Has anyone had success with a Nexdoc and Pinephone?

[nelstomlinson]

I have a beta edition pinephone, using Manjaro Plasma. I am experimenting with a Nexdock, and getting poor results.

When I turned on the phone and plugged it in, they did connect, and the display was sort of shown on the Nexdock.  I got strange effects, though: sometimes the two displays seem to overlap, sometimes the phone display was shown at phone size in the upper left corner of the Nexdock, occasionally other strange stuff. 

I went into the settings and messed with them a bit. It showed the Nexdock display, and showed the phone (called it laptop, but the sizes made it obvious which was which).  After a bit the phone display went black, and the Nexdock display began to blink furiously if I moved the mouse pointer.  The earlier strangeness was intermittent, and now this is continuous.  The only way I can get out of the jam is to unplug and reboot the phone.  If I plug it back in and turn on the Nexdock, I'm back to black screen on the phone and blinky on the Nexdock.

If anyone has made this combo work, I'd appreciate some pointers.

[nelstomlinson]

A little update, with a new question at the end:
If I connect to the Nexdock through the docking bar, using the HDMI output and a USB cable as if the Pinephone were a Raspberry Pi, it works a bit better. There is still a LOT of flaky behavior. Right now the running software is displayed nicely on the Nex screen, but the phone screen is split between the running software and the desktop. The up-arrow for the list of apps shows on the Nex, but not on the phone. The three control buttons on the bottom of the screen, the square which shows all the running apps, the logo which displays the desktop, and the X which kills the maximized app, don't show at all on the Nex. Only the second two show on the phone, so I can kill the running program, or I can minimize it, but there is no way to call it back once minimized.

Anglefish crashes before it can finish loading, settings crashes periodically, the phone has crashed and rebooted a couple of times. At least the terminal works.

If I force the phone screen into landscape mode, one time it became a mirror of the Nex screen. This latest time I tried it it didn't. That sort of inconsistent behavior is really frustrating.

All this was with the phone scaled at 200% and the Nex at 100% If I scale both displays to 200%, things get better. I can see the entire phone screen have all three of the control buttons showing on it, though still not on the Nex. ***Edited to add: The device re-scaled the Nexdock monitor to 125%, and that sometimes works when I plug in and turn on the Nexdock, sometimes doesn't. ***

At this point I suspect I would get similar results with any HDMI monitor I plugged in. Has anyone had success with an HDMI monitor? What did you have to do to make it work?

[nelstomlinson]

I put mobian/phosh on an SD card and booted from that.  I plugged the phone into the Nexdock via the docking bar, and stuff just works, no messing about necessary.  I'm typing this on the phone/Nexdock combo.

So far, after playing with mobian a bit, I'm much more impressed with it than I was with manjaro. It's a lot smoother, a lot less flaky, haven't lost access to the modem yet.

Edited to add:
I declared victory a little too soon. It starts out great, but if I let it go to sleep, that causes the Nexdock to disconnect, and the phone does NOT come back to life in an acceptable state. The phone is at 100% scaling, it is not sharing the display nicely with the Nexdock, and the settings-display screen says there is a hardware issue so the changes cannot be applied. That screen is frozen, and I cannot make any changes to the settings. I cannot even close it by swiping up - it swipes up, but then it comes back in a couple of seconds. A reboot puts the phone back to normal.

Since I'm doing this through the docking bar, I suspect this would be a problem with any HDMI monitor.

[kk22]

Now that there have been a couple more months of development put into the phone, have you seen any improvement in the stability with the Nexdock?

[nelstomlinson]

Now that there have been a couple more months of development put into the phone, have you seen any improvement in the stability with the Nexdock?

Yes! I should have updated this a while back.

I'm now using Mobian Bookworm, and the Nexdock just works now. The issues with scaling are pretty much gone. Some apps open partly on both screens, some open at less than full screen on the PP, some open full screen there and need me to hold down the meta-key while I click and drag them onto the big screen, but everything works OK with no bandaids or kludges.

I have noticed that occasionally the Nexdock screen will blank briefly, with no apparent cause, and no apparent affect on the PP. Not sure what that is, but it's a minor irritation.