The Pinephone Manjaro Community Edition smartphone is now up for for pre-order from the Pine Store, which means customers can reserve a phone that will ship with a mobile-friendly version of the popular Manjaro GNU/Linux distribution.

Manjaro ARM is very much a work in progress a the moment, but the developers have been making progress, and sharing some details of the latest developments in a series of recent tweets. A public beta is coming soon.

There are Manjaro ARM nightly builds available with three different desktop environments/user shells at the moment, including:

Update: Several hours after this article was first published, the Manjaro team released Manjaro ARM Alpha1 featuring Lomiri.

Among other things, most Lomiri apps are working, the Morph-Browser supports GPU acceleration. The setup wizard mentioned below is included. And there’s initial support for phone calls and SMS functionality… although phone calls are said to be “highly unstable” at the moment and messaging “might not work properly.”

It’s also worth noting that there are some key features that are not working at all in Alpha1, including the camera or vibration alerts.

Update 2: The PinePhone Manjaro Community Edition will ship with Manjaro Beta 1 featuring the phosh user interface. I took the software for a test drive on my PinePhone, and it’s definitely one of the more polished OS options available for the PinePhone as of mid-October, 2020. 

https://linuxsmartphones.com/first-look-manjaro-arm-beta-1-with-phosh-on-the-pinephone/

Update 3: Manjaro ARM Beta2 Phosh for the PinePhone adds support for 60fps graphics, HDMI output, and using the camera LED as a “torch” or flashlight. The Linux kernel has been updated, as have a number of packages. 

https://linuxsmartphones.com/manjaro-arm-beta2-phosh-for-pinephone-brings-better-performance-hdmi-output/

Update 11/24/2020: Manjaro ARM Beta3 with Phosh brings camera, web browser, phone call, and UI improvements, among other things. There’s also a new Manjaro ARM Alpha2 with Lomiri for folks who prefer the UBPorts/Ubuntu Touch user interface to Phosh. It’s still a little rougher around the edges though, which is why it’s considered alpha rather than beta software.

https://linuxsmartphones.com/manjaro-arm-beta3-for-pinephone-brings-camera-phone-call-and-gesture-improvements/

The original continues below, with a roundup of Manjaro ARM updates from September, 2020:

Recently the team shared a few pictures and videos that show off:

While the Pinehone Manjaro Community Edition will be the first device to ship with Manjaro ARM pre-installed, the operating system is free and open source software that should be installable on existing PinePhone hardware (and possibly other phones or tablets with similar hardware as well – there’s already an alpha build of Manjaro for the PineTab tablet.

You can find the latest Manjaro ARM releases at the OSDN website.

Update 10/19/2020: Manjaro ARM Beta 1 with Phosh is now available for download. This is the version of Manjaro that will ship with the PinePhone Manjaro Community Edition, and while it’s still a little rough around the edges, it’s already one of the most polished and user-friendly operating systems available for the PinePhone:

https://linuxsmartphones.com/first-look-manjaro-arm-beta-1-with-phosh-on-the-pinephone/

Latest Manjaro ARM news

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One reply on “Manjaro’s smartphone OS is making progress”

  1. One should not forget that hardware and software still are rather experimental…

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