A plea

[kern707]

Dear All,

There isn't a subforum for general Pinephone software topics, so I hope it's OK to post this here.

I've had my Pinephone for a couple of months now, and I'm enjoying playing with it.  But from a couple of recent chats I've had on Reddit, it seems I'm not alone in being irritated by the poor quality of some of the distro releases for the Pinephone.  Over recent days I've tried:

• Manjaro Plasma.  Used to boot fine.  But now, if I flash it to SD then the phone just boots to whatever is on emmc.  And if I flash to emmc, it doesn't boot at all.
  
• KDE Neon.  Again this used to be OK-ish but now, although it boots OK, when I try to launch an app, the app launches but then the whole system immediately crashes.  Happens every time and for every app.  Other people on Reddit have found the same.
  
• Ubuntu Touch.  Again this used to work pretty well, but now when I try to boot it, it gets as far as the Pine64 logo and just hangs there. 
  

I realise that developers have day jobs and are working in their spare time, so they can't do very extensive testing.  But could they at least make sure that the release a) boots correctly and b) can actually run some apps without crashing?

The honourable exception to this that I've so far found is Mobian.  It seems to be well maintained, and just about everything I need works.

I'm sorry if this comes over as unduly negative, but I (and, it seems, others) find all this annoying.

In regarding to testing, you can also help  but it will be better if you can focus on a specific distro, so you can thoroughly test it - then there are places where you can post your bug reports, and the developers will read and review them, to make sure the next releases are better and more stable.

Things can get better much faster if we as a community can contribute by simply reporting bugs that we find, as a developer I can tell you that in huge code repos it is hard to find all bugs by your self - the more testing is done, the more "issues" or bugs are found and being reported back to the developers which will deal with them, and as a result the next releases are becoming better and more mature.

Here for an example is the testing / bug reporting thread for the latest beta3 release of Manjaro-arm with Phosh for PinePhone:  https://forum.manjaro.org/t/manjaro-arm-...-pinephone where you can also find a GitLab link for where you can open an issue in their official bug tracker.