Logout recently wrote a great phlog 
that discussed a number of alternative 
mobile OSes.[1] Back in November, I 
ordered a Pinephone (which arrived 
some time in February), so I've been 
following the development of operating 
systems for that device ever since.

There is a list of OSes currently in 
development for the Pinephone at their 
Wiki.[2]

Among those that stand out that were 
not mentioned in Logout's phlog are 
PureOS, which was developed for the 
Librem5 smartphone (and a port is 
available for the Pinephone); nemo 
mobile (which combines the open 
source parts of Sailfish with a libre 
GUI); and a number of GNU/Linux 
distributions that run natively on the 
phone.

For me, the most exciting of those 
distributions is a Debian-on-ARM image 
that makes use of the Phosh desktop 
environment from PureOS. Calling, 
texting, and data already work. A lot 
of Debian applications also work, 
though many need their GUIs resized. 
Some, of course, have not been ported 
to ARM (yet). Hats off to the 
developer, a-wai.[3] It's truly 
amazing what one person can 
accomplish!

I am really looking forward to the day 
that I can run Debian on my phone, 
especially since a clamshell keyboard 
is in the works, and the device can 
output USB-C to HDMI. Convergence is 
almost here!

The main drawback at this point -- 
which affects all of the OS candidates 
-- is power consumption. Very few 
power-saving features have been 
implemented. At present, the most you 
can hope for is about 9 hours of 
battery life on standby.


----


For those of you who make use of the 
circumlunar.space XMPP server, I have 
a new VPS provider and am in the 
process of restoring from backups. It 
should be running again soon. I'll 
post an update as soon as it's 
working. If I can't get it running 
from the backup, I'll be emailing you 
a new password.



[1] gopher://i-logout.cz/0/phlog/posts/2020-04-07_alternative_operating_systems_for_smartphones.txt

[2] https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php/PinePhone_Software_Release

[3] https://gitlab.com/a-wai