Pine64

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Pine64 is an organization that designs, manufactures, and sells single-board computers, notebook computers, a smartwatch, and smartphones.

https://www.pine64.org/

founded 4 years ago

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Current status of the PinePhone distros (mander.xyz)

submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hello!

I purchased a PinePhone UBPorts version when it was first available a while ago, but I didn't have the time to play with it then. I just turned it on and updated the Ubuntu Touch, and I am surprised that the most recent update in the Stable branch is from the end of 2020. I see that there have been more recent releases of Ubuntu Touch for other devices, but they do state the following:

The Pine64 PinePhone and PineTab are updated independently of the rest of these devices. The stable channel for the PinePhone and PineTab will not receive an update labeled "OTA-23".

This website confirms that latest stable release of Ubuntu Touch for the PinePhone is from 2020.

I couldn't find any statements on this, but I suppose that UBPorts is no longer interested in supporting the PinePhone - or atleast it is not one of their priorities.

I am trying to figure out what to do with this phone now. The wiki has a wide selection of distros here, but doesn't give much info about them. Seems like it would take some effort to sift through each one of them. Do any of you use any of these and can recommend one? Is it even worth to invest the time to install one of these at the moment - or are all of the projects equally stale?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I’ve been quite happy with postmarketos. It’s has been the smoothest distro so far.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago

This website confirms that latest stable release of Ubuntu Touch for the PinePhone is from 2020.

Lol, it's actually way worse - that 2020 release of UBPorts is actually based on Ubuntu Xenial, also known as 16.04 LTS - from 2016. If I understand correctly, they're currently working on making a new ubports release based on 20.04 LTS (rather than the latest Ubuntu long-term support release, this year's 22.04...).

My impression is that postmarketOS is one of the post popular, if not the most popular, Pine Phone distro among people who use it as a daily driver. It is being actively developed and used by many people.

If you like Arch, Manjaro might be OK, but my impression (based partly on this post) is that it is not a great choice.