Poll: What is your favorite distro/interface for the PinePhone?
Only 25 people have voted so far, so it is a little early to do any analysis, but I found these results to be interesting:
- 72% of PinePhone users say that Phosh is their favorite interface. I think that this shows that Purism's decision to create a new interface (rather than using one of the existing Linux mobile interfaces) was justified. Purism's software development is helping to sell the PinePhone, so we shouldn't have such a bitter partisan rivalry between the PinePhone and Librem 5. As I see it, PinePhone users need Purism's dev work, and Purism benefits from all the PinePhone users who are testing and packaging their software and the help from the Mobian and postmarketOS developers who contribute to Phosh. All the major desktop distros (except Gentoo and Slackware) are now packaging Phosh, so it looks like Phosh will become the way that most people eventually use mobile Linux.
I think Phosh is winning by default, since UBports needs more volunteers to maintain its huge codebase, Plasma Mobile is behind Phosh in terms of development, and most PinePhone users don't want to use proprietary software, so that eliminates Sailfish OS's proprietary Silica interface. However, 61% of desktop Linux users report that they use a GTK-based desktop environment and Phosh is based on reusing a lot of the existing GTK desktop applications that people already use, so it shouldn't be surprising that Phosh is currently winning.
- 20% of PinePhone users say that Sxmo's Suckless buttons interface is their favorite. PinePhone users are really a hardcore crowd. However, I notice that most of the people who voted for Sxmo also voted for one of the graphical interfaces, so I wonder how many people are actually using the Suckless buttons interface as their primary interface. I suspect that many wanted to vote for Sxmo because it is so cool and geeky to use the physical buttons on the side of the phone to control the phone, but as the PinePhone becomes more mainsteam, I predict that Smxo will have a smaller percentage of users compared to Phosh and Plasma Mobile.
- In my last poll in August 2020 about what interfaces people were using on the PinePhone, Lomiri was the second most used interface after Phosh. The fact that Lomiri only got 1 vote in this poll leads me to believe that a lot of people voted for Lomiri last time, because it was installed on the first Community Edition of the PinePhone. This time I asked people which was their favorite distro+interface, rather than which interface(s) they had used, and the results are very different. I think UBports is being hurt by the fact that it has so few volunteers to maintain its code (it only has 9 people with commit access) and Ubuntu Touch was originally designed to use Android drivers through libhybris, so it is a lot of work to switch the code to use Linux drivers.
Edit: Lomiri now has 3 votes, so it is now doing much better in this poll.
- Plasma Mobile has improved a lot since the last poll in August 2020, when it only got 11% of the votes. Unlike Lomiri, Luna Next, Glacier and Hildon, I predict a bright future for Plasma Mobile because KDE has a large number of volunteer programmers to keep working on the Plasma Mobile code. It seems very likely to me that Plasma Mobile will become the second most popular mobile Linux interface after Phosh. I think Phosh will remain the dominant interface, because the GTK/GNOME environment has so much corporate support from IBM/Red Hat, Google, SUSE and Canonical, and Phosh is designed to work top of the GTK/GNOME libraries and reuse GTK/GNOME applications. In contrast, Plasma Mobile only has corporate support from Blue Systems, so I foresee it as not being as competitive, but Phosh is very dependent on the success of Purism as a company, whereas Plasma Mobile will do well without any corporate support.
- I expected both Ubuntu Touch and postmarketOS to do much better, since they were the first two distros to get Community Editions, and both had a head start over the other distros in terms of supporting mobile devices, but both of them only have gotten one vote so far. The first, second and fourth most popular distros on the PinePhone are Mobian, Manjaro and PureOS, respectively, which seems to indicate that people prefer using the standard Debian and Arch toolsets that they already know from using Linux on the desktop. Debian and Arch are the two most popular Linux families for end users on the desktop, so it makes sense that people coming from desktop Linux would prefer similar distros on mobile devices, rather than learning Ubuntu Touch's peculiarities or the Alpine toolset in postmarketOS.
- I'm surprised that PureOS got so many votes, considering that it is no longer listed as a distro for the PinePhone on the PINE64 wiki and clover has paused development of PureOS.