Thanks for the offer, ondoho
But I hate giving up on things, except to take a break till my anxiety with it settles down.
(My anxiety is frustration-driven, and causes massive cognitive disruption.)

I'll get it eventually.

Glad to see you're still trying. Just a note. I've been seeing some really good reviews on Mobian and Manjaro ARM on YouTube recently. You might check those videos out, in fact it seems those users are starting to prefer phosh(purism) over lomiri(ubports). This makes a lot of sense to me since phosh is based on the GTK stack and allows you to run desktop apps out of the box, even if the don't fit on the screen. The same can be said for plasma mobile even though it uses the QT stack.

I've just recently been able to boot ubports on my Raspberry Pi 3B. So I've got a feel for what it actually is. The convergence is nice but you have to jump through several hoops to get X or wayland apps to run, hopefully they can improve on this.

I also seen where one of the lead devs from PostmarketOS has released a video showing the state of the software that will ship with the next CE. It looked great to me. I can hardly wait :D

If you decide to try Maemo Leste, they have a very active mailing list, a subforum on https://talk.maemo.org/ and many more channels.

The stumbling block is that battery issue - and the fixes suggested via that "Crust" simply won't work, they just crash the phone. Until that gets solved, it will stay a brick.
No time for it any more for a while.

So are you saying that none of the OS's for the PinePhone have Crust in a usable state?

^ IIRC binkyd was saying that Crust is not installed on the system they tried, and they did not succeed in installing/configuring it.

You wrote this yourself, assuming it is true that would be one way to proceed I guess.

Correct. I'm just trying to find out how a Linux phone could be a "brick" when there's a big selection of OS's to use.

Good ol' Android terminology I guess.

Well my PostmarketOS CE is ordered :D I find it interesting that PinePhones on eb@y were selling for well over $200 until the exact day that the next version was announced. After that the phones didn't even get a single bid until a day or so ago.

Sorry but what do you deduce from that?

Mostly just observation. Also that the ubports/Braveheart usb c display bug is supposed to be fixed in the next version, making these versions not quite as desirable anymore, hence the price drop on ebay. There are some used PinePhones listed on eBay right now for over $250. In fact there's one listed at over $500 right now! I don't understand why people think they have a gold mine with a low spec $150 phone.

OK, I understand that.

I can explain that. When I bought my Pinebook (110EUR incl. extra storage) it kept adding up shipping, paypal fees, and finally import taxes, to 213EUR total!
So a 150$ Pinephone might end up costing double that in the end!
(asking 500$ seems delusional though)

Yes I understand. Have you seen the July Report? Looks like they're trying out a different method for shipping to the EU to avoid a lot of that. I hope it pans out.

OK.

No matter what I try, I can't get this UBports to work. It simply does not do what the instruction manual says.
It bricks at every attempt to update.

Needs something called "Classic Application Support" in order to create containers, which is like step 2 - can somebody tell me where I can find some info about this?
Nothing comes up on the Ubports community forum.

Battery still sucks.

And my flailing around has caused me to detest the interface.

Looking for recommendations on replacing it with another OS.

You don't need to replace the current os to try a new OS. Just flash a micro sd card with a different OS and boot. Right now Mobian and Manjaro seem to be ahead in features, I'm sure it's not saying much and that's changing constantly, but let us know how they run on your phone.