tool pacman. So for updates run in Terminal:

Code:

sudo pacman -Syu

8. The same goes for searching, installing and removing programs. Study Manjaro Pacman overview here. For example - to remove closed source (server part) communication program Telegram: sudo pacman -Rsun telegram-desktop
9. If you rely on xmpp&jabber communication, then your options are kaidan and dino(-mobile). Kaidan is native PlaMo software, but not ready yet. There is no multuser chat and message archives are not syncronised correctly. Install it using pacman, as Discover lists an older flatpak version. Dino-mobile was the best choice, unfortunately it is not installable any more. You can try the desktop version but it is not optimised to phone screen.
10. If you need a PlaMo e-mail client, then you are out-of-luck. There was a project Pelikan, but it seems to be stalled. Of course - you can install Geary, but it pulls in much of Gnome packages, so it is more sense to run it under Phosh.

EDIT: This is last update here (June 1st 2023) as my PinePhone found a new user/tester and probably goes to Maemo Leste way...

[israel]

I have found in the recent weeks that Plasma Mobile has become quite useful, and works quite well.
If WiFi is disabled, MMS messaging works well, though I do not like 'group chats ' and have not tried one.

The half black screen issue still occasionally crops up, though rotating the phone fixes it.  Phone screen rotation seems to be controlled in 2 separate places the top tray button 'Auto-rotate' as well as 'Settings->Display Configuration->Orientation'  I have found that using 'Automatic' with 'Only when in tablet mode' *unchecked* works correctly.

The on screen keyboard works really well, though the emoji portion shows small emoji, making some unclear.

The three biggest issues I have found are:
1) not being able to hook up to my computer via USB cable to use sftp/ssh connections, and it must be done using a wireless connection.
   there is an open bug about this, and indicators on how to fix this, with those fixes purportedly in the kernel + the manjaro tweaks package, though I have yet to dig deep enough to fix it.
2) playing music and locking the screen make the phone become unusable.  the preinstalled 'wave' program nearly crashes it, while audacious continues to play fine, though the phone becomes inaccessible, being a black screen no matter what button I push.
3) The phone rings through the ear piece, though this can be mitigated by switching the audio to come from the internal speaker, however this makes all phone calls on speaker, with no way to adjust it, unless you switch the 'Settings->Audio->Playback Devices->Port'  back to 'Internal Earpiece' once the call has started.

Any tips for how to fix the music/lock screen issue would make this much more usable.

Another issue is using retroarch with the overlay display gamepad.  It does not register input.