[powersnail]

I have Mobian installed, and I don't have a spare SIM card to try calling and SMS. (I have tried postmarketOS and kde neon, and neither was good enough)

Functionally, everything else works: WIFI, apps, suspend, camera, music, etc.

I wouldn't use this as my primary phone, though, as it still crashed on me a few times. Many programs cannot adapt to the screen size effectively; buttons, menus are sometimes not possible to see.

It's not unusable, but not ideal if you want a robust primary phone.

Another drawback (if used as a main phone) is that it's really slow. In fact, it's possibly the slowest device --- with regard to user interaction --- that I have used in years, which is okay for a pinephone, as it is intended as a testing device.

[Mediterraneo10]

I agree on the slowness of the device. The Pinephone has been a huge disappointment for me in that regard. But I think that says more about the bloatedness of software in 2020 than the Allwinner A64 CPU in the Pinephone. Why does the old Nokia N900, with less RAM and a 2009-era processor, feel so snappy and responsive while still providing an interface that still seems modern today, but Phosh on the Pinephone has ragged scrolling and opening any new window takes forever?

[tmzt]

I wonder what it would take to install Maemo/Meego or even matchbox and gpe. I never had a Nokia tablet, but I had a Zaurus SL5500 and it ran gpe usably. Matchbox also does a good job resizing apps to the full screen.

I have run Mobian and Phosh on Pinephone and while clean it was slow, clumsy to switch apps, and did not size most apps properly.

[swiley]

RE: slow

Did you try an X11 DE without compositing? Wayland based stuff (like phosh) is almost unusably slow for me, but on mate and fluxbox everything is very fast (firefox scrolls at ~15FPS instead of ~2 for example.)

[powersnail]

That’s a good idea. Thanks! I’ll give it a try.