banazir, 1 year ago

I have a Mobian community edition PinePhone with postmarketOS and it is my daily driver. It suits my humble needs, but these few years have been a mixed bag. Especially with Mobian I’ve had periods of it working great, punctuated by periods with annoying issues. I stopped using the phone for a while when it suddenly stopped taking calls but I didn’t notice since there was no indication of trouble. My family reported me missing when they couldn’t reach me after a few days. Luckily that was then sorted out, but it wasn’t great. This hasn’t happened since.

postmarketOS has been pretty solid and seems to perform better than Mobian.

After a few years I’m starting to think I need a new battery, but the official store has been out of stock for a while. I’m not sure if they will ever get more parts. Communication from Pine64 has also slowed down to a crawl, which is not great. At least their official monthly blog was last updated in august. At the moment I’m somewhat skeptical of their future. We’ll see.

Be warned though: the PinePhone can browse the web and banking probably works, but watching, say, youtube is not going to be a great experience. You’re probably better off using alternative solutions like Pipeline. The PinePhone is not a powerful machine and you will have tinker every now and then.

Having said all that, if you set your expectations correctly you can probably get along with a PinePhone as your daily driver. I’m not sure if I can recommend it because there are many caveats, but in the end you know your needs and what you’re comfortable with better than I do. I like my PinePhone and I surely wish more people get Linux phones and that the ecosystem evolves.