New Pinephone Pro

[Airdale]

Hi all!

I've recieved a new Pinephone Pro explorer edition and am about to fire it up. I've been following pinephone development closely over the past couple of years and excited to try it out.

I have a fair amount of linux experience with multiple different distros over the years. That being said, I'm not a hard core programmer but more of a tinkerer.

I had two main questions before getting started.

#1
Tow-boot vs u-boot?

Seems like the big show-stopper bug for now with the PPP is power managment. It seems like many people have installed Tow-boot to help deal with this, but there are others that seem to be making progress using the u-boot that came by default. Should I just switch over to Tow Boot right off the bat? Are there disadvantages to doing this?

#2 
Best distro to get started with at the moment

I know that people are asking this all the time, but this seems pretty fluid and changes frequently. I know that any of them will have problems and need work in development. I just was trying to get started on a reasonably good footing.

I have read that Manjaro Plasma unstable branch has made some real progress with power managment. However, it seems like people have had some significant trouble trying to update the pre-installed image of manjaro plasma on the explorer edition. Should I just flash a new image to an SD and try out that? Or has anybody sucessfully updated from the Manjaro Plasma using the unstable branch from the preflashed image.

Thanks so much for the help! Looking forward to trying this out and contributing back what I can.

[bcnaz]

On the Pro series phones :
... "I" think Arch is the easiest to use "Out of the Box" distro at this moment.

Mobian is having problems with suspend on the "Pro series" phones,
.... if you turn off suspend, it runs great, but then it has a short battery life.

Phosh for the desktop seems to be the most dependable interface at this time.

Have 1 Brave Heart, 3 PMOS convergent, 1 Manjaro convergent, 1 Explorer Pro phones.

[brb78]

I Second Arch for usability. Power management under u-boot and MMS on Arch have also greatly improved recently.

[dukla2000]

...
#1
Tow-boot vs u-boot?
...

I have played a lot with Tow-boot and dual booting. I really do not think there is much point for a single use OS - indeed it adds a 10 second delay to the boot (I presume to display an options menu if you have a console attached) which is a PITA. So my 6p - do not rush to Tow-boot.

...
#2 
Best distro to get started with at the moment
...

Mobian. Closely followed by arch. Put either on an SDcard, overwrite the boot code on the eMMC and enjoy. Note that, at present, resume will NOT work for an OS installed on the eMMC (whatever I do to Tow-boot or u-boot) so stick to SDcard if you need battery life.