PinePhone Pro - Update
The last few weeks have been... busy. Some of what has been keeping me occupied has been time spent giving various tasks a shot on my PinePhone Pro. To start with, I was running postmarketOS with the phosh UI. Given enough encouragement, I could do things like send and receive SMS, MMS, and even phone calls. It was the encouragement that troubled me. The (understandable) choice to base the OS on Alpine Linux was not, in my view, helping me arrive at solutions any faster.
As one does when having run a variety of Linux flavors over the decades, I elected to try
another mobile-focused distro: Mobian. There was nearly a
chorus of angels when I booted and immediately had functional calling without having to
offer any encouragement to my sound settings. Configuring MMS to work properly took very
little effort, and did not require a reboot once I figured out how to make a recent NetworkManager
bug stop ruining my IPv6 life. While some elected to roll back that particular package, I
elected to simply disable IPv6 entirely on my mobile connection.
Convergence, or the ability to plug the device into a USB-C dock and use it like a regular computer just like I do with my laptop, does not yet work. There are ongoing efforts within a pretty spectactular libre software community, and while you definitely do not want me writing your kernel I can certainly break it in exciting new ways and provide detailed feedback on what happened. To that end, I have been much more active in various development channels to help with testing and review of pull requests. Seemed like a good place to start!