Just another noob wanting to know your favorite build

[marcih]

Im just curious if I will need to re flash the phone every time a new major update comes around.

No need for that, just occasionally check the commit history of phosh and PinePhone build profiles to keep up with packages were added or removed from the new images and make the changes on your image, otherwise running "sudo pacman -Syuu" is enough to upgrade. I'm still running the same factory image that came with my Manjaro CE device in November with no issues.

If thats the case, I might just stick with the SD card method until a really nice stable version comes out.  In that case, Mobian would be the defualt OS on the phone.

Manjaro Phosh is in some regards better than Mobian because the latter is heavily reliant on upstream Debian; as an example, Mobian is still on the 1.14 branch of ModemManager which is less reliable than the 1.16 branch that Manjaro is on.

Any thoughts on Anbox?  From what I hear it doesn't really work all that great yet.

If you have Linux installed on your desktop, try Anbox there; it's the same on the PinePhone, just significantly slower, especially startup. Also beware that apps running in Anbox can't access the microphone or camera, so using Signal or WhatsApp for calling or syncing the desktop app is impossible at the moment.

I imagine the issues would arise with clashes between the phone GUI and the screen.  I figure my programs that run in the terminal would be fine.

Correct.

If I need to turn off WiFi on Mobian, perhaps it would be better to use the hard switches in the back of the case? Then its more hardware and software just has to deal with it lol.

I haven't tried in a while but I remember needing to reboot the phone to have WiFi come back after flipping the switch back on.

Now its just a waiting game for it to get into the US of A.  How long did shipping take for all of you?

I can't comment on that since I'm in Europe.