Should I buy a Pinephone Pro?

[dukla2000]

...
Would you recommend buying it?

Aah - the million dollar question

The cost is high - for me the PP was close to petty cash but the Pro is getting to be serious money with VAT etc.

The elephant in the room: there are no camera drivers and AFAIK none in sight. I really don't understand what happened here as the front on the Pro is supposed to be the same as the original back. And the new back was chosen (I am sure I recall reading somewhere between announcement & shipping) because it had good linux support!

The modem is identical to the original - I have never had the instability you have on either my original PPs or my PPP.

I am struggling to get a stable arch install on my Pro eMMC - Mobian on an SDcard is fine. (On my PPs I could get either stable on eMMC and either stable on SDcard.) I appreciate this is likely transient (but nagging in my mind is how stable the eMMC itself is - I have also had some grief with 'poor' flashes of images to it which is more noticeable than ever on an original PP).

Speed it really is a better experience. Of course impossible to accurately quantify but my attempt to cause an argument is boot speed of arch from the eMMC (from plugging in USB power till phosh login screen). I have just timed my original PP at 40 seconds and will update this post when I get a comparable PPP time.

Am I happy - perhaps 6/10, the cameras and the price are downers. I guess I would rate my PP as 8/10 with the main downer being speed.

Would I recommend - if you have the disposable cash then of course: as someone who loves tinkering with computers it is a great toy. Otherwise, no.

ps, boot time on PPP is 28 seconds. Note this includes 10 seconds of Tow-boot time (presumably if I had a serial console I would see an options menu), so effectively 18 seconds, or half the time of my PP!