[kwlug-disc] PinePhone woes

[Chris Irwin]

On Tue, Nov 02, 2021 at 02:32:04AM -0400, Paul Nijjar via kwlug-disc wrote:
>At the beginning of his presentation, Brent suggested that the
>PinePhone was not living up to its promise as a phone. What have the
>deficiencies been?

Full disclaimer: I bought it with full expectations that it would be 
unusable as a phone.

That said, my issue is mostly around the usability of distros on the 
phone. They're difficult to use -- rough GUI edges aside.

It seems the most effort seems to be in PostMarketOS, a distro based on 
Alpine Linux. They have a number of front-end options, and there seems 
to be some smart people behind it, decent instructions for building 
custom images, etc. Problem is, I find Alpine Linux cumbersome. Updates 
sometimes don't install, software selection is quirky. Flatpaks don't 
work out of the box, and after tweaking, still don't seem to work quite 
right.

I did find a Fedora image somebody made, which would be much more 
interesting to me. It works, but is a weird mix of rawhide and old 
packages, and weird config changes. Not a stable platform for use. The 
build scripts were very rough shell scripts that required root and 
mucked with loopback block devices and dd -- I didn't trust it enough to 
run on my primary machine.

I plan on trying to figure out how Fedora builds RasPi images, so I can 
adapt that procedure to build a proper-ish Fedora image. Problem is, 
I've been planning to do this for some time. I'm very time limited 
lately, and I haven't made it very far in my research. I have no idea 
how the RasPi or other device-specific images are assembled.

-- 
Chris Irwin

email:   chris at chrisirwin.ca
  xmpp:   chris at chrisirwin.ca
   web: https://chrisirwin.ca