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Adventures with the Pinephone Pro

The year of Linux on your phone

This past Friday (three days ago from the time of this writing), I received a Pinephone Pro Explorer Edition.

https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PinePhone_Pro

So fresh and so clean clean

Well, not anymore. I've already damaged it lol.

That is, I broke one of the SIM pins trying to use the supplied micro-to-nano SIM adapter. (I'm still waiting to hear something useful back from customer support.)

And, I dinged the top case (maybe the glass?) when I dropped it in an excited frenzy hooking it up to a keyboard/mouse/monitor.

I'm trying to let go of perfection - yes it's damaged, but it's still amazing.

I have a love/hate relationship with things that are new and pristine (or new and unknown).

I love them for their perfection, I hate that using them either physically damages them (through accidents or normal wear and tear) or shatters my illusion of their goodness.

Again - learning to let go.

Operating System

I'm running Mobian off of an SD card.

How to bypass the eMMC

After breaking the SIM pins and giving up on cellular connectivity, I moved on to trying different operating systems.

Like a dummy, I used the wrong Mobian image (the one for the original Pinephone, not the Pro) which of course wouldn't boot.

But, I had no way of knowing whether it was a hardware problem or if I wasn't getting the timing right for skipping the eMMC and booting off of the SD card.

Anyway, Mobian is a much smoother experience. The stock OS (which they recommend not erasing because it acts as a safety net against bricking your phone) runs Plasma. I don't like Plasma on the desktop. I find it bloated. And it feels worse on the phone.

Getting it hooked up to an external keyboard/mouse/monitor showed me just how capable the hardware is.

Any feeling of lag or non-responsiveness is because of the touch interface. It manifests most noticeably in two ways:

general lack of precision (e.g., you didn't really hit the button you're trying to click)
weird inertial scrolling when swiping (vs either Android or iOS)

As a docked device, it's so fast.

I'd say it feels on par with a Raspberry Pi 4.

One thing, though - it doesn't like the ethernet on my USB dongle. The wifi doesn't seem to be connecting to my 5Ghz, instead always attaching to my 2.4Ghz.

(Solved! I gave it a static mapping in pfSense's DHCP Server. But also, I have no idea why that worked.)

Daily Driver?

Yeah...No.

Earlier, I mentioned in passing that I gave up on cellular connectivity. I'll debug it eventually. I may need to try a different carrier?