I Went on a Roadtrip With PostmarketOS

[Kevin Kofler]

Linux: (Okay, this section is mostly just opinion. I shouldn't even include this since it's likely to derail any productive discussion) OpenRC...just why? Why would this be used instead of systemd? I'm not saying OpenRC has no uses but I see absolutely zero benefit to dying on that hill here with the Pinephone Pro. And Ash as the only preinstalled shell? Absurd. Seriously, why not include Bash at the absolute minimum? I didn't even realize it was possible for a distro to function without Bash installed. APK feels like a watered down apt. First experience with Alpine Linux, hope it's my last.

Alpine Linux is by design an extremely minimalist distribution. They do not even use the de-facto standard GNU glibc, but the musl libc. Using OpenRC and Ash fits into that concept.

[ ] Alarm: Completely broken. Will not wake phone from sleep. Tested with default app and wakeup-mobile which had an APK that included wakeup-rc or some such similar packages. This also did not work.
[snip]
[P] Suspend: Sleep after media playback is very broken. I even wrote a script that runs in the background and kills the media player after 30 minutes and suspend will still fail. I altered the script to run "loginctl suspend" 15 seconds after killing the media player and suspend will still fail. This manifests when I wake up 4 hours later, the phone is very hot to the touch, screen is off, battery nearly dead after falling asleep with a full charge.

dmesg does not return any errors and the app is successfully closed when I unlock. Ran out of ideas and patience for toubleshooting this. I rely on this feature every night to listen to music or asmr so I can fall asleep. This bug is especially egregious to me. Occassionally suspend with no active tasks stops working but for the most part is stable.

For both of those issues, my suggestion is to just plug the phone in before you go to sleep and keep it plugged overnight. This ensures that you have power in the battery the next morning. And, while this setting is hidden in the mobile version of the power management KCM and disabled by default in Plasma Mobile, you can set it to not suspend when plugged in (as commonly done for notebooks) by manually bringing up the desktop KCM with kcmshell5 powerdevilprofilesconfig and making the setting there. Doing this ensures that the alarm will definitely ring. It will not fix your suspend issues (quite the opposite), but with the phone plugged in, you will have a full battery in the morning anyway.