Reliable OS?

[FOSSagent0]

I've had a PinePhone for a few years now and unfortunately it has been collecting dust. For me it was not reliable enough, along with a few issues that take away from it being a daily driver.

I want to revisit it before I decide to just buy another Andorid phone.

What OS is a daily driver that can be relied upon?

Also what features are still missing? I know It may not seem much to you but group messaging is a requirement and the ability to send images too because it's actually an utility for some of us.

[mikehenson]

What OS is a daily driver that can be relied upon?

I have used Arch Linux with Phosh as a daily driver for over a year now. 
https://github.com/dreemurrs-embedded/Pine64-Arch

Also what features are still missing? I know It may not seem much to you but group messaging is a requirement and the ability to send images too because it's actually an utility for some of us.

In the USA, T-Mobile and DanctNIX Arch with Phosh works out of the box. I have not missed a text (SMS or MMS) or a phone call is months! 

Here is a youtube playlist of setting up a PinePhone with Arch and Phosh
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL...ixZG94pj99

[alpineduck]

I can recommend postmarketOS stable with Phosh, it does the job for me, and contrarily to most distributions currently available for the PinePhone, it's not a rolling release, which means you can usually upgrade the system without risking major breakage (Mobian users, for instance, seem to face a lot more problems regularly introduced by updates). As a second choice I would also recommend Arch, it seems to be the least risky of the rolling releases.

Telephony and SMS work fine for me, except the problem I described in https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=18203, which is not specific to a particular distribution. I'm waiting for replies to know if I'm the only one affected or if it's a more general issue with the PinePhone.

Mobile data works fine, and Firefox is usable for browsing.

WiFi works too but is somewhat buggy when you turn it on and off regularly: sometimes it fails to connect when I turn it on, then I turn it off and on again and it connects successfully; sometimes after turning it on and off a few times it goes down completely and I have to restart the phone to get it working again (there's probably an other way to bring it back but I didn't take time to investigate).

The camera is functional but images are really poor quality.

The flashlight is fine.

Battery life is poor compared to most phones but enough for me for two days of moderate use.

I don't use group messaging, MMS or Bluetooth so I can't tell about these.

[Eugo]

The camera is functional but images are really poor quality.

The flashlight is fine.

Battery life is poor compared to most phones but enough for me for two days of moderate use.

I don't use group messaging, MMS or Bluetooth so I can't tell about these.

I concur with the most, including a tough episode with Mobian, except that I'm on Manjaro/Phosh.

Now about the camera, there's a lengthy thread about it - let's just say that I'm quite satisfied with it. It's nowhere near what you get from 600$ phones, but for this price, it's solid. One last glitch, the so-called flash doesn't sync with the shutter. Want flash? Turn the flashlight on, take a shot, turn off. I'm doing photography for 55 years now, and the Pine's camera is a nice toy, fun to play with and most of the time I like the results.

GPS I managed to get to work for a while, it's needs a python script (which I also found on this forum). Now with the version of the OS I installed, that script is missing a few modules, so it doesn't run, and since I don't really use GPS, I didn't bother to make it work.

Sound reproduction on the outer speaker is amazingly good - I had to listen to some people playing music on their Samsungs and whatnot, which was awful, eardrum piercing. On Pine, it's smooth.

Ditto for the microphone. I've used it the PP as a sound recorder on multiple occasions, and it's even a notch better than the near perfect Nokia I used before.

Telegram works fine for messaging, even voice, and it reproduces incoming video nicely; sending video will freeze your phone, don't even try.