PinePhone updates: 4 months
2023 February 18
I mostly haven't used my PinePhone for a while. It turns out it works okay for me to just be disconnected from my personal accounts while I'm at school and then reconnect when I get home. Keeping the PinePhone working requires some care and attention, and I'm busy.
At some point, a dependency changed and broke the version of Dino I was using. When an update to Dino became available on Debian's experimental branch, it wasn't built from the libhandy branch, so it didn't work well on mobile. Then my Mobian installation broke. (I don't remember if this was my fault or an update that went wrong, but somehow things went bad.) I tried PostmarketOS and ran into issues very early on. It seemed like it was going to be a bad time, so I quit.
Recently, Dino released version 0.4 which (among other changes) uses libadwaita, making it possible to support mobile formats better. It seemed like a good time to try getting my PinePhone working again.
I'm now back on Mobian (Phosh, bookworm/testing) with Dino 0.4.0, and it's overall nice. The mobile support is generally good. It looks nice, and it's actually possible to manage key trust now. (You just have to scale down the key trust dialog in the Phosh mobile settings.) Dino has been crashing a lot, and I don't know whether that's because of the PinePhone just having low resources in general or some other issue. Hopefully it'll be fine.