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Comment by lvass | Hacker News Reader

Do these phones run mainline distros e.g. Debian? I'm thinking about getting one just for occasional ssh. Even a tty with the keyboard addon would be fine. Regular phones these days are such massive spyware that I'm not even willing to trust ssh keys inside them.

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Well there are volunteer groups that add extra packages to these distros and build images for them (mobian -> debian, alarm -> arch, PMOS -> alpine.) I think a lot of it will get upstreamed to Debian (if it hasn't already.)

On mine I run PMOS configured nearly the same way I have my other computers configured (same WM and everything.)

FWIW Debian can run on the pinebookpro, which uses a similar soc as the pinephonepro (rk3399 vs. rk3399s). There are a few kernel changes needed, but they might be mainlined by the next LTS.

So I would say maybe in a year or so Debian testing could run on it.

https://blog.mobian-project.org/posts/2021/12/28/pinephone-p...

It’s running already (well as close as possible for mobile). But they say «in a year» it’ll be usable as a daily driver too.

I was talking about the official Debian project, which is stringent about non-free firmware and patches to the kernel.

Mobian and Manjaro ARM are much more lenient about patching up their kernels in the name of device support (perhaps to a fault, but if the images work...).

If you are interested in Debian, look at: https://mobian-project.org/

I would call it....sort of official? It isn't Debian per se, but many of the devs working on it also are working with Debian to get as much upstreamed as possible (or are affiliated with Debian proper). It also tries to use upstream Debian packages as much as possible.

I run that (and develop for it!), and I have ssh on it.

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