About

Ever since Motorola released the first Linux phone in 2003 (COUGH GNU/Linux COUGH), enthusiasts, enginerds, and those with crippling paranoia have waited for the opportunity to truly wield the power of Linux on their phone.

Well maybe not since 2003. But here, 20 years later, the aforementioned fringe has the opportunity to realize a fully capable computer in their pocket. Although it is still not ready for the masses; there are many bugs to iron out. Only the brave or foolish would adopt Linux on mobile at this stage.

Unfortunately I fall into the latter camp. An engineer by no stretch of the imagination, I'm a truck driver and tech enthusiast who adopted Linux when you still had to edit xorg.conf to see the GUI. And just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you. So when my Pixel 3a with GrapheneOS needed to be replaced I opted for the Pinephone Pro Explorer edition.

After installing three different OS's with three different DE's I realized what I was in for. I set myself to make a scratchpad to refer to the lessons of the past. If these lessons are useful for others, well, hotdog! But mostly this site was created because I'm foolish enough to buy a phone that doesn't quite work yet and my memory is so poor I'm not able to remember how I fixed something in the past.