In early February, we echoed news that was a bit scary: the PinePhone Community Edition would no longer be manufactured. At first, we thought that something was wrong, that they could abandon the project, but in their note they said no, that it was only the beginning and what they wanted was to choose an operating system so that all pinephone the future will use it by default. That moment has already come and we already have a winner.
Personally and from what I have tried on the PineTab, it does not surprise me that what they have announced in this february note is that the chosen operating system is Manjaro. It works very well and, in fact, even though it was stopped at the tablet, they were the first to achieve many important achievements, such as good hardware acceleration or that the desktop apps fit perfectly. Arch Linux works great too, but I had always been confident that Manjaro would make things better. And so it has been, to the point of having taken the cat into the water.
PinePhone will use only one operating system from now on
What scared me the most was the interface. There is a lot of work being done with Phosh, and I don't like it at all. It can and does look good when we use it alongside the keyboard or want to connect it to an external monitor, but the tactile experience leaves a lot to be desired. For that reason, my favorite bets were Lomiri, from UBports, or Plasma Mobileby KDE. I like Lomiri better because of the gestures and some other details like the keyboard, but the truth is that their apps are not the best, from what I understand PINE64 and their choice to have chosen Manjaro + Plasma.
The rest of the information in the February note is less interesting, at least for one server, but I would like to know if they will do the same with the PineTab and if they will choose the same combination. The latest image of Manjaro for the PINE64 tablet was released in October, and it hasn't come a long way since then. In any case, it is another issue and another device, and the decision made by PINE64 seems good to me, especially as a Plasma user on three computers.