PostmarketOS vs Manjaro on Pine Phone

[laaglu]

pmOS has the most varied desktop environments, but it's more complicated to get going unless you go with premade images.
Manjaro has better package management. pmOS is Alpine Linux based, which uses a strange combination of debian type commands on top of a PKGBUILD system they call APKBUILD. it's really very strange. Manjaro's package management is just like any other Arch derivative.

Thanks!

Actually I face the same dilemma as you. I had ordered the pmos edition, so this is what I currently run.

One of the things I really like about pmos is full disk encryption. I think it should be mandatory, as phones are easily lost or stolen and contain a lot of private data.

Regarding packages, pmos is built on top of alpine linux, which is a linux distro designed to be as small and efficient as possible:

• C library (musl)
  
• Init system (openRC)
  
• lightweight basic commands (busybox)
  

It has had a lot of success in the docker world, where a lot of dockerized apps ended up providing an alpine-based image because it is so small compared to more classic distros

On the pinephone, what I can say is that installing upgrades is incredibly fast because they are so small. Indeed you will need to learn yet another package manager (apk), but then I am not very familiar with manjaro's pacman either.

IMHO, since both distros use phoc + gnome, you tend to have more or less the same user experience. What makes me hesitate between both is that manjaro is also a pretty good desktop distro. I have installed it on my laptop, so the idea to run the same OS on both devices is appealing, but it does not have full disk encryption out of the box I believe.

To make up your mind, if you have an available microsd card somewhere, you could try megous multiboot image (aka p-boot), this way you could easily compare both).