So fediverse, I'm battling through the break-in of a new #PinePhone right now, and figured y'all would have opinions or good advice on what OS to use. I'm partial to Arch from desktop use, but the Arch ARM stuff doesn't look like it's currently vigorously maintained? Already the pre-installed Manjaro with Plasma was incredibly buggy, but then again, it was very out-of-date. A system upgrade broke boot though, so now I'm looking at new images to start from.

Boosts appreciated.

#MobileLinux

@tiotasram if you want an arch base use this https://github.com/dreemurrs-embedded/Pine64-Arch/releases. Manjaro arm ports atleast for the pine devices are abandoned and have been for years now. They also always had problems with updates. That arch base is what everyone that wants arch uses.

@tiotasram I thought Mobian was default choice these days? :-)

@pavel thanks for the opinion! I'm new to the whole linux phone thing so I've got no idea what these kind of consensuses are.

I started with linux desktop very briefly on debian, then moved to Ubuntu for a while, and finally to Arch. I like the Arch release philosophy a lot and the AUR, but I can deal with whatever if it's more compatible/fully featured for the phone.

@tiotasram This whole "mainline linux on mobile" thing is quite new :-).

@pavel yeah, I'm experiencing that. With all the evil Google shit going on right now, when it came time to buy what would probably have been yet another Android phone, I pretty much just snapped and decided since I do have the Linux admin skills to fight the battle, it's time to try something different.

One main new phone motivation is that my old phone is ~4-5 years old and its battery life isn't what it used to be; it's starting to need an extra charge to get through the day, which is a problem if I forget. But as far as I can estimate, the new phone running Linux won't actually last longer, probably because it doesn't kill processes as aggressively as Android does (there's some nice upsides to that through). Probably going to go down the power conservation settings rabbit hole at some point...