Using postmarketOS Phosh on the Pinephone

After trying out a number of mobile Linux OSes with the multi-distro demo image, I decided to go with postmarketOS Phosh, since it's the only one that met the base requirements for a daily driver.

Installing PostmarketOS Phosh and apps

It turns out it's not possible to install OSes directly from the multi-boot image, but the multi-boot image does contain Jumpdrive, which allows images to be flashed directly to the eMMC from a desktop via USB. Use dd to flash the image to the eMMC.

Initial update would not work through Software app. Instead, I used apk upgrade -i in the terminal, and it worked. apk is the package manager for Alpine, which postmarketOS is based on.

I'm still not seeing any apps that aren't already installed in the Software app. But using apk add I can install whatever I need from the terminal.