I think I will continue using AOSP on a pixel phone until waydroid support gets a bit better. It takes a while to start waydroid, and by then I'm already down like 25% battery.
The "selling point" of postmarketOS is that it is based on the lightweight Alpine Linux, and it has a toolkit (called pmbootstrap) which is designed to make it easy to port it to stock-android phones, not just pinephone/librem5's. So whatever contributions you make to the OS will survive beyond this generation of phones. Also, other distros like Ubuntu Touch try to make their own weird userspace, but postmarketOS is nice because it behaves a lot more like the desktop linux userspace. Also, it's easy to run their pmbootstrap program to make your own image- it gives you a selection of DE's to choose from for example sxmo or kde mobile or phosh, and you can even set up FDE. What I'm getting at here is that it's a lot more "standard" and extensible than the other linux phone distros out there: they try to build on top of a minimal alpine linux instead of just porting a bigger distro like manjaro or reinventing the wheel.
Hopefully we will eventually see postmarketOS ported to a more powerful (probably stock-android) phone that has feature-parity with the pinephone (see https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices#Community). I would definitely miss the extensibility and open-ness of the pinephone; ideally a company like pine64 just iterates on the pinephone until the hardware is usable, and the software meets it in the middle.
Yes. I'm not sure I understand your question though. A big use case for PostmarketOS is software for a mobile phone, so that's my use case.
Was that a mistake or does it get lumped together with the OG PunePhone?
The normal PinePhone is one of the main devices, so it seems that that one has way better support.
TL;DR: Pine64 creates the hardware, but pretty much depends on the community to get software support. As a result, software support for the Pinephone Pro is incomplete. That being said, PostmarketOS probably has some of the best support for the Pinephone Pro
- Displays text on screen
- Responds to touch input for navigating a contact list and call functions
- Initiates and terminates calls
- Operates the handsfree speaker
- Shows battery status
- Basic text input
- Provides gsm connectivity, no internet, no bluetooth
- Its a dumb os doing nothing more than the above - nada, nil.
I am not being sarcastic, but i would install such an “os” on spare smartphones in a heartbeat. It would save on battery, reduce waste and enhance my privacy. I am not knowledgeable on the topic otherwise i’d do it myself. Hopefully someone with experience can make it happen.
> So far, what works for Samsung Galaxy S III LTE (samsung-m3) also works for the samsung-m0 (Galaxy S III international GSM version without LTE, Also known as Galaxy S III 3G SHW-M440S in South Korea) and samsung-shv-e210s (a Korean variant). (None of these S III models should be confused with the North American S III models, which require OS builds.)
[0] https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Samsung_Galaxy_S_III_(sam...
The only weird choice is not having systemd and also using musl due to being based on Alpine ;)
