Screen dying already?

[dsimic]

I've started by setting the thermal trip points on my PinePhone (Manjaro Phosh, stable branch) to 45°C, 60°C and 75°C respectively.

Reason for the upper limit being so low is that I did once accidentally reach it by stupidly putting some clothes on top my phone, which was on the charger and had a compile job running; needless to say, the whole phone was searing-hot at only 75°C, which couldn't have been healthy for it. I must add that this was around Christmas time and the delamination didn't start until April.

Having such a low value for the "critical" trip point cannot hurt the phone; when it comes to the safety of the phone, it's only important not to go over the default value of 110 °C for the "critical" trip point.  Also, with the lowered values for the "passive" and "hot" trip points, the "critical" temperature shouldn't be easily reached, at least in theory, so it should be fine to have around 100 °C configured as the value for the "critical" trip point.

The only adjustment I felt like I had to make was bumping up the "passive" point up to 50°C because I experienced stutters when watching 720p videos YouTube videos using FreeTube that weren't present before and (seem to) have gone again after the bump. Even at 50°C the phone still doesn't feel too hot, so I think it's okay.

Thank you for doing the testing!  Did you also monitor the CPU temperature while watching YouTube videos, etc.?  There are more "knobs" for the thermal governor inside the Linux kernel, so it would be good to know how close was the CPU temperature to the configured "passive" trip point value.

Has anyone gotten a word on whether it's a defect and whether they'd be willing to ship a replacement screen to those affected? I ask this because I already have quite the shopping list for the PINE store and they're all currently in stock (doesn't happen often) and I wouldn't want to order a replacement screen just to find out afterwards that they would've given me a one.

Unfortunately, I have no idea.  You may want to create an official support ticket, asking the same questions.  Due to unknown reasons, Pine64 has remained silent to quite a few recent questions and bug reports.

Expanding the guide above by adding a more "modern" (read: "systemd-centric") way of doing the same thing using systemd's tmpfiles, something that Arch and Manjaro users need to do due to the lack of a sysfsutils init script or service unit. I'm sure there's also a way to do this using udev rules, but I'm not that familiar with those (yet ).

Please note that the "traditional" sysctl mechanism is actually available on Arch Linux and, consequently, on Manjaro.  Thus, creating a simple /etc/sysctl.d/90-throttling.conf file, for example, would be all that's needed.  More information can be found in the Arch Linux wiki.