I'm getting ready to daily driver the Nexus 5 with Ubuntu Touch. I just need my SIM Adapter to come. So let's go over some essential apps that I am going to install when I daily drive this Nexus 5. Let's get into it.

Pure Maps

Let's start with a mapping application, now there's actually two map apps on the OpenStore. uNav, and Pure Maps. Pure Maps is the one I recommended because uNav was kind of laggy on my tests, and Pure Map has a UI that makes a little bit more sense to me. Pure Maps allows you to view the world and streets using MapBox although if you don't like MapBox it has other maps you can use such as HERE OpenTopoMap and my personal favorite, OpenCycleMap, and it also has navigation, and you can search for nearby venues from your current location using reviews from either FourSquare or MapQuest. There's two versions of Pure Maps on the OpenStore. The only different between them is the quality of Text to Speech voices, so you can download whichever.

Download Pure Maps Full Here
Download Pure Maps Slim Here

Teleports

Teleports is a Telegram client specifically built for Ubuntu Touch. It's very quick and it looks good, and it supports standard features such as emojis and attachments. Check this out if you use Telegram and you are using Ubuntu Touch. It's not as featured as the Android Telegram app, or even the Telegram web app, but it still very good option if you use Ubuntu Touch.

Download Teleports Here

FluffyChat

If you are a Matrix user check out FluffyChat, this is the Matrix client for Ubuntu Touch. It is a tad bit slower than Telegram, but that could probably be due to some of the slowness of Matrix itself. FluffyChat is a very solid matrix client, and it also has a bunch of customization options in the settings menu for those who like customization. This app even works on iOS and Android, and there's a web version too. So if you like Matrix, check this out.

Download FluffyChat Here

UT Tweak Tool

UT Tweak Tool is a tool for customizing Ubuntu Touch. You can change things such as the scaling, customize the launcher size, change your system theme to a dark theme, manage your apps, and even make your filesystem image writable among tons of other features, so if you need to tweak anything in Ubuntu Touch, check out UT Tweak Tool...

Download UT Tweak Tool Here

Webber

Since Ubuntu Touch doesn't have many apps, you are dependent web apps if you want to use Ubuntu Touch for daily use. So Webber allows you to turn websites into apps to integrate them with your system better. Webber is very simple to use all you have to do is enter the URL, and it will automatically add the name and icon which you can choose, and if you want you can customize the web apps such as changing the splash screen color, and editing the controls and url patterns. Note that at the time of making this video, this app doesn't work on the PinePhone although hopefully it will work in the future.

Download Webber Here

Utudu 2

Ubuntu Touch does have a standard note taking app, and it's meh. It does notes decently, and you can sync it with Evernote, however for to do lists, Utudu 2 is a much better app for to-do lists, although it's note system is meh. It allows you to create notes and to-do lists. It also lets you group them in to either "Today", this "Week", or "Other". It's very simple, it's easy, and it's great if you need a to-do list app..

Download Utudu 2 Here

I've been following the development of PureOS for about a year. I've been reading the Purism blog, and I've been watching Purism's and HackerGames's videos. I really wanted to Librem 5, but since I'm a teenager, I can't afford one. So I was very excited when I learned that somebody ported PureOS to the PinePhone. How good is it?

History

In 2017, Purism crowd funded the Librem 5 on their website. From there they started working on PureOS and Phosh for the Librem 5. Purism already maintained PureOS as a desktop operating system with the goal to follow free software foundation standards. So development began on porting PureOS to the Librem 5. PureOS uses GNOME, which doesn't work very well on mobile, so they start developing Phosh which is a mobile shell that takes advantage of GTK and the GNOME ecosystem. Most Linux shells used QT, so it was going to take a lot of work to make GTK mobile friendly. Purism started work on developing libhandy which allowed developers to make their apps adaptive and work across the desktop as well as the phone.

Phosh was being developed very quickly. In January 2019, HackersGame released a video of PureOS barely booting on the Librem 5 developer kit. Then only 6 months later in June 2019, Solitaire was working!

Fast forward to March of 2020, a PinePhone developer by the name of mozzwald created a port of PureOS to the PinePhone. This was done by taking postmarketOS and adding PureOS's root file system. However eventually the PinePhone developer Clover took over development of the PinePhone port. Since Clover took over, it has become less like PureOS for the Librem 5, and more like it's own thing. There are lots of weird hacks and patches that the Librem 5 version doesn't have, so keep in mind this isn't an exact port like it's advertised, and more like it's own distro that is just based on PureOS.

UI

PureOS uses the Phosh desktop environment. Now, I have talked about Phosh already, however, Purism maintains Phosh, so Phosh should work better on PureOS than most other distros. And Phosh does seem to run faster on PureOS than on Mobian, so good job PureOS.

PureOS's UI is very simple. You hit the arrow button on the bottom to reach the overview which shows your recent apps and app list.  There's also a notification center if you tap the status bar on the top. This allows you to change some basic settings and view notifications.

Given that Phosh takes advantage of the GNOME Ecosystem significantly, most of the apps follow the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines, so basically all apps have a similar design. If you use Phosh with GNOME apps, the experience in terms of design, can rival iOS.

Apps

The default app selection is minimal. The apps are Purism's phone and messanging app, GNOME Web, Contacts, Calculator, Chess, Clocks, Document Viewer, Powersupply, Settings, GNOME Software, Terminal, Text Editor, and Usage. It also comes with a dedicated flash light app and KittehPlayer which is weird because KittehPlayer is a QML app that can't fit on the screen in portrait mode. It's slightly different from PureOS's default app selection on the Librem 5 because it is missing Icon Browser (which PureOS comes with on the Librem 5), and PureOS for the PinePhone ships with KittehPlayer, Powersupply and a Flashlight app.

Any GTK app that can adapt to the PinePhone's screen should run flawlessly, although some are a bit slow on the PinePhone because they are made to be ran on the much more powerful Librem 5. QT apps also should run fine, but they can be harder to install because there aren't a lot of adaptive QT apps in the PureOS repo which means you are forced to use Flatpaks. And I couldn't get any Flatpaks to work, so I wasn't able to test any QT apps.

Web Browsing

The default web browser in Pure OS is GNOME Web. On PureOS it can load web pages at a decently fast speed, but scrolling is choppy. GNOME Web can actually load YouTube videos on PureOS, but they are very choppy, so the YouTube experience isn't very good.

Firefox ESR can also be installed from the PureOS repo, but I get some weird D-Bus library bug when I try to run it. This could be fixed by modifying Firefox's .desktop file to run Exec=env GDK_BACKEND=wayland /usr/lib/firefox-esr/firefox-esr %u --no-remote. After setting up Firefox, it runs somewhat slow, but it does work although I prefer GNOME Web to Firefox for browsing on PureOS.

Community

Purism has several matrix groups and email lists for PureOS, and they also have a Librem 5 category on the Purism forums. However, the PinePhone version of PureOS doesn't really have any community platforms other than it's git repo, and the Pine64 forum thread.

Conclusion

Even though PureOS on the PinePhone isn't an exact port of PureOS from the Librem 5, I still believe that PureOS on the PinePhone is a great choice if you want a Debian based distro with a bleeding edge version of Phosh. So if you like Phosh, check out PureOS.

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Hello, so I have been getting a lot of questions about the PinePhone, so I'm going to have one post answering all of them. This is probably going to be a reoccurring series of articles and videos, so if you have any questions, comment them below on this post, or on YouTube.

What operating system do you recommend?

Right now my biggest recommendation for an OS goes to Ubuntu Touch. Lomiri seems to be the least buggy UI I've used so far, and the OpenStore has a lot more mobile compatible apps than the repos on all the other distributions I've tried. However, even though Ubuntu Touch is the most complete, it is not my favorite.

My favorite OS right now, and the one I use the most is Mobian. This is the most stable Phosh distro I've tried on the PinePhone, and it brings the latest software additions for the PinePhone very quickly (for example, Mobian was the first to get a working camera app). However Phosh hasn't matured as well as Lomiri has so even though it's my favorite, I would still recommend Ubuntu Touch over Mobian.

What do the pins on the back do?

According to the Pine64 Wiki, The PinePhone has 6 pogo pins on the back. These pins will allow for custom hardware additions in the future. For example, we could use these pins to create a wireless charging case, a battery case, or an IR blaster. Because these are only accessible when you take off the back cover of the PinePhone, these could really only be utilized by a custom back cover, unless you keep the back cover off of the PinePhone. Luckily Pine64 provides CAD files of the backcover so anyone can make a custom case utilizing these pins.

Is it usable as a daily driver?

The PinePhone is getting very close to being usable as a daily driver. Ubuntu Touch is the most daily driver ready OS I've used. At the time of writing this, most of the essentials work great, but some network and cellular features are unstable or unusable, and Ubuntu Touch can not take photos yet, or use GPS, and video acceleration is missing.

The battery life is also hit or miss on the PinePhone. CRUST power management is great, and on the community editions of the PinePhone, you could probably go close to a full day on the battery (although I can't test that because I have a Braveheart PinePhone). Unfortunately the PinePhone Braveheart editions have a hardware issue where the battery drains even if the phone is turned off, so this would be very annoying if I tried to use my PinePhone as a daily driver.

The OpenStore is also missing a lot of Android apps that people need. At the time of writing this, the Ubuntu Touch music app can't detect my music, and the Ubuntu Touch Telegram app is bugged, so I can't see what I'm typing until I send it. The PinePhone with Ubuntu Touch is very close to being daily driver ready, but it isn't ready quite yet. I do want to try and use Ubuntu Touch as a daily driver, so in the future, I might get a Nexus 5 with Ubuntu Touch and use that as a daily driver.

How do Qt apps work on Phosh?

Right now Mobian doesn't have many QT mobile apps in it's repo, so I haven't fully tested this yet. But when I ran Pure Maps from Flathub on Mobian, it ran well, although there is some lag when zooming into a map. In the future, I'm going to try out Manjaro with Phosh, and Manjaro also has a Plasma edition for the PinePhone, so that means Manjaro should have a repo with both Phosh and QT apps. So that means that I will be able to test this very soon.

Can the PinePhone run PureOS?

There is currently not an official version of PureOS available for the PinePhone, but there is an unofficial port of PureOS available for the PinePhone. Keep in mind that this port is not officially supported by Purism, and you may experience issues.

Does HDMI output work?

Right now the Braveheart and Ubuntu Touch Community editions of the PinePhone do not support HDMI output through USB-C because of a hardware issue. However, if you have soldering skills you can get these versions of the PinePhone to work with HDMI out via USB-C. If you do not have these soldering skills, than in the future, you might be able to send your Braveheart to Pine64 to get it fixed.

Luckily, the new PinePhone postmarketOS community edition fixes this hardware issue and even has a special edition PinePhone for convergence with an extra gig of ram, double the storage, and a USB-C convergence dock.

Can it run Android apps?

Some Linux distributions support Anbox, but most of the Anbox apps don't run very well. A made a full YouTube video about Anbox on the PinePhone for people interested on how it runs. As a summery, on postmarketOS Android Apps are very slow, and almost unusable, but it preforms slightly better on Mobian, but most apps don't work. There is also a build of Android for the PinePhone, although that kind of takes away from the spirit of the PinePhone.

How do you create an app for the PinePhone?

Apps on the PinePhone highly depend on the operating system you are using. Most Ubuntu Touch apps use QML which is a language that allows you to make QT apps based on web technologies. For other OSes, it depends. Phosh OSes such as Mobian mostly use Gtk and Libhandy while Plasma Mobile OSes use QT and QML. In theory, any Linux app that can scale down to a phone should work on most of the OSes. So, if you want to create an app, just create a Linux app that can run on ARM processors, and scale down to a phone. I also have a video about building Phosh apps here.

Conclusion

I'm probably going to make a second article with more PinePhone questions answered, so leave a comment on the video version of this article, or on the article itself. If I didn't get to your question, than it was either a duplicate, or you asked multiple questions in one comment and its kind of hard for me to screenshot comments if theres multiple questions.

Thank you for reading, if you like my work, please become a patron, or donate another way, and join the PizzaLovingNerd community on the chat protocol of your choice.

Yesterday Mobian added in a camera app with support for photos. Yesterday I was unable to get the camera app to work, but today I flashed the latest and greatest nightly image, and I was able to get some sample shots. None of these are edited except for rotation changes because the PinePhone can not shot horizontal photos without editing them.

I'm not a camera expert, but even I can tell that most of the photos are very blurry, and low in dynamic range, and have a lot of noise. They kind of remind me of photos taken from a webcam. But the Camera UI seems good. Photos are very hard to take because the camera app only seems to render the preview at around 1 frame per second, so you have to time your show very well in order to take a photo.

I wanted to get video footage from the PinePhone, but everytime I've tried, GNOME Camera would either freeze or crash, so I was unable to get video.

My first draft of this article was going to just be me dogging on the PinePhone's camera, and I will say that the frame rate is bad right now. But after I looked at other sub $100 such as the Nokia 1.3, and the Alcatel 1X 2019, and the PinePhone's photos are still worse, but not by that much. So considering the PinePhone's price point, and the fact the most of the PinePhone's operating systems barely support the camera, with that in mind, the PinePhone's camera isn't that bad.

I still wouldn't recommend it to anyone, and the camera app on Mobian is still basically a tech demo (like I said in my original article), but overall, they aren't bad for the PinePhone's price point and software limitations.

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Mobian is one of my favorite operating systems for the PinePhone right now, and now it's even better.

Before today, if you wanted to take a picture with the PinePhone, it was not a fun time. You would either be forced to use something like V4L2, or do some weird media-ctl ffmpeg command line stuff that I don't understand. But now, taking a photo with the PinePhone is very easy thanks to Mobian.

Today the Mobian developer, a-wai posted a thread onto the PinePhone forum saying that Mobian now allows photos to be taken. He was able to do this using some new patches implemented by megi to the Pine64 kernel. Photos can now be taken using an experimental build of GNOME Camera, and the experience looks good.

Now, before you run towards your shelf or drawer, grab your PinePhone, and flash Mobian, keep in mind this is still very experimental, and is basically glorified tech demo at it's current state.

"This is far from perfect, and should be regarded as some kind of 'technology preview': image resolution is 720p only, and the quality is really poor atm. Still, I believe this is a major step forward!" a-wai stated on the Pine64 forums.

So this is supposed to be a preview of whats to come in the future of PinePhone software.

Now that Mobian can take photos, other OSes should be able to take photos very soon using the new kernel patches. So, you should be able to take a photo soon on the PinePhone no matter what OS you are using :P.

I haven't been able to get this work myself yet. When I tried, I got a black screen in the camera app, and now I can't login to Mobian. Other users have also been reporting similar issues on the Pine64 forums. I'm going to keep trying to get it working, and when I do, I'm going to take some photos using the new PinePhone camera software to test it out. So stay tuned for that :D.

Overall, I am very excited for this new feature, I am very excited to see this working better on Mobian, and I am looking forward to seeing it on other operating systems.

UPDATE: I got the camera working and I took some photos. You can view them here.

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Mobian has been getting a lot of praise from the PinePhone community. But is all that praise warranted? Well, it might be.

History

On February 4th, the PinePhone developer a-wai announced Debian+Phosh, a build of Debian with Phosh and some Linux applications. It worked exclusively on the PinePhone and used the Phosh desktop enviorment. There were not any special repositories or packages, and the bootloader and kernel were "binaries squeezed into the image".

After around 3 months, on May 14th, the Debian+Phosh team announced Mobian. Mobian was a still Debian with Phosh, but it now had a custom repo, and some changes under the hood in order to make Mobian easier to port to new devices. Right now, Mobian only supports the PinePhone, but in the future, they would like to port it to the PineTab and Librem 5.

Thanks to a-wai for answering some questions I had about the history of Mobian.

Installation

Installing Mobian is very easy, download the img, plug in the microSD card, and flash it using something like balenaEtcher.

If you want to flash it to the EMMC, download the Jumpdrive img, flash that to the SD card, insert the SD card into your PinePhone, plug in your PinePhone to your computer and boot your PinePhone, and that should give your computer access to both the SD card and the EMMC. Than you can flash Mobian to the EMMC using Etcher.

You may need to use a tool such as Gparted to expand the partition to be more than 16 gigabytes if your microSD card is bigger than 16 gigabytes.

UI

Mobian is using Phosh desktop environment. Phosh is a shell that uses GTK applications instead of QT applications like on Plasma Mobile and Lomiri. It's UI is really simple to navigate. To go to the overview, click on the arrow button on the bottom. The overview will show up with your open apps at the top, as well as a list of all your installed apps under it. If you tap on the status bar on the top, it will bring down a notification center like panel. I do wish that the notification center was a swipe down instead of a tap, because I find myself frequently opening that notification center when I am trying to reach something on the headerbar.

Given that Phosh takes advantage of the GNOME Ecosystem significantly, most of the apps follow the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines, so basically all apps have a similar design. If you use Phosh with GNOME apps, the experience in terms of design, can rival iOS.

Apps

Mobian comes with a lot of preinstalled apps out of the box. It ships with everything you might need out of the box, but there's a couple pre-installed apps that are very similar to each other. Mobian ships with both GNOME Web and Firefox, which means there are two preinstalled web browsers, and Mobian ships with Purism's messanging app, Fractal, and Telegram which means there is 3 messaging apps.

Most GTK apps will run flawlessly on Mobian, although some apps are a bit slow because they are made for the Librem 5 which is a device with better specs. QT apps also run surprising well on Mobian despite using Phosh as a DE.

One issue with Mobian is that adding Flatpaks is a huge pain. Flatpak is preinstalled, but it doesn't come preinstalled with Flathub, so you have to manually add Flathub. Also, for whatever reason, Flatpaks take forever to install. It took me almost 40 minutes just to install PureMaps off of Flathub, so installing Flatpaks is a nightmare.

Web Browsing

Like on postmarketOS, the web browser experience needs to improve. Both GNOME Web and Firefox are very slow, and scrolling is very choppy on GNOME Web. Although Firefox is slow, Firefox seems crash less on Mobian than it does on postmarketOS, and the UI adapts slightly better to mobile on Mobian because it puts the extra buttons in a menu. Overall web browsing isn't great on Mobian, but it is slightly better than on postmarketOS.

Community

Mobian has a semi-active Matrix channel, but that's the only community space for Mobian other than GitLab and the Mobian Wiki. Mobian's Matrix is decently active, but it doesn't compare to the likes of the postmarketOS and UBports communities.

Conclusion

Mobian is a great choice for those who want Debian on the PinePhone, and a great choice for people who want to try out Phosh. It still is still a bit buggy with Phosh, but not nearly as buggy as some of the other Phosh OSes I've tried. Overall, check out Mobian, it is a very good OS.

Thank you for reading, if you like my work, please become a patron, or donate another way, and join the PizzaLovingNerd community on the chat protocol of your choice.

postmarketOS, the supreme Linux distro for phones. Even iPhones can run postmarketOS, but does that mean it's good. Let's find out.

History

The history of postmarketOS is not very interesting. It was launched on May 6th 2017, with support for the Nexus 4 and Galaxy S2, with a Weston graphical user interface. Overtime, postmarketOS got support for more and more desktop environments such MATE, XFCE, GNOME, Phosh, Plasma, Plasma Mobile, and soon, even Lomiri. postmarketOS also added support for more and more phones, starting with only two phones, and today booting on over 200 phones.

Installation

Installing postmarketOS is a lot more difficult to install than most other OSes because you have to build it yourself. It is very customizable and supports almost any UI you want, but because of the extra options, it can be harder to install. As a summery, you have to install pmbootstrap, configure pmbootstrap, build an image and flash it to the SD card. I have a full guide on how to do that here.

UI

It's kind of hard to discuss the UI since you can use whatever UI you want on it.. You can choose a desktop UI like MATE, Xfce, GNOME, and Plasma. Or you can use a mobile UI like Phosh, Plasma Mobile. The choice is up to your. Plasma Mobile has the most features, but in my experience it is very buggy. Phosh is less buggy, and feels more complete, but Phosh is also very new, and GTK apps are still being worked on for it.

Apps

If you chose Phosh as your UI, there are 7 apps preinstalled. A phone and messaging app, GNOME Web, Cheese, Extensions, S ettings, and a terminal emulator. I don't know why extensions is preinstalled because Phosh can't run GNOME Extensions, and Cheese also doesn't do anything because it can't detect a camera. There also isn't an app store preinstalled, so you have to install gnome-software in order to install apps without using the command line.

If you chose Plasma Mobile as your UI, there are 9 apps installed. A file manager (Index), Kirigami Gallery, Phone Book, Pix, Spacebar (messanging app), a terminal emulator, a phone app, web browser, and camera app. Interestingly Plasma settings does not come preinstalled by default, which means it is impossible to connect to wifi without using nmtui. Like Phosh, Plasma Mobile does not come with an app store, so you would have to install discover.

If you install postmarketos-ui-plasma-mobile-extras instead of postmarketos-ui-plasma-mobile, than you will also get a not taking app, a XMMP/Jabbor client, a public transport app, a text editor, a document viewer, an email client, a music player and calendar. I kind of wish that phosh got it's own postmarketos-ui-phosh-extras, but unfortunately, it doesn't.

postmarketOS is based on Alpine Linux, and uses Alpine Linux's repository for most of the apps, and there are a lot of apps missing on Alpine Linux's repository, so you are going to have to use Flatpaks for a lot of them, despite postmarketOS not offically supporting them. Some of the biggest missing apps I noticed were Lollypop Music Player, and Pure Maps.

Web Browsing

On postmarketOS with Phosh, GNOME Web is very slow, and when it eventually does load websites, it is very choppy when you scroll around. But atleast the UI works well on GNOME Web. Firefox's UI does not fit on the screen in portrait mode and many websites get cut off. Firefox also crashes frequently, and the browser is set to a desktop user agent, so you get desktop sites (unless the site can adapt to a small screen). Fortunately, if Firefox doesn't crash, websites run great for the most part. On the Plasma Mobile side, Anglefish opens, and the UI seems mobile friendly enough, but I can't get any websites to load. So the web browsing experience on postmarketOS needs some improvement.

EDIT: There is a fix for Anglefish now.

Community

postmarketOS has a very big and active community. From Matrix and IRC, to Twitter and Mastodon, and of course a Reddit community because there's a subreddit for everything. But postmarketOS is missing a forum with GitLab issues, Reddit, and IRC/Matrix posing as somewhat of a replacement. Luckily, there is a PinePhone forum section for postmarketOS.

Conclusion

I believe postmarketOS is a "jack of all trades, master of none" type of operating system. It can run on more than 200 devices, but not a single one supports every feature (the PinePhone is almost there). It also supports almost every GUI you can think of, but it's also missing several mobile apps.

I think postmarketOS is worth giving a shot, but keep in mind, that it's not going to usable as a daily driver OS, even in comparison to other PinePhone OSes.

Thank you for reading, if you like my work, please become a patron, or donate another way, and join the PizzaLovingNerd community on the chat protocol of your choice.

postmarketOS is one of the coolest OSes for the PinePhone in my opinion because of how customizable it is during installation. It comes with barely any apps preinstalled, and it you can use whatever GUI you want on it. However, because it's so customizable, it is a huge pain to install. So hopefully this guide will help you install it.

Pre-installation

Installing postmarketOS is a lot more difficult than installing other OSes to the PinePhone. You are going to need a Linux system with atleast kernel 3.17 or newer. The Windows Subsystem for Linux will not work. So if you are using Windows, I recommend creating a USB with Ubuntu on it, and doing this process from that.

The first thing we need to do is install pmbootstrap. If you are on Alpine Linux or postmarketOS, than you can install it with sudo apk add pmbootstrap. If you are on Arch and you are fine using the AUR install the pmbootstrap package with your favorite AUR helper.

If you are not on Alpine Linux, or you don't want to use the AUR, than we will install it using pip. Install pip, and git. pip is a package manager for python that allows you to install python modules and programs. git is a version control system that pmbootstrap needs to download files it needs.

# Debian / Ubuntu / Linux Mint
sudo apt install python3-pip git

# Arch / Manjaro
sudo pacman -S python-pip git

# Fedora / Red Hat
sudo dnf install python-pip git

# openSUSE
sudo zypper in python3-pip git

Now that pip is installed, we need to use pip to install pmbootstrap.

sudo pip3 install pmbootstrap

Now that pmbootstrap is installed, we can start the postmarketOS installation process using pmbootstrap init but if you have installed postmarketOS before, make sure to run pmbootstrap pull in order to pull the latest patches.

Configuring pmbootstrap

Once you run pmbootstrap init, it should ask you for a work path. If you press enter, it will use the default work path. Otherwise, enter the work path you want to use. Once you select a work path, it should git clone pmaports to your work path.

[10:40:01] Location of the 'work' path. Multiple chroots (native, device arch, device rootfs) will be created in there.
[10:40:01] Work path [/home/pizzalovingnerd/.local/var/pmbootstrap]: 

Now it will ask you for a release channel. It will give you the choice for either edge or stable. At the time of writing this, stable doesn't support the PinePhone, so make sure to pick "edge".

[10:42:19] Choose the postmarketOS release channel.
[10:42:19] Available (2):
[10:42:19] * edge: Rolling release channel
[10:42:19] * stable: Stable release channel (first beta v20.05, does not have many devices yet)
[10:42:19] Channel [edge]: edge

Now it's going to ask you for your vendor. Type "pine64" and press enter.

[10:47:46] Choose your target device vendor (either an existing one, or a new one for porting).
[10:47:46] Available vendors (49): alcatel, amazon, asus, bq, chuwi, fairphone, finepower, fly, fujitsu, google, gp, hisense, htc, huawei, infocus, jolla, leeco, lenovo, lg, medion, meizu, motorola, nextbit, nobby, nokia, oneplus, oppo, ouya, pine64, planet, purism, qemu, raspberry, samsung, semc, sharp, sony, surftab, t2m, tablet, teclast, tokio, wiko, wileyfox, wingtech, xiaomi, yu, zte, zuk
[10:47:46] Vendor [qemu]: pine64

Next it will ask you to enter your device. Type "pinephone" and press enter.

[10:47:46] Vendor [qemu]: pine64
[10:50:15] Available codenames (6): a64lts, dontbeevil, pinebookpro, pinephone, pinetab, rockpro64
[10:50:15] Device codename: pinephone

Then it will ask you to enable a proprietary component for Wifi and Bluetooth. I highly recommend enabling it, otherwise you won't get support for Wifi or Bluetooth. To enable it, type "y" and press enter.

[10:50:39] This device has proprietary components, which trade some of your freedom with making more peripherals work.
[10:50:39] We would like to offer full functionality without hurting your freedom, but this is currently not possible for your device.
[10:50:39] device-pine64-pinephone-nonfree-firmware: Wifi and Bluetooth firmware
[10:50:39] Enable this package? (y/n) [y]: y

Now enter your username of choice and press enter.

[10:55:54] Username [user]: pizzalovingnerd

And then select your UI of choice.

[10:55:59] Available user interfaces (13): 
[10:55:59] * none: No graphical environment
[10:55:59] * fbkeyboard: Plain framebuffer console with touchscreen keyboard support
[10:55:59] * gnome: (Wayland) Gnome Shell (not for armhf)
[10:55:59] * i3wm: (X11) Tiling WM (keyboard required)
[10:55:59] * kodi: (Wayland) 10-foot UI useful on TV's
[10:55:59] * mate: (X11) MATE Desktop Environment, fork of GNOME2 (stylus recommended)
[10:55:59] * phosh: (Wayland) Mobile UI developed for the Librem 5 (works only with numeric passwords!)
[10:55:59] * plasma-desktop: (X11/Wayland) KDE Desktop Environment (works well with tablets)
[10:55:59] * plasma-mobile: (Wayland) Mobile variant of KDE Plasma (slow without hardware acceleration, allows only numeric passwords!)
[10:55:59] * plasma-mobile-extras: Plasma Mobile with more apps pre-installed (video and music players, pdf reader, etc.)
[10:55:59] * shelli: Plain console with touchscreen gesture support
[10:55:59] * sway: (Wayland) Tiling WM, drop-in replacement for i3wm (DOES NOT RUN WITHOUT HW ACCELERATION!)
[10:55:59] * weston: (Wayland) Reference compositor (demo, not a phone interface)
[10:55:59] * xfce4: (X11) Lightweight GTK+2 desktop (stylus recommended)
[10:55:59] User interface [weston]: phosh

If you don't know what UI you want, I recommend picking Phosh. In the future I plan on writing a series of articles going over each UI, so that you know which one to get.

After that it will ask you for some build actions, I usually just press enter to use the default.

[10:57:55] Build options: Parallel jobs: 5, ccache per arch: 5G
[10:57:55] Change them? (y/n) [n]: 

Now it will ask you if you want any extra packages, here, you can just press enter for no extra packages, or type "none".

[10:58:39] Additional packages that will be installed to rootfs. Specify them in a comma separated list (e.g.: vim,file) or "none"
[10:58:39] Extra packages [none]: 

Now it's going to try and auto detect your timezone. If it detects it right, just type y and press enter.

[10:58:48] Your host timezone: America/Los_Angeles
[10:58:48] Use this timezone instead of GMT? (y/n) [y]: y

And finally, we need to select a hostname for postmarketOS. If you don't know what to set the hostname to, I recommend setting it to either "pinephone" or "pine64-pinephone".

[11:01:28] Device hostname (short form, e.g. 'foo') [pine64-pinephone]: pinephone

Now we are done configuring pmbootstrap.

Finding your SD Card.

Now we are going to generate an image and flash it to the microSD card. First plug in your microSD card to your computer. If your computer doesn't have a microSD card slot, (which it probably doesn't), then use either an microSD to SD adapter, or a microSD to USB adapter.

Now we need to locate the drive name. Use lsblk -p to list your drives.

pizzalovingnerd@pizzalovingnerd-ThinkPad-X230:~$ lsblk -p
NAME             MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
/dev/sda           8:0    0 465.8G  0 disk 
├─/dev/sda1        8:1    0   512M  0 part /boot/efi
├─/dev/sda2        8:2    0     1K  0 part 
└─/dev/sda5        8:5    0 465.3G  0 part /
/dev/mmcblk0     179:0    0  59.5G  0 disk 
└─/dev/mmcblk0p1 179:1    0    49M  0 part

If you are using a microSD to SD card adapter, your drive name should be something along the lines of /dev/mmcblkX where X is a number.

But if you are using a microSD to USB adapter, then it will be something along the lines of /dev/sdX where X is a drive letter.

Flashing to an SD Card

If you want to flash postmarketOS to your microSD card, then run pmbootstrap install --sdcard /dev/drive where drive is either sdX or mmcblkX. Run this at your own risk. This will overwrite all data on the drive.

Flashing to the EMMC

If you want to flash postmarketOS to the PinePhone's EMMC, or it's local storage, then you we we will have to use Jump Drive.

First we are going to download Jumpdrive using wget, and then convert the .img.xz file to a .img file using unxz. Then we will flash Jumpdrive onto the SD card.

wget https://github.com/dreemurrs-embedded/Jumpdrive/releases/download/0.4/pine64-pinephone.img.xz
unxz pine64-pinephone.img.xz
sudo dd bs=4M if=pine64-pinephone.img of=/dev/drive

Now insert the SD card with Jumpdrive into the PinePhone. And reboot. You should get something like this on your PinePhone.

Now if we run lsblk -p it will show two new drives.

pizzalovingnerd@pizzalovingnerd-ThinkPad-X230:~$ lsblk -p
NAME        MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
/dev/sda      8:0    0 465.8G  0 disk 
├─/dev/sda1   8:1    0   512M  0 part /boot/efi
├─/dev/sda2   8:2    0     1K  0 part 
└─/dev/sda5   8:5    0 465.3G  0 part /
/dev/sdb      8:16   1  14.7G  0 disk 
└─/dev/sdb1   8:17   1  14.7G  0 part 
/dev/sdc      8:32   1  59.5G  0 disk 
└─/dev/sdc1   8:33   1    49M  0 part

/dev/sdb is the PinePhone's EMMC, and /dev/sdc is the SD Card.

And now we can run pmbootstrap install --sdcard /dev/sdX to flash postmarketOS to the PinePhone's EMMC.

pmbootstrap install

When we run pmbootstrap install it creates a chroot with the installation, which is then copied to an encrypted image. Eventually it will ask you for a password. Note: the password may be hidden depending on your terminal emulator.

[12:47:11] *** (2/5) CREATE DEVICE ROOTFS ("pine64-pinephone") ***
[12:47:11] Update package index for aarch64 (4 file(s))
[12:47:13] (native) install qemu-aarch64
[12:47:13] Register qemu binfmt (aarch64)
[12:47:13] (rootfs_pine64-pinephone) install alpine-base
[12:47:18] (rootfs_pine64-pinephone) install postmarketos-base device-pine64-pinephone device-pine64-pinephone-nonfree-firmware postmarketos-ui-phosh
[12:49:10] (rootfs_pine64-pinephone) write /etc/os-release
[12:49:10] (rootfs_pine64-pinephone) install
[12:49:14] (rootfs_pine64-pinephone) install
[12:49:19] (rootfs_pine64-pinephone) mkinitfs postmarketos-allwinner
[12:49:58]  *** SET LOGIN PASSWORD FOR: 'pizzalovingnerd' ***
New password:

Eventually, it will be done installing. Now just run pmbootstrap shutdown and will are done. Now if you boot into your PinePhone, you should see postmarketOS.

ERROR: /dev/sdXX is mounted!

If you an error similar to this: ERROR: /dev/sdXX is mounted! We will not attempt to format this! then run sudo umount /dev/sdX?* and it should work when you run pmbootstrap install again.

Otherwise, you are all set.

Thank you for reading, if you like my work, please become a patron, or donate another way, and join the PizzaLovingNerd community on the chat protocol of your choice.

Ubuntu Touch is one of the most popular Operating Systems for the PinePhone, so lets take an indepth look at it.

History

In Late 2011, Mark Shuttleworth from Canonical announced that by the release of Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu will support tablets, phones, and other "smart screens". Later in January of 2013, Canonical announced Ubuntu Touch, and showed a demo of Ubuntu Touch at CES 2013.

In February 2013, we got a developer preview of Ubuntu Touch for the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, the Nexus 4, the Nexus 7 and the Nexus 10.

Over the next few years, Ubuntu Touch gained support for more and more devices until in April 2017, Canonical announced that they were abandoning Ubuntu Touch. Luckily the UBports community picked up the project and kept the development of Ubuntu Touch rolling.

Installation

Installing Ubuntu Touch is very easy, download the img, plug in the microSD card, and flash it using something like Etcher.

If you want to flash it to the EMMC, download the Jumpdrive img, flash that to the SD card, insert the SD card into your PinePhone, plug in your PinePhone to your computer and boot your PinePhone, and that should give your computer access to both the SD card and the EMMC. Than you can flash Ubuntu Touch to the EMMC using Etcher.

After that, you go through the Ubuntu Touch welcome setup. Just select your language, connect to WIFI, select your timezone, set your device name, passcode, and that's it.

UI

The UI is using a desktop environment called Lomiri which was previously known as Unity 8, but changed its name due to people getting it confused with this. The Unity Game Engine. The UI is very unique and different from other OSes.

When you first login to the phone, there is no app drawer. Instead, you swipe in from the left in order to show your favorite apps. If the app you want to use isn't there, then hit the icon on the bottom left and it will show the rest of your apps. In order to go to the multitasking view, swipe in from the right, and you got all your recent apps, and you can close them and switch to them similarly to how you can do it in iOS and Android.

If you swipe down from the top left then it will bring you to your notifications. However if you swipe down from an indicator from the right, it will bring you to the page for that indicator. For example if I swipe down from the battery indicator, then it will bring me to the battery page of quick settings panel. You can also select your quick settings by swiping left or right while bring down the panel.

Most of the apps have a pretty consistent UI, probably more consistent than Stock Android's stock apps, but not as consistent in design as Apple's stock apps.

Overall, it is a very good UI once you get used to it, but if you are coming from iOS or Android, it might take a while to get used to.

Apps

The amount of preinstalled apps are almost perfect. There's no preinstalled apps that feel like bloatware except for that dedicated UBports app which is just UBports propaganda. This app should just be the homepage for Morph browser, not a dedicated app.

Ubuntu Touch apps take advantage a lot on web technologies. Most apps are written in QML which is a language similar to HTML and JavaScript, and also reminds me a lot of JSON. But, many people are not writing native apps for Ubuntu Touch. The Open Store is filled to the brim with just web apps. For example, if we open the Open Store and search for YouTube, you get 4 different web apps for YouTube and 6 web apps if you include YouTube Music and other YouTube web front-ends.

The Open Store has too many web apps. If I wanted a web app for something, I would download Webber off the Open Store and make a web app myself. I'd go as far to say that for every good native app for Ubuntu Touch, there are 3 web apps. So if you plan to try out Ubuntu Touch, get ready to be using a ton of web apps.

Web Browsing

Given that there's so many Web apps in the Open Store, web browsing should be good right? Sort of.

Morph Browser is a very fast and response browser. I think browsing with Morph browser is actually a lot faster than my Nokia 6.1 Android phone despite the PinePhone having inferior specs to that phone.

But Morph Browser's UI is pretty meh. For example the tab switcher is a weird tab thing on the bottom of app. And it can block some text on the bottom of the screen like the trending tab on the YouTube mobile website. And if you rotate the phone horizontally to browse, then the tabs on the top are microscopic.

So Morph Browser is a great mobile browser with a great browser with a mediocre UI.

Community

Ubuntu Touch has a very active community that you can turn to if you need help with something, or if you just want to talk.

UBports have a very active forum where you can talk about Ubuntu Touch, ask questions, get support, and help with development.

UBports also has a very active Telegram, and Matrix groups where you can get help with your UBports device and Pine64's forum also has a section for UBports to talk about PinePhone. You can also watch a bi-weekly live Q&A on the Ubuntu Touch YouTube channel.

Conclusion

Overall, I think Ubuntu Touch right now is probably the most complete OS for the PinePhone in terms of features, but, like all the other PinePhone OSes, it still needs some work done to make it fully usable for even your mom.

Thank you for reading, if you like my work, please become a patron, or donate another way, and join the PizzaLovingNerd community on the chat protocol of your choice.