Projects:PinePhone Daily Driver Distributions Testing

My results from testing of various distributions with the PinePhone to fulfill the Projects:PinePhone Daily Driver.

[i] Finished as of 2020. The winner is Arch Linux ARM from DanctNIX.

Testing Results

Mobian

Pros and Cons

• [+] Debian (almost as good as Arch Linux)
• [+] Aims to be as upstream as possible, built from source
• [+] Usually features the newest features
• [+] Most reliable so far

postmarketOS

Pros and Cons

• [+] Alpine Linux
• [+] Easily customizable (thanks to pmbootstrap)
• [+] Full Device Encryption
• [–] Seems to often lag behind other popular distros when it comes to supporting new features.

UBports

Pros and Cons

• [+] Usually polished
• [+] Built via debos from source
• [–] [–] read-only file systems, not intended to be modified by the user

sxmo

Pros and Cons

• [+] built on top of postmarketOS (i.e. Alpine Linux)
• [+] tiling window manager
• [–] [–] kills power/volume buttons easily
• [–] X11 instead of Wayland
• [–] smaller community

Arch Linux ARM

Pros and Cons

• [+] Arch Linux (and all that it entails)

Related

• PinePhone Software