PinePhone app development

[Kevin Kofler]

Thanks, is plasma the most popular distro that people are actively using?

It is hard to tell what is actually the most popular.

Plasma Mobile (on Manjaro) is what you get preinstalled by default if you order directly from Pine64. The EU store overwrites it with Phosh for some reason (at least the Manjaro option is Phosh, they offer 2 other distros, Mobian and PostmarketOS, but I think those are also shipped with Phosh – not that I really cared because I dd'ed my existing installation from my first, now broken PinePhone on top of it anyway). What other resellers preinstall, I have no idea.

I get the impression that most users here on this forum are running Phosh. I myself run Plasma Mobile. I run Plasma Desktop on my desktop and notebook computers, so Plasma Mobile was the logical choice, plus it came preinstalled on my first PinePhone.

because from what I am seeing so far it seems to be quite laggy in terms of responsiveness, and the included kirigami? apps seem to take a good few seconds to start up.  On the other hand I have no idea what performance to expect from the device...

Well, the lagginess is mostly due to the hardware, I think. The Allwinner A64 is pretty slow by today's standards. I would not expect Phosh to be much (if at all) faster, at least the Phosh apps on Plasma Mobile are no faster than the Plasma Mobile / Kirigami ones in my experience. (Compare, e.g., Geary with Angelfish.) Minimalist stuff like SXMO is probably much faster, but also much less user-friendly.

I was also having some issues with screen brightness 'auto'? dimming last night, such that the screen would not stay illuminated for more than a second.  So I built a null modem cable and found a couple errors via the serial console (but only shows boot) but guessing there are log files somewhere.  But I have since been reading quite a few community comments reccomending to replace the included OS, but from my brief research it seems like there is no solid stable winner currently?  So I am feeling a bit lost with all the options, but at the same time it is also amazing to have a phone with so many options   and since I am hoping to write some apps, I am also now wondering how portable are apps between all these OS options.

The first thing I would do is to update the shipped OS to the current packages. But do not use Discover for that, it will likely break your installation! (PackageKit is not well supported on Arch and Manjaro.) Instead, best run "sudo pacman -Syu" on the command line, then reboot, then run "sudo pacman -S pamac-gtk pamac-mobile-integration", and then you can use Pamac-GTK for your future system updates.