I got my Pinephone (non-pro) this Monday and all my playing around with it seems to show that all Manjaro Plasma versions work fine (= as fine as is to be expected with beta level software), apart from the beta 13.
As soon as I update from an older version (tested with the very old one that came from factory, though there I kinda messed up with updating, but also with a fresh PlasMo beta 12 image) to beta 13, it stops booting and flashing a fresh PlasMo beta 13 image on an SD card (or directly to eMMC with jumpdrive) boots sometimes, (roughly half the time for me), but any subsequent shutdown and reboot fails to boot that image, even if I changed nothing (something broken on growing the file system to fit the eMMC/SD?). My boot process then looks like this: press power button, get LED indicator lights, get vibration, then nothing. No screen backlight, no screen image even with powerful flash light from the front (meaning it’s not just the backlight that’s off), no ssh server booting (which I set up on some installs prior to it being bricked) - but it’s also not off. Holding power button again doesn’t boot again, because it’s still “trying to” boot, I have to hold the power button for a long time to force kill it, then I can (unsuccessfully) retry booting with the same way. This happens no matter if I’m booting from SD or eMMC.
I’d like to provide more actual information, but I don’t have the UART adapter thing and with no screen image or ssh access it has proven rather difficult to get any logs - happy to provide more info if someone has an idea how to get to said info.
EDIT: I’m fairly certain my hardware is fine, as right now I’m running postmarketOS on the eMMC and that is stable and actually manages to boot more than once. I’d like to use Manjaro though as pmOS is quite a few releases behind on Plasma and I’m getting some general bugginess/weirdness in the shell from it that I didn’t have on Manjaro
EDIT2: I’ve flashed the images like the pine64 wiki described with dd: dd if=/path/to/image.img of=/dev/<sd device path> bs=1M status=progress conv=fsync
. When flashing directly to eMMC via Jumpdrive I got fsync failed for '/dev/sde': Input/Output error
from dd which suggests broken eMMC, but it still booted, postmarketOS is fine on the eMMC as well and the behavior is identically broken when Manjaro is on the SD card, so I don’t think that’s it.
EDIT3: It seems that Manjaro Phosh beta 28 is also not booting properly on my device while Phosh beta 27 is doing fine. I’ll see if an upgrade from 27 to 28 breaks again, same as Manjaro Plasma PlasMo beta 12 to 13 broke. — And it seems like the update broke, though it also did freeze the UI mid update so that may not be conclusive. I also just tried the latest dev release of Manjaro PlasMo and that’s also not booting, same issue. What change was made independently of desktop environment between 9 days and 2 months ago that could prevent booting?