The Pine64 community made the decision to use PinePhone as the default for smartphones a firmware based on the Manjaro distribution and the KDE Plasma Mobile user environment. At the beginning of February, the Pine64 project abandoned the formation of separate editions of the PinePhone Community Edition in favor of developing PinePhone as a holistic platform that offers a basic reference environment by default and provides the ability to quickly install alternatives.
Alternative firmware developed for PinePhone can be installed or downloaded from an SD card as an option. For example, apart from Manjaro developing boot images based on postmarketOS , KDE Plasma Mobile, UBports, Maemo Leste , Manjaro , LuneOS, Nemo Mobile , a partially open source platform from Sailfish and OpenMandriva. Discussed building builds based on NixOS, openSUSE, DanctNIX and Fedora. To support developers of alternative firmwares, it was proposed to sell in
in the online store Pine Store, stylized back covers for each firmware with the logo of different projects. The cover will cost $ 15, of which $ 10 will be transferred to the firmware developers in the form of a donation.
It is noted that the choice of the default environment was made taking into account the long and well-proven cooperation of the PINE64 project with the Manjaro and KDE communities. Moreover, at one time it was the Plasma Mobile shell that inspired PINE64 to create its Linux smartphone. Recently, the development of Plasma Mobile has made significant progress and this shell is already quite suitable for everyday use. As for the Manjaro distribution, its developers are key project partners, providing support for all PINE64 devices, including ROCKPro64 boards and the Pinebook Pro laptop. The Manjaro developers have contributed a lot to the development of firmware for PinePhone, and the images they have prepared are some of the best and most fully functional.
The Manjaro distribution is based on the Arch Linux package base and uses its own BoxIt toolkit, which is modeled after Git. The repository is supported on a rolling basis, but new versions go through an additional stage of stabilization. Custom Environment KDE Plasma Mobile