What OS will actually work with phone calls?

[112113101098101077]

I'm on Arch Linux on my Pinephone. Both voice, sms and data has worked consistantly for me. Now, I'm furtunate to be on a operator with good coverage and a "bring your own device" policy. I would say that Arch make the phone fully usable for the basics. Some tips:
- Reboot the phone daily
- Use "mmcli -m 0 --messaging-list-sms" to look after "hung" messages
- Update the phone with "pacman -Syu" and reboot after appying updates
- Lock the phone to either 2G or 4G (depending on your coverage)

Hope this helps

[Nutmeg]

Alright, so, as an update to my own question, we have been running these phones for about two weeks. We have settled on either Arch or Mobian being the least glitchy and most user friendly (for us). My husband liked the layout of Manjaro with KDE the best because it is what he uses on his computer, but he could never get it to work with phone calls/text. Will update about our experience with phone and text on the carrier post as well, but got Puretalk to work inconsistently and just now tried US Mobile with activating an old phone and then switching the SIM. So far, so good. Both calls and text.

[TRS-80]

I have been using Mobian with a prepaid SIM from Walmart (their own Family Mobile service, with GSM (T-Mobile I think)) and so far pretty good. In fairness I only used it extensively for a few days so far. I do drive a lot for work (all over U.S.) so looking forward to doing lots more extended testing once I go back (I am taking at least this whole week off).

There are some glitches, some times the modem drops out and I need to reboot, and it takes some times a few moments to wake up and reconnect to to the network when the phone wakes up (as have been widely reported, and currently under active development as I understand) but if you are willing to deal with these minor inconveniences, it can actually already be used as a phone, including VoLTE which was a very pleasant surprise as I think that is becoming just about required moving forward.

As an added bonus, I was able to sign up for service on their website using a completely fake name (although you will need to provide some email address, anonymous and temporary services are available). No ID nor any other intrusive data collection required. I was quite pleasantly surprised by this.

[bcnaz]

hmm ?
I must be one of the Lucky ones ?  and I am just a GUI Linux user.
But even when I got my first Brave Heart phone,  I was able to distro hop to find an OS that had some usability...  Not always sometimes there were days or weeks.....

That was using AT&T prepaid.  I also had usability on T-Mobile, another GSM service provider.
(BUT  I have felt T-Mobile has serious trust issues)

My Brave Heart is in retirement waiting for me to install the upgrade motherboard that I bought for it.
I have since purchased 3 PMOS Convergent phones and 1 Manjaro Convergent phone, 
   ( IF the Pine phone did not work, this poor old guy would have stopped buying them at the Brave Heart )

For me Debian, which evolved into Mobian has been the most dependable,  
I have been using Mobian as my daily driver for quite some time now using my old AT&T sim card in one of the PMOS phones, still running from the sd card.

The other 3 phones have Pure Talk sim cards, yeah a cheap AT&T MVNO,  those are running Post Market, Arch, and one I switch between Manjaro & Mobian all still running from sd cards,  one day I will flash them to the eMMC, but no hurry, they run ok this way and I can change the OS in just a few minutes this way.

I remember when people started screaming the modem had to be flashed with new firmware,  I considered it, but I never did it.
  Turns out my modems were working,  they were being blocked by the MMS messages stuck in the cache,  clear the cache and they work fine.

I did spend hours & hours everyday the first year & half+ reading everything in the Pine forum,  sometimes multiple times,  trying to stay up on everything.
    After so much forum time,  I will "never buy a USED Pine phone" !  >Flash and Brick the modem, Then sell it on Ebay ? ? ? <

Since I am a basic GUI user, my contributions are to PayPal $$ to the developers.  We should all help in whatever way we can.

You do not have to be a Linux Developer or Nerd to have a working Pine phone, (That does help though ! )

BUT you Must give it a lot of your Attention.

[mouffa]

PinePhone could be renamed to PersonalEquationPhone because the software configuration that works depends absolutely on what functions someone is basing his daily routine and the way he feels these are better implemented by a specific distribution on which he can do further modifications, let alone the hardware modifications

Now I prompt all the retired Braveheart motherboard owners to attempt to modify the board to 1.2b so that we don't throw away technology and go one step further on customising the phone

[bcnaz]

Well for me talk & sms text are #1
Cellular data is a nice plus, but not so much on a little phone screen, I would rather use the laptop (or tablet) via hotspot or tethering,,
being a bit paranoid I only use wifi at home to do updates or software downloads.

Mobian fills my requirements pretty well at the moment. As mentioned earlier, it does still need some polish, but it does WORK.

AND YES, It would sure be nice to find a good use for those "retired" Brave Heart motherboards..!

[mouffa]

it can be turned into a laptop or be used as a router/repeater/vpn proxy etc or be used as a generic automation board and innumerable other ideas