Been using PostmarketOS/ Phosh for a bit over 6 months now on my PinePhone and wanted to jot down some notes before trying out Manjaro/Plasma next.
Have been using Android for years and wanted to make the switch to Linux on the phone for a while. Pulled the trigger on a PinePhone early in 2025 and got off the ground pretty quickly. I went with PostmarketOS/Phosh as that's what a lot of people were recommending.
Going into this experiment I had my must-haves set at Calls, TXT, and Internet; nice-to-haves Signal and Matrix; and things that would be icing-on-the-cake like Camera (had heard it didn't work well) and GPS.
Right out the gate everything went well. For the most part everything worked out of the box and was easy to set up. My SIM card was detected and worked without having to mess with it. Wifi connected without issue. The UI and Settings were intuitive and easy to find my way around. There is a command line but did not have to resort to that for any basic setup. It came with the apps one would expect: phone, txt messaging, contacts, calendar, browser, camera.
This one was the one drop-dead end-of-the-experiment-on-day-one feature; if I couldn't make and receive calls/txts then what was I even doing? I had seen people talk about issues with calling and texting for years on Linux so I expected some hiccups but to my delight everything has been smooth sailing (besides some initial issues with Verizon but that will have to be its own post).
I'm not a big texter but this is something I need to work reliably for password retrieval, verification, things like that. Over the course of 6 months I didn't run into any huge issues. Once in a while it seemed like sending too many messages in rapid succession would cause one or two not to be sent (and I'd be alerted about these). When in areas with poor reception sometimes it seems like I could get messages coming in hours after I returned to good-coverage but I never had anyone indicate to me that I missed their message.
Interestingly, due to how reliable txt notifications are and how squirrely application notifications can be txt'ing has become the main way people now get in touch with me when timing is the more important factor.
Similarly, I'm not a big phone conversationalist but I did do a few long calls (2+ hours) catching up with friends and family as well as scheduling various appointments and playing phone tag with vendors and some customer support. I wasn't able to get calls working with my ear buds but I also didn't try too hard.
Similar to calls & texts, working Internet was another big thing, though I was willing to flex a little here. Again, worked when I booted up the phone for the first time with the SIM installed. It tops out at 4g but is fast enough for my needs.
One day the internet went out and I used the hotspot for my work laptop. Worked better than the hotspot on my Pixel 8a.
One down side is that the mobile internet seems to go down when the phone is in standby.
Signal and Matrix were my biggest nice-to-haves; I could live without but I do make heavy use of these services and would ultimately like to find an OS they work well with.
For Signal I found a nice little client called Flare. Doesn't have all the features as the blessed client but it gets the job done. One down side is that you have to verify w/ a Signal install on Android or IPhone so it looks like I will have to keep an old Android around to verify Signal sessions once in a while.
Matrix had a few options available in the store. It even integrates with the built in chat app but I couldn't get the session verified and had to give up on it. Landed on Fractal in the end. It can be slow to load on occasion but otherwise works very well.
One downside is that these applications only give notifications when they are open. I don't love it but I also don't mind as this allows me to get notifications when I want to get them.
I came into this with low expectations of the camera even working, however was pleasantly surprised that the Gnome Camera app worked out of the box without issue (Note: Megapixels did not work for me). Saw reports of it not working, crashing, crashing after the first open, etc but I've had no issues on PMOS.
It's a little slow to load up and take pictures and you have to hold it very steady. The resolution is low so it's not good for taking pictures of text to read later. It technically takes video but it's choppy to the point of being unusable. Some samples from my collection:
One of my nice-to-have's early on was the ability to use Slack on the phone. Not because I love Slack but because it's a convenient way to stay up to date with what's happening at work. There are no apps in the store, 1st or 3rd party, and even though it works in a web browser I was not able to get it to work on Firefox on PostmarketOS.
I had heard about an Android emulator called Waydroid and thought that could work.
I was pleasantly surprised that Waydroid mostly just worked out of the box. I had tried it a year ago and wasn't able to get it working but now it worked fine, if rather slow, which was expected on this phone. However, I was not able to get Slack working, I suspect, because I was not running a Waydroid container with Google Play Services.
I was able to get Bart Runner working, my favorite app for quickly seeing when trains are arriving. The timezone is waaaay off despite being set correctly but it's otherwise bug free and works great. One nice thing is that the app can be launched in a sort of standalone mode from an icon on the home screen.
When I first switched over from Android I did an export of my address
book to a contacts.vcf file which I imported to my Contacts
on this phone. I was hoping that it would always read from the file so
that I could update contacts anywhere and just have it pick up the
changes. But alas, this was not to be. I tried making changes elsewhere
and then re-importing the file but now I had duplicate entries.
WebDAV/CalDAV/CardDAV/*DAV to the rescue. I've been trying to avoid having too many services to maintain but this one ended up being worth it. Gnome has native account integration which allows applications to easily connect and use these services. I can now edit Contacts anywhere and have the changes picked up on my phone.
I got more use out of the calendar integration and task integrations than I'd expected. Very convenient to do these things when I'm on the laptop and pull them out when at the grocery store later
Since moving off centralized services I haven't been entirely happy with my RSS setup. Nothing wrong with RSS, I love it, but I just didn't find myself reading articles on my laptop. And I didn't want to manage RSS Feeds from my phone.
I ran across a service called Wallabag that allows for saving content to read later while offline, similar to Pocket if you've used that. They have the option to host for you but, of course, I opted for self hosting. Now I peruse RSS feeds at my leisure, click the "Wallabag" icon on interesting posts, and Read It Later on my phone.
Before getting the PinePhone I had already mostly moved to paper maps and written directions so I didn't expect to get much out of a Maps application. It can be a little on the slow side, and the GPS isn't always 100% accurate, but it can get you out of a pinch. The searching isn't great; it works best if you know the exact address you're looking for. But if you know you're close it works well for just browsing the map to find the store/address you're looking for.
Having a working VPN on my PinePhone was so far down my list as to be mostly out of mind but it is worth mentioning that it was incredibly easy to generate Wireguard config with Mullvad (my VPN of choice) and enable it directly through the Network Settings. It even shows up as an icon in the gutter to easily enable/disable.
There were a few things I was either surprised didn't work or caught me off guard in some other way.
To save battery the phone goes into a standby mode a minute or so after the screen turns off. While this does extend battery life it has the effect of disabling all internet connections while asleep (mobile data & wifi, phone & txt still work) which results in: No notifications for messages received on Signal, Matrix, or any other service that relies on an internet connection to notify of new messages while the phone is in Standby.
This leads to two interesting outcomes:
I'm torn on this because it allows me to see less notifications and to see them (mostly) on my terms.
If getting notifications is top priority I either leave the phone plugged in or enable Caffeinate in the drop-down menu (Caffeinate increases battery usage but I don't have a firm idea how much. I don't usually use it for more than an hour or so).
For some reason some apps, notably KeepassXC and Evolution, won't work with the virtual keyboard. This does set a certain limit on being able to "take care of business" as I can't grab passwords from my password manager should the need arise. I can get them via the command line but the exercise of finding the password and getting it into a copy-buffer is not one I wish to do on a regular basis. These work fine with a physical keyboard but I don't always have one on hand.
For some reason at one point my keyring got out of sync with my login and required me to enter my PIN a second time after initially booting up. I'm not sure how this happened as I hadn't changed the password.
This happened while I was traveling and tried to fix it by editing
some file in /etc/pam.d but ended up making the phone
un-bootable. I was able to use someone's laptop to install a fresh
PostmarketOS/Phosh on a spare SD card to get me by until I got home, so
that was nice.
The battery life is probably one of the main things that keeps this from feeling like a "real" phone.
For my daily use it's fine; I unplug when I get up and use throughout the day to send messages, check messages, check time, check weather, read articles. I plug it in again at bed time but I can easily leave it off the charger and it would survive quite a ways into the next day.
But if you do any amount of idle social media scrolling or watching videos you'll find the battery tanking fast.
PostmarketOS with Phosh is a very capable OS on the phone. I'll be spending time trialing other popular OS's but I have a feeling I'll come back to this one, maybe even permanently, at some point. After this I think I'll checkout Manjaro/Plasma and PostmarketOS/SXMO but later on want to do Manjaro/Phosh to see what differences there are.