I've been daily driving Poco F1 for months and closely monitor its development. I'm glad that Drew Devault has switched to it, But there are some major discrepancies with his installation experience and that of others incl. me on multiple devices.
1. Xiaomi unlocking experience is indeed a pain, But the 30 day interval has been removed for time between unlocking,Following the XDA guide should be fine[0] and SIM requires data connectivity.
2. pmbootstrap flashing tool works flawlessly if the device Wiki is followed properly[1], The only thing I would add to the installation step with pmbootstrap is enabling Full Disk Encryption before flashing.
pmbootstrap install --fde
And regarding the usage, headphones and GPS doesn't actually work as of writing but the location from WiFi (or) Cellular.
We had a small discussion about Drew's installation experience at the Matrix channel[2] where the actual SDM 845 kernel developers and device maintainers participate hangout, The general consensus is that he seems to have faced a random error during pmbootstrap flashing and probably didn't try again.
I flashed it dozens of times while trying to address this issue and none worked. I also tried packing up an Android recovery zip and installing that instead a few times. "Don't install a fucked up filesystem" was goal #1, and it was only after several hours of failure that I shifted the goal to "unfuck this filesystem". It was probably a more severe defect than you think.
I would really like to get more details about the pmbootstrap defect so we can reproduce and fix it. If you don't mind, I will send an email to your public inbox regarding this post, So we could have the details in one place.
1. Xiaomi unlocking experience is indeed a pain, But the 30 day interval has been removed for time between unlocking,Following the XDA guide should be fine[0] and SIM requires data connectivity.
2. pmbootstrap flashing tool works flawlessly if the device Wiki is followed properly[1], The only thing I would add to the installation step with pmbootstrap is enabling Full Disk Encryption before flashing.
And regarding the usage, headphones and GPS doesn't actually work as of writing but the location from WiFi (or) Cellular.We had a small discussion about Drew's installation experience at the Matrix channel[2] where the actual SDM 845 kernel developers and device maintainers participate hangout, The general consensus is that he seems to have faced a random error during pmbootstrap flashing and probably didn't try again.
[0] https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/poco-f1-ultimate-collecti...
[1] https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Xiaomi_Poco_F1_(xiaomi-be...
[2] https://matrix.to/#/#sdm845:postmarketos.org