Pine tab with phosh or plasma?

[dhosh]

I probably shouldn't be playing in the development sandbox, but an old man has to stretch once in a while!
I've had reasonable amount of time on Linux .. mostly Ubuntu variants ... yes, including the shell ... but all have been in the '386 + world.  I know arm is a new-ish animal.  Exciting, and interesting, nonetheless, and I'd like to help.
To that end, I got several toys over the last few months ... the Pinebook Pro, Pinephone (UBports community), and the Pinetab.  I played around with various flavors on the PBP, and landed on Manjaro Plasma.  It, so far, for me, has been the most useful.  As I'm hoping to have all my Linux devices as similar as possible, I'm targeting Manjaro for the Pinetab and Pinephone, as well.

The Pinephone has Manjaro ARM GNOME 3.382, with Wayland Windowing system .... (OK ... so, I thought I installed Plasma ... too many downloads ).  This seems to work reasonably OK, so far, as well... although the camera ... not so much, and I haven't ventured out to get a SIM card for it, until I kinda know it's going to work.  My Samsung S7 is on Verizon. (I'm in Michigan, USA)

Now to my current play-time .... Pinetab. 
I'm using manjaro-arm-flasher, as, so far, I think I want to stick with Manjaro editions.
For the tab, My choices are:
   phosh ver: dev-...alpha 1, alpha 2, dev-...1017
   plasma-mobile:  ver: alpha 2, 3 or 4choices are:

   phosh ver
   plasma-mobile-dev (I think that's the name)  ver: dev-...1017

I tried plasma-mobile-dev  ver dev-...1017. 
  It certainly looked nice, and I was initially excited, I could connect to my WiFi, and put in a password, so the pop-up keyboard worked.  About .... once.  I haven't seen it since ... at least and work.  Most every time, the virtual keyboard doesn't pop up when input is needed.  ... not in Firefox, terminal, etc.  I can connect to the physical keyboard that came with it ... the keyboard lights come on, but that's about it.  If I plug the keyboard in after the pinetab boots (which it rarely does now) ... sometimes the virutal keyboard pops up, sometimes not.  If I type on the physical keyboard, the screen flashes when doing so.  When I press enter ... SOMEtimes, the keys I pressed show up in the input field.  Usually not, however.
 
  Currently, I can not get the pinetab to boot at all with the SD card in place.  The initial white Manjaro logo comes up, with the whirly-circle dots.... they go around about 1 1/2 times, then stop. 

I have just downloaded phosh/dev-...1017.  ... an depressed the power button .... drum roll .... and, yes ... it boots!  Pop-up keyboard works, although the overall speed of the tablet is much slower than the Plasma version I tried above.  If I tried to go to software and choose Updates, I get a 'no plugin could handle get-updates'.  I hit the refresh icon in the upper left hand corner, and it says it's looking for new updates ... so, guess maybe I'm on a roll.  I don't see auto-rotate, or an option to lock what orientation it's in ... yet.  Let the experimentation begin. 
Overall ... this version looks like my current pinephone  desktop ..... not anything like my PBP. 

Anyway ... just my status, so far.  I will see how consistent the pinetab is, with this phosh flavor, before trying one of the plasma flavors again. ... although I THINK that is what I would like better.  Who knows.

Thanks, all
Dennis





So, I've been trying to make sense of all of these different editions and versions.