Here I begin a new serie of articles, regarding my new Pinphone. I bougth it in Nov, 2022. Since it is a developers' device, do not expect to meet a smartphone as usable as those which nowadays you can find even at you favorite fishmonger shop. Infact, you can only buy the PInephone on internet: https://pine64.comPinephone is my daily phone.In this article I'll share my experience with OpenSuse on the Pinphone.I installed it on a microSD card. First on a 32GB card, I then shrinked the FS and cloned it on a smaller and slower 8GB card (which maked the device responding slower). The OpenSuse version was with Plasma Mobile DE:openSUSE-Tumbleweed-ARM-PLAMO-pinephone.aarch64 Issues:First at all, you can't encrypt your system partition. Second, I haven't been able to change the dafault pin, although I did through the Plasma settings. Third, something quite weird; after installing it and rebooting a couple of time, I found out that the screen orientation acts weird: it is always wrongly rotated 90°counterclockwise!
To avoid this, you must go under Plasma Settings, Screen orientation and select Manual; then set it in LANDSCAPE mode. In this way you can trick it and get the usual portrait mode (remember, it screen was wrongly rotated 90°).
I didn't test the GPS yet.About stability, at the beginning it looked quite stable, then I began to experiment several reboots after typing the PIN. It freezes quite often too, sometimes you can regain the control, other times no. Generally speaking is not very very responsive when you rotate the device, a bit better when clicking on the icons, ok when typing.It seems to me that the use of the battery is higher respect to other Plasma's distros, it doesn't last a day (.ok, gps, wifi... it depends, but I usually test the distros in the same conditions).Megapixel, the program to take pictures, starts but stacks on its first purple window.. But now let's talk about the worst thing:on the pure phone side,the phone doesn't work! Under Settings, I got a nice "NO modem available". Therefore, no calls, no SMS
, even after the first update.Updating the whole system for the first time, means downloading less than 900MB.As said before, I haven't been able to change the default PIN through its setup, under Plasma Settings; nor I could change the password of user pine under a terminal. I achivied this by doing it as root. Good news:What I like is that generally speaking I found Plasma Mobile working better on OpenSuse than in other distros I tried (Manjaro, PostmarketOS, Mobian): USUALLLY windows fit the screen quite well (no span outside), and the scaling of not native apps works quite well too. But windows of Kwallet for example are always spanned outside the screen, no matter which distro I use. It is a Plasma problem. I personalized the desktop by changing colors, theme, icons etc, the KDE's way, and now I have a nice green theme. At the end of my test, OpenSuse doesn't work well on the Pinephone; without a working modem there's not much you can do. Said this, I'm pretty sure that there's a problem with my own installation. Infact on the website of OpenSuse it's written that modem, calls and SMS work, therefore something probably went wrong during the installation process. I trust the situation will improve in the future. I have been told that, on another distro, issues can be avoided by using a faster microSD; some of my problems could therefore be caused by my old slow 8GB card. On the other side, I'm not willing to waste a 128GB card for an OS which can be installed on 8GB...
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