[allana]

The Allwinner A64 platform has numerous developers working on it compared to the iMX8, which has really fleshed out fully featured hardware support over the last few years. Running most Linux distros should be a breeze on the Pinephone!

[megous]

That's a bit of an overstatement. It has some interested and active developers, but support is far from fleshed out, especially for the poratble device use.

There are lots of patches floating around, that you can apply to the mainline linux tree, to get CPU DVFS, thermal management, to improve I2S support, etc. Suspend to RAM is nowhere to be seen, leaving you with always ON SoC, which will drain the battery in half a day doing nothing.

It's all fixable, but let's not pretend A64 has fully fleshed out HW support in the mainline Linux kernel.

OTOH, there's a great potential, because Quectel EC25 broadband module also runs Linux and has some potential for being hackable:

https://projects.osmocom.org/projects/quectel-modems/wiki

So there's definitely a lot of fun to be had with the future PinePhone. You'll be able to log in to your broadband module and perhaps modify it:

https://projects.osmocom.org/projects/quectel-modems/wiki/EC...