Poll: What is your favorite distro/interface for the PinePhone?
12-24-2021, 10:44 AM
(06-21-2021, 09:31 AM)nelstomlinson Wrote: The touchscreen interface is a really terrible way to operate a computer. Does Phosh make that less worse than Plasma? If so, how, please?
For some things, the touchscreen is OK, but when I want to type and especially when I want to use the terminal, I almost always attach a Bluetooth keyboard or I ssh from my PC, so I can use my PC's keyboard.
In my opinion, the Maliit virtual keyboard (which is used by Plasma Mobile, WebOS, LuneOS, SailfishOS and is the backend for Lomiri's keyboard) is better than Squeekboard in Phosh, but Maliit was developed by Nokia in 2011 for MeeGo, so it had a major head start.
As I see it, Phosh and Plasma Mobile are under heavy development and improving rapidly, whereas Lomiri is more complete, but it is having more trouble maintaining its code, and I see the same problem with LuneOS (which is based on the free parts of LG's WebOS). I think that the best interface is SailfishOS, but I won't use it because of its proprietary Silica interface. Another problem is oFono, which is used by Plasma Mobile, WebOS/LuneOS, SailfishOS and Lomiri, but it isn't as well maintained as ModemManager. Phosh is based on ModemManager and Plasma Mobile is switching to ModemManager.
Phosh has a substantial lead over the other interfaces in this poll, which I think is due to the fact that Purism is paying for its development and Phosh was designed to be a thin overlay on top of GTK/GNOME, which is already maintained by the big Linux companies (IBM/Red Hat, Canonical, Google and SUSE), so Phosh has a lot more corporate support than the other interfaces and it is easier to maintain and incorporate into existing distros. By getting rid of libhybris and switching to ModemManager, Plasma Mobile is getting easier to maintain and incorporate into distros, and UBports is working to get Lomiri incorporated into Arch and Debian, so they are all working to break out of their silos, but Phosh was designed from the beginning for close compatibility with an existing desktop stack.