"But my friend runs a PinePhone as a daily driver" - eviltoast
  • Björn Tantau@swg-empire.de
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    10 months ago

    There is a Debian spin for the Pinephone called Mobian. I ran that for quite a while with Phosh as the front end. It’s probably still installed on the device.

    What I hate about ARM is that you basically need a separate image for every device instead of one for everything like with x86.

    • lemmeee@sh.itjust.works
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      10 months ago

      I use Mobian with Phosh too! What I love about Mobian is that it’s just a small overlay on top of Debian. The project’s goal is literally to upstream everything into Debian and to stop existing. You can see that it doesn’t add a lot of packages: https://packages.mobian.org

      Yeah, you are right about ARM. It seems to be true about RISC-V as well. It’s so weird that so many people think those kinds of devices will be good for us. Sometimes I watch reviews of single board computers on YouTube and the reviewers never mention that the device can’t run mainline Linux. They can’t install Debian from debian.org on them. So instead they install some distro provided by the manufacturer and for some reason they are just fine with that. Raspberry PI is the same and almost nobody seems to be talking about this. So that’s why I’m not sure if you can install a normal distro on PinePhone Pro or Librem 5, even though they can run mainline Linux.

      Also ARM SoC manufacturers don’t seem to try to have upstream Linux support. So I think that’s why PinePhone uses a 2010 SoC (if I remember correctly) and Pro uses a 2016 SoC. It’s a bad platform.