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Review: postmarketOS 25.06 and 25.12
Quoting: DistroWatch.com: Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD. —
I was pleasantly surprised and impressed with how good the experience with postmarketOS running Phosh has become. Running this operating system felt like getting a hardware upgrade compared to every other mobile operating system I've run on the PinePhone. The interface was smoother and more responsive, more applications were able to run, the resource usage was minimal, and everything (except the camera) worked out of the box. (Some people might be wondering about making phone calls; the PinePhone's frequency range is outside of my cell carrier's range. Text messages and phone calls cannot work due to physical limitations rather than software limitations.)
Admittedly the PinePhone is a low specification device and, as a result, it struggles under the weight of some heavier applications. GNOME Software, for example, and the Firefox browser ran slowly and I switched to a lighter browser while also doing most of my package management from the command line.
Despite the struggle with some larger applications the PinePhone feels more like a proper (low-end) phone running postmarketOS rather than a low-end single-board computer (such as an early Raspberry Pi) as it did when running UBports or Manjaro. This is the first time it's felt usable as a mobile device or even as a desktop-style device. In the past it was more of a low-end server or embedded device which had a touch screen.
It's hard to overstate how impressed I am with how well postmarketOS performed for me during my trial. It's unusually light, it has a good collection of polished applications, the operating system supports working with Alpine packages, Flatpak bundles, and Distrobox containers. Most of the PinePhone's hardware worked out of the box without any effort on my part, and the operating system seamlessly mixes mobile applications with command line tools. The experience breathed new life into my PinePhone.
What really impressed me though was how well Phosh handled convergence. The experience it offers is surprisingly smooth and Phosh has a highly polished interface that somehow manages to bridge the gap between desktop and mobile computing without making either feel awkward. It was easy to use my finger to push a new window from my phone to the TV screen, then use the mouse to interact with the application window.
A few times in this review I've pointed out the PinePhone has low hardware specifications (2GB of RAM and a 1GHz CPU), which makes sense as it was developed as a proof-of-concept, not intended to be a device used on a day-to-day basis. By the time my trial was over I found myself lamenting that PINE64 no longer has an up to date model of the PinePhone, perhaps with a 2GHz CPU and 4GB of RAM. If they did I could possibly replace my desktop computer with an upgraded PinePhone, postmarketOS, and a docking station. Phosh running on postmarketOS really does bridge the divide between desktop computing and mobile smartphones and I hope the few remaining rough edges are addressed because this could be the full powered, convergent phone distribution the Linux community keeps seeking.