This is also a pretty good link: https://wiki.mobian-project.org/doku.php

Its a wiki for a lot of tips and tricks to get Mobian working on the Pinephone. It has a couple of other devices it will run on, but the Pinephone/Librem 5 are the most mature.

(Disclaimer: I'm one of the devs for Mobian).

One of the key FAQs missing is: Is it ready? Should I use it? What should I expect my experience to be?

I like to think Mobian is one of the "mature" Pinephone Distros, i.e. if there is something that doesn't work on Mobian, it will not work on any Pinephone/Librem 5 Distro.

> Should I use it?

I mean...of course i will say "yes you should!", so I guess I am more curious what you are expecting or if you have specific expectations?

> What should I expect my experience to be?

Mobian uses Phosh as the default environment, so if you have used any Pinephone Distribution with Phosh, that's about what to expect.

If you have not used Phosh....well to be honest I do not know of any good Video reviews for it, but I imagine such videos exist.

That doesn't exactly answer the question though on expectations. Is the OS stable? Are there apps that crash a lot? Should I be aware of any shortcomings that would hamper a normal phone experience?

Unfortunately expectations are very individual based, which was why many of my answers were not very helpful.

> Is the OS stable? Are there apps that crash a lot?

The OS and the apps are stable, Mobian is based on testing/sid, but if we have apps that arenot a part of Debian proper, we try to make sure they are stable.

> Should I be aware of any shortcomings that would hamper a normal phone experience?

Using it as a phone is almost there, but for me, the notable shortcoming is the lack of MMS. This is being worked on (actually I have been the primary person to work on it), and I am hoping it will be included sooner than later (within the next couple of months). I have also been working on getting Visual Voicemail to work.

Wifi Calling also does not work, and no efforts have been made on that.

But Calls, SMS, Voicemail, VoLTE (though this can be carrier dependent) all work!

Compared to other distros on the pinephone, it's hampered by having Debian as a base system. The pinephone's singular camera program Megapixels is stuck on an older version on Mobian, because the newer versions require GTK 4, which Debian and thus Mobian does not package.

(You can of course compile the GTK 4 stack yourself if you want. It's Linux after all.)

Yep. So far the plan is once Bullseye moves to stable, I think we are going to look into porting GTK4 into Mobian, as Megapixels and a few other apps are moving to GTK4.

Mobian is targeting Debian Testing/Sid. Debian is currently in freeze but after the upcoming release Mobian will start getting regular updates for every package.

By "upstreaming to the original projects", does this include upstreaming changes and packages to Debian, so that stock Debian will work as well as possible on these devices?

That is the idea yes. Many of the Mobian Devs are also on the Debian on Mobile Team

Debian on Mobile team: https://salsa.debian.org/DebianOnMobile-team

Mobian Team: https://gitlab.com/mobian1

They need to make that the homepage, atleast temporarily!