01-03-2022, 04:23 AM
(This post was last modified: 01-03-2022, 04:26 AM by Undvik.)
Now that the keyboard is finally available I'm ready to give the phone another go. Right on time as my current android phone's screen has cracked and it's on it's last legs, so I intend the pinephone to become my daily driver. I have a 3Gb manjaro community edition phone that I got about a year ago, but wasn't able to jump into it as much as I had hoped. I hated doing terminal stuff on a touch screen and other things in my life made me table it for the moment.
So now that a physical keyboard and more battery are on the way let's try again. I'm a bit overwhelmed on which distro to try out so I suppose I'll start out multibooting to see where it's at. I use Ubuntu on my desktops and Debian on my server, and have dabbled in Arch in the past. Arch seems to be in a good place right now on the PP, but the names I'm hearing most often around here are Manjaro and PmOS. Any advice on what to focus on for starters? I've also seen that it's not enough with choosing a distro, but that the UI can have multiple versions in each distro as well (AFAIK like GNOME, KDE, XFCE, right?). Here I'm seeing most people using Phosh, some Lomiri on manjaro and Sxmo on PmOS, but I don't really understand the advantages/disadvantages of one over the other.
Things I mainly use my (current) phone for: - Reddit
- Quick browsing for stuff that comes up
- Podcast/music listening (With Podcast Addict). Can be both by bluetooth or by jack depending on the situation.
- Comic/Manga reading (using Tachiyomi), sometimes PDF reading.
- Navigating the city (OsmAnd for everything except public transportation)
- Receiving emails from gmail and protonmail
- The usual phone stuff with contacting people. (Discord, Telegram, Whatsapp, Slack)
- Controlling Sonarr, Radarr, Bazarr, etc. using nzb360
And other stuff that I wouldn't really miss if not available. Now I realize not everything works yet on the PP and that's fine, but starting out from the most developed place would be preferable. I also plan on (someday) adding a small homeserver on a raspberry pi to handle matrix bridging and other such stuff
Any advice on all this? really pumped up again 
(01-03-2022, 04:23 AM)Undvik Wrote: Now that the keyboard is finally available I'm ready to give the phone another go. Right on time as my current android phone's screen has cracked and it's on it's last legs, so I intend the pinephone to become my daily driver. I have a 3Gb manjaro community edition phone that I got about a year ago, but wasn't able to jump into it as much as I had hoped. I hated doing terminal stuff on a touch screen and other things in my life made me table it for the moment.
So now that a physical keyboard and more battery are on the way let's try again. I'm a bit overwhelmed on which distro to try out so I suppose I'll start out multibooting to see where it's at. I use Ubuntu on my desktops and Debian on my server, and have dabbled in Arch in the past. Arch seems to be in a good place right now on the PP, but the names I'm hearing most often around here are Manjaro and PmOS. Any advice on what to focus on for starters? I've also seen that it's not enough with choosing a distro, but that the UI can have multiple versions in each distro as well (AFAIK like GNOME, KDE, XFCE, right?). Here I'm seeing most people using Phosh, some Lomiri on manjaro and Sxmo on PmOS, but I don't really understand the advantages/disadvantages of one over the other.
Things I mainly use my (current) phone for:- Reddit
- Quick browsing for stuff that comes up
- Podcast/music listening (With Podcast Addict). Can be both by bluetooth or by jack depending on the situation.
- Comic/Manga reading (using Tachiyomi), sometimes PDF reading.
- Navigating the city (OsmAnd for everything except public transportation)
- Receiving emails from gmail and protonmail
- The usual phone stuff with contacting people. (Discord, Telegram, Whatsapp, Slack)
- Controlling Sonarr, Radarr, Bazarr, etc. using nzb360
And other stuff that I wouldn't really miss if not available. Now I realize not everything works yet on the PP and that's fine, but starting out from the most developed place would be preferable. I also plan on (someday) adding a small homeserver on a raspberry pi to handle matrix bridging and other such stuff
Any advice on all this? really pumped up again
I would say the fastest one is Arch. The only differences between Arch and Manjaro for the PP is Manjaro comes with a different theme installed by default and a handful of extra programs. I think it is probably worth doing Arch just because it will save you between 2-3GB of storage. All that being said, the GPS on the PP is garbage, so navigation won't be easy, the browsing experience isn't great and things like Discord will need to be done in browser because they don't support the phone architecture for Linux. Also, I use Podcast Addict for my Android tablet and the best podcast listener for the PP is Kasts but it simply isn't on par with Podcast Addict in my opinion. Though it is much newer and will eventually get there.
I've been daily driving my PP for about 4 months now and I have basically adapted to not really navigating in real time or using the browser much unless needed because it just simply isn't great. So if you do try to daily drive just keep in mind that the phone is going to be significantly worse than your Android but also, after a while you get used to not constantly being on your phone like Android wants and you cut back on using it how you would with Android.
Lastly, Mobian has a great wiki so just go through there and add in the tweaks to make everything a bit smoother or easier. https://wiki.mobian-project.org/doku.php?id=tweaks
(01-03-2022, 10:15 AM)ragreenburg Wrote: I would say the fastest one is Arch. The only differences between Arch and Manjaro for the PP is Manjaro comes with a different theme installed by default and a handful of extra programs. I think it is probably worth doing Arch just because it will save you between 2-3GB of storage. All that being said, the GPS on the PP is garbage, so navigation won't be easy, the browsing experience isn't great and things like Discord will need to be done in browser because they don't support the phone architecture for Linux. Also, I use Podcast Addict for my Android tablet and the best podcast listener for the PP is Kasts but it simply isn't on par with Podcast Addict in my opinion. Though it is much newer and will eventually get there.
I've been daily driving my PP for about 4 months now and I have basically adapted to not really navigating in real time or using the browser much unless needed because it just simply isn't great. So if you do try to daily drive just keep in mind that the phone is going to be significantly worse than your Android but also, after a while you get used to not constantly being on your phone like Android wants and you cut back on using it how you would with Android.
Lastly, Mobian has a great wiki so just go through there and add in the tweaks to make everything a bit smoother or easier. https://wiki.mobian-project.org/doku.php?id=tweaks
Thank you, I'm aware that it will be worse than the android I have right now but I don't expect it to be too much of a problem. Still, good thing to mention for anyone new to the PP that's reading this. I've already been wanting to cut back on phone time so that'll certainly help. The thing though is I have ADHD, so having something with which to listen to podcasts during commutes or fiddle with in dead times is a must, and I believe that that will be covered.
Any tips on creating a multiboot sd card? I've seen megi's on here with all the distros but I think I want to start out trying Arch, PmOS and Mobian only so that one would be a little bloated.
(01-04-2022, 03:36 AM)Undvik Wrote: Any tips on creating a multiboot sd card? I've seen megi's on here with all the distros but I think I want to start out trying Arch, PmOS and Mobian only so that one would be a little bloated.
The multi-boot image build scripts are available, so building with only the OS versions you want shouldn't be too hard.
https://xff.cz/git/pinephone-multi-boot/
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