Multiple issues with the Pinephone

[MTXP]

External display (hdmi) works out of the box with arch, postmarketos, mobian and manjaro. And maybe with some other distros but those 4 are the most supported ones.
With Ubuntu Touch it is work in progress.

but... OG PP (not pro) is not perfecrt device for "convergence" usage because there are several things what makes external display usage difficult.
Hardware is weak and slow -> so doing anything big will make the system really slow and almost freezes everything.
If you use modem same time with hdmi there is high change that your external display will flicker like a maniac so it is unusable.

What you can do is use really lightweight apps - like terminal or so. Or you can shutdown modem when you connect hdmi.

Best experience / most stable exeprience with OG PP today will be with pmos or arch and I would say use Phosh as desktop enviroment.
And you need to use Biktrogjs firmware if you want to have reliable phone experience

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And forgot to mention:
There are differencies between hdmi cables, docks and displays. Not everything works with og pp - most does but not everything.
And some displays does not start the connection if you don't have power plugged in to PP.

Thanks a lot for this response. All I want from pinephone right now is to have HDMI and display a presentation or a word document or something like that, or in most extreme cases play a video there. Also, you say HDMI works on all of those OSes except for Ubuntu Touch, but the HDMI doesn't work for me anywhere. With the PinePhone stock OS (I think its manjaro/plasma) the phone is unusable due to massive jittering and nothing is streamed to the external display. On arch the HDMI only worked before booting, showing me the terminal stuff it was doing. Any idea how to get it working properly on any OS? By the way, I'm using the stock HDMI hub that comes with the phone. That's one of the reasons why I'm confused the HDMI is not working.