Just purchased a PPP, how screwed am I?

[fxc]

The title sounds negative but I say it with humor. Just to set my expectations, I'm currently using an F1 Orchid by Sunbeam Wireless. It's a flip phone and my phone before that was a iPhone 12 Mini. So I've already gone through the stage of losing essentially all smartphone functionality and on top of that, because the flip phone I use is from a niche manufacturer, I've even experienced the joys of carrier whitelists. So really, the only expectation I have is that the PPP function as a phone. I need it to be able to consistently receive calls and SMS/MMS whether suspended or not. Any particular US carrier recommended for best compatibility? Which OS/DE is most recommended currently for my purposes? I've looked at past threads but none seem current or answer the questions I have. My plan was to use pmOS with KDE as my ideal scenario but I could get used to GNOME or Phosh if needed. I plan on flashing the FOSS firmware for the modem as reports seem to indicate it improves the experience.

How is the software development progressing and where can I contribute monetarily? I looked at pmOS but they aren't interested in such donations.

You said how can you contribute monetarily. Someone else said you don't need to.

If you are rich, please contribute monetarily.

The PinePhone Pro has decent specs but is very unusable due to the battery problems. It will lose charge within an hour or use. You can't rely on it for a full day. It's a huge problem. No one has ever posted why that is or ways of mitigating that. There have been some ideas about using a different non-official battery.

If you really want to help make this linux OS phone great; create different bounties with Monero: (These are suggestions not bounties since I am not rich.)

1) A bounty of 2 Monero to anyone who is willing to research what causes the PinePhone Pro to lose charge so quickly and anything that can be done in terms of software to make it improved. Also, this research could improve the third generation of PinePhone Pro.

2) A bounty of 1 Monero for anyone to improve the process for installing Waydroid on every Pinephone pro distro, as it is not consistently easily installed in each distro. It would be nice if there were a page for each distro showing currently problems or if things are working.

3) A bounty of 5 Monero for any sort of software that automatically resizes apps intelligently in Mobian and other distros. The scale options are terrible when using Apps and there isn't a good way of addressing this. This problem becomes very frustrating over time. There is no software to automatically and intelligently resolve that and there should be.

4) A bounty of 2 monero for someone to work on Call reliability and research what the problems are and how they can be improved.

If you are rich and want to contribute, create bounties so people are more motivated to use time to try to get these things figured out. The camera problems are being worked on and should sort themselves out over time. However, the big 3 problems remain:

-battery problems, call reliability problems, app display problems

The pinephone pro also gets way too hot sometimes compared to other phones and this is likely related to the battery life problem.

Pinephone Arch used to have a repository to make downloading Pinephone Arch and using full disk encryption easy. That got taken down. It would be nice if someone would pay for that to be back up, since it was likely taken down to cut costs.

The Pinephone Pro is an exciting phone and it's not ready yet for widespread use, but Rome wasn't built in a day. However, there are specific problems that need to be addressed, and bounties would help.

Regarding Arch compared to Mobian, Arch is lighter but Mobian is very Debian which is such an easy OS. They are both great. You have an internal EMCC and an external SIM slot. Why not try both? Manjaro is not great but Waydroid works better in Manjaro, although many other things don't.

That the battery is draining fast and that the phone gets warm is expected and normal. The SoC is simply not built for that kind of appliance. This can't be solved with software and has to be lived with.

Regarding your scaling issue on Phosh, you need to enable scale-to-fit, see https://wiki.debian.org/Mobian/Tweaks#Au...pp_scaling.

Regarding calls and the modem there is the open firmware, which works more reliable, https://github.com/the-modem-distro/pinephone_modem_sdk. Biktorgj is working very hard addressing any bug he finds.

Regarding full-disk encryption under Arch there is https://github.com/dreemurrs-embedded/ar...-installer (mind the PRs, and see also https://github.com/simon2github/PinePhon...-Installer). That wasn't changed or taken down.