It's only CLI-based because the writer seems to be using the phone that way. That's how it appears to me anyway. Kind of like Linux on the desktop ...

Everything I've seen about the PinePhone suggests that you can go full GUI.

Not in my experience with Arch on the pine phone. Arch was the only distro where almost everything worked, but I have to do CLI updates. The GUI isn't really there yet for all of the basic and necessary administration activities.

Okay, perhaps some qualification needed: There are Linux distros, both for mobile and desktop, that can probably be run completely from the GUI. Arch Linux is not one of them, and is vanishingly unlikely to ever be one of them - consider that on desktop, Arch doesn't even install a GUI by default, and this is not considered even remotely a bug.

Arch can be run entirely from GUIs if you want that and so install them. There isn't one 'Arch GUI' no, but there's not really one '<distro> GUI' either, for your choice of value for distro. (At most some more exotic/niche ones might limit what can be easily installed?)

My point is that Arch culturally has an expectation that users will be comfortable with the shell. Perhaps you can run the system from the GUI once it's set up, but you have to get there which means setting the system up starting from a shell.

Yes, true, sure. Not to disagree with you, but just to say I'm pretty sure Manjaro (which is an Arch-derived distro with a bunch of packages/maybe bit of config chosen for you) can be GUI installed with whatever DE and probably never touch a shell just as well as Ubuntu or whatever.

Saying that actually you could achieve the same thing with `arch-install` which is now bundled in Arch's official images, you'd only briefly have to deal with its TUI option-based interactive installation, nothing manual.

The Original poster uses arch + sxmo as the UI. It has a GUI for upgrading packages, altho I rarely use it.

SXMO users like OP are a minority of PinePhone users.

The two more popular alternatives are Plasma Mobile and Phosh.

https://plasma-mobile.org/

https://developer.puri.sm/Librem5/Software_Reference/Environ...

I want it to be a dockable computer [0]

This is Pinephone Pro Explorer Edition able to run VS Code. External display is buggy though. On Pinephone the lag is really bad for VSC but not so on PPP.

Mobian Phosh has best external display performance I found

KDE Plasma Mobile is the one that is closest to a phone IMO regarding UI/UX.

[0] https://i.imgur.com/MhSB1us.jpg

+1

https://www.pine64.org/2022/01/31/pinephone-community-poll-r... shows most PinePhone users don't use the CLI-based interface.

The external keyboard probably makes it tolerable, but yeah, it's likely hard to deal with. I'd love to see how it works in practice, and how long the author keeps it up.

Personally I far prefer the CLI even on a touch screen because I don't get controls popping/sliding/whizzing underneath my fingers when I'm trying to do something else.

Use Mobian. It ships Phosh and plenty of phone-friendly applications.