>But pmOS really suffers from reliability issues – both on edge and on stable it seemed like every update broke some things and fixed others, [...] such as the media controls on my bluetooth headphones breaking [...] major showstoppers such as broken phone calls, SMS, [...] all of my icons disappearing from the UI
I would be surprised if these issues were because of pmOS and not because of Alpine. For example everything involved with bluetooth headphones or with calls or with SMS is in Alpine, with the exception of one ALSA UCM config file from the pmOS device-pine64-pinephone package that hasn't changed since 2021. In the ~2 years that I've had my PP (running pmOS Edge), the only time phone calls were broken were because of pipewire updates in Alpine repo. SMS has never broken. I don't use bluetooth headphones so I can't say anything about that.
Alpine is maintained somewhat "amateurishly" compared to other distros. Eg one of the main Alpine devs frequently makes commits to the packages repo without any sort of merge request or review process, which sometimes introduces new bugs and they then make more commits to fix. I'm not saying this is a bad thing, quite the opposite; it's just what the dev culture is, and it means fixes and changes go in quickly without bureaucracy etc. (And I'm pretty sure ddevault is aware of this.) Also while Alpine does involve pmOS folks in discussions about issues that might affect them (and many of the pmOS folks are also Alpine folks), things do slip through the crack many times, like the pipewire issue I mentioned and many others.
At the same time I expect these things to happen on edge but not on stable, so I'm surprised that he says he experienced them on stable too. I only use Edge myself so I can't say for certain.
In any case, to the overall point of having a phone that is 24/7/365 reliable at calls and SMS, I agree that "PinePhone running pmOS Edge" will not meet that requirement, for both software and hardware reasons.
I would be surprised if these issues were because of pmOS and not because of Alpine. For example everything involved with bluetooth headphones or with calls or with SMS is in Alpine, with the exception of one ALSA UCM config file from the pmOS device-pine64-pinephone package that hasn't changed since 2021. In the ~2 years that I've had my PP (running pmOS Edge), the only time phone calls were broken were because of pipewire updates in Alpine repo. SMS has never broken. I don't use bluetooth headphones so I can't say anything about that.
Alpine is maintained somewhat "amateurishly" compared to other distros. Eg one of the main Alpine devs frequently makes commits to the packages repo without any sort of merge request or review process, which sometimes introduces new bugs and they then make more commits to fix. I'm not saying this is a bad thing, quite the opposite; it's just what the dev culture is, and it means fixes and changes go in quickly without bureaucracy etc. (And I'm pretty sure ddevault is aware of this.) Also while Alpine does involve pmOS folks in discussions about issues that might affect them (and many of the pmOS folks are also Alpine folks), things do slip through the crack many times, like the pipewire issue I mentioned and many others.
At the same time I expect these things to happen on edge but not on stable, so I'm surprised that he says he experienced them on stable too. I only use Edge myself so I can't say for certain.
In any case, to the overall point of having a phone that is 24/7/365 reliable at calls and SMS, I agree that "PinePhone running pmOS Edge" will not meet that requirement, for both software and hardware reasons.