In other software news, we’ve seen a lot of improvement to popular OS choices as well as introductions of new ones. In the past few days I have used KDE Neon, Postmarket OS and Debian with Phosh. I found all of these OSes performing exceptionally well nowadays, especially in terms of UI fluidity. Let me start with KDE; I was very impressed with both its new features as well as how it performs even when running from an SD card. The most recent KDE Neon image supports autororation, incoming and outgoing calls, auto-brightness and all key functionality of the modem. Installing most common applications, such as Telegram, was a breeze and I was pleased to see the phone responding snappily to the power button being pressed to lock the screen. Little things, such as volume keys working and a power-dialogue showing when the power button is held down, have also been implemented since I tried the image last. The latest image has a significantly improved battery life, a reduction in battery consumption of 30-35% from previous OS iterations, thanks to Sameul’s work on suspend. It is a real pleasure to see Plasma Mobile mature, and I hope and trust the PinePhone has contributed to the maturing process in no insignificant way.

The two popular OSes using Phosh as the front-end are Postmarket OS and Debian with Phosh; despite sharing a common front-end, the two systems differ somewhat in terms of bundled applications and some features and functions. Postmarket OS exposes – for a lack of a better word – more options in the settings menu and ships with a cutting-edge kernel (5.6). Debian, on the other hand, has a couple more features implemented – such as auto-brightness and the proximity sensor. Both have functional GPS, incoming/outgoing calls (with great sound quality), SMS support and well as LTE – all initiated on boot. Both also ship with Firefox alongside the default GNOME browser; Firefox works really well on both and scales nicely to the screen-size of the PinePhone. I am including a short video from an end-user, showcasing the most recent build of postmarket OS on the PinePhone.

In terms of New releases, NixOS is now available for the PinePhone for those who wish to try it out. I have not yet had the chance to run it but it is my understanding that all NixOS core functionality works well out-of-the-box on the PinePhone.