I think I'm reading this blogpost correctly: Mobian devs working on maintaining Linux kernel support for Pinephone painted themselves into a corner with tech debt, and may not be able to continue porting new kernel updates. Pinephone Pro runs a different chipset with wider community support, so it's not affected.
I didn't see any communities or articles talking about this, so either it's not a big deal, or nobody is talking about it.
I've recently decided to just focus on turning my OG pinephone into a mobile hotspot (and maybe running some remote services on it eventually). It's booting postmarketos but just to a login shell. I ssh into it from the usb tether if I need to make changes. It's working pretty well but sometimes after several hours the modem drops off the mobile network and I can't get it to reconnect even by hard power cycling. The next day when I pull it out again it has reconnected and works again.
Couldnt you also just use a WWAN adapter? I dont know what Laptops have that.
I'm sure I could but then what would I use my pinephone for? :)
Tor server! Always the right answer
Haha, I've actually considered something along those lines. I wonder how Verizon would feel about someone hosting such a server on a phone using their network.
Its not illegal unless its an exit node, and even that works in some cases.