Pine64-Arch VS Mumble

Phone has Tow-boot and the open-source modem firmware already installed. eMMC & sdcard have just been formatted & flashed to the latest Arch Phosh image from danctnix.

I flashed my pinephone pro with an arch-sxmo image (here: https://github.com/dreemurrs-embedded/Pine64-Arch/releases), and it works great, but I can't seem to switch the autologin to a new user. In fact, I couldn't find a conf file, neither in /etc/conf.d/, neither in /etc/tinydm.d/env-wayland/. I added a "tinydm" file in both directories, containing the line "AUTOLOGIN_UID=1001" (1001 is the userid I want to log in at boot), but to no avail. Any suggestion?

The keyboard is an important detail! Given the state of the PinePhone Pro, and that you want to use keyboard, have a look at DanctNIX Sxmo https://github.com/dreemurrs-embedded/Pine64-Arch/releases .

I was using the danctnix arch build running Phosh - https://github.com/dreemurrs-embedded/Pine64-Arch/releases

At the time (about 10 months ago) it was the most solid I could find. I'm a little out of date at this point, but I'll probably check back in on it some time in the next few months.

And I agree - even at the time it was a usable phone. A tad slow for my tastes, but hard to argue with the performance given the low cost of the hardware.

For comparison: Here‘s the (IMHO sane) DanctNIX PKGBUILD: https://github.com/dreemurrs-embedded/Pine64-Arch/blob/master/PKGBUILDS/phosh/phosh/PKGBUILD

I think Sonobus is overkill. I suggest you look at a couple of relatively old-school gamer voice chat tools - Mumble or Teamspeak. Mumble is open-source and the connection is always encrypted, Teamspeak is commercial but the free tier should be fine for you - but you have to make sure to manually turn encryption on yourself. It has been a long time since I used either, so I don't know which is easier. Both of them require you to run their matching server software.

Mumble's latency is unbeatable imo, it's basically their main focus and shows.

The sticking point for me is the lack of persistent messages, something the devs strangely think is a privacy plus. Issue open since 2016: https://github.com/mumble-voip/mumble/issues/2560

If you drop out for a minute you won't have access to anything that was posted in chat, which makes it useless for anything other than voice only comms, that might suit some business purposes but I've always needed to post links or screenshots in chat during meetings.

There's any number of alternative chat applications available, like Element, Mumble, Teamspeak etc.

Mumble?

I think Mumble might fit what you're looking for. It's been a very long time since I've used it, but it seems to still exist: https://www.mumble.info/ - I've used previously for exactly what you're describing, events with lots of crew dispersed around and no budget for radios. I had it installed on an AP running OpenWRT so it was just a case of plugging that in and getting people to install the app and connect to it.

Along with the options already mentioned, if you're not into TeamSpeak, there is an open source alternative called Mumble which operates in the same manner. No internet required, and is supported on multiple platforms.