Why I left Pine64
blog.brixit.nl
Why I left Pine64
1–10 of 227 posts
Re: Why I left Pine64
#2On one hand, I understand your frustration here, for sure.
But on the other hand, Pine devices have severely lacked for being able to tell users what the best place to start is. I've wanted to back to my PinePhone a few times and had to ask, like, what is in the best state to use, and nobody could tell me.
Updating my PineBook Pro took a ton of investigating because the simple explanation of how to get from what mine shipped with to what new ones shipped with was hard to find, discussion of what mine shipped with was nearly gone already, and the process for upgrading it also had since changed!
As someone who doesn't build distros, your post is actually really nice for me, now I know I should just install Manjaro on my Pine devices! About time they picked something.
Re: Why I left Pine64
#3I totally understand the Frustration the author has here. But I'd rather have any working software version than 10 that don't work well at all and that has always been my pine64 experience. Great hardware, barely any documentation, important hardware and software features don't work at all or are locked behind a very old kernel version
Re: Why I left Pine64
#4On one hand, I understand your frustration here, for sure. But on the other hand, Pine devices have severely lacked for being able to tell users what the best place to start is. I've wanted to back to my PinePhone a few times and had to ask, like, what is in the best state to use, and nobody could tell me. Updating my PineBook Pro took a ton of investigating because the simple explanation of how to get from what mine…
I don't think the author meant that the problem was Pine "standardizing" on a single distro, but standardizing on a distro which has done (comparatively, AFAIK) little in terms of active software and driver development. By diverting people to a distro which mostly siphons up the work done by others, they risk poisoning the well and driving away the developers actually writing device drivers and infrastructure.
Re: Why I left Pine64
#5On one hand, I understand your frustration here, for sure. But on the other hand, Pine devices have severely lacked for being able to tell users what the best place to start is. I've wanted to back to my PinePhone a few times and had to ask, like, what is in the best state to use, and nobody could tell me. Updating my PineBook Pro took a ton of investigating because the simple explanation of how to get from what mine…
Even supposing your premise is correct (and it's not: diversity is good), the question becomes if Manjaro is the right choice, and it is definitely not. Manjaro is a very poorly run Linux distribution with misaligned incentives, poor practices regarding stability and security, and a history of problems playing well with others -- and they don't even work on the software that still needs to be written to make Pine devices useful. This is not the right horse to back.
Re: Why I left Pine64
#6I totally understand the Frustration the author has here. But I'd rather have any working software version than 10 that don't work well at all and that has always been my pine64 experience. Great hardware, barely any documentation, important hardware and software features don't work at all or are locked behind a very old kernel version
How does making alternatives harder to boot and pissing of maintainers of software components they rely on improve their quality long-term?
Re: Why I left Pine64
#7Well, Manjaro is in a path to make some money; they incorporated a few years back and made deals with developers of privative software like Vivaldi and Softmaker to make their software the default option. I can't blame them, everybody needs to bring food to the table, but after reading TFA I believe they're hurting the FLOSS ecosystem around them.
Re: Why I left Pine64
#8On one hand, I understand your frustration here, for sure. But on the other hand, Pine devices have severely lacked for being able to tell users what the best place to start is. I've wanted to back to my PinePhone a few times and had to ask, like, what is in the best state to use, and nobody could tell me. Updating my PineBook Pro took a ton of investigating because the simple explanation of how to get from what mine…
I don't think the author meant that the problem was Pine "standardizing" on a single distro, but standardizing on a distro which has done (comparatively, AFAIK) little in terms of active software and driver development. By diverting people to a distro which mostly siphons up the work done by others, they risk poisoning the well and driving away the developers actually writing device drivers and infrastructure.
This is exactly right. And also a distro that is just refusing to disagree with pine64 when decisions are made that impact all distributions negatively
Re: Why I left Pine64
#9Anecdote: i backed pine64's first-ever Kickstarter and got two of their A+ boards (i think they were called). They claimed high performance and full HD video. In the end i couldn't get a single Android game, no matter how primitive, to run at more than a couple of frames per second and Netflix was too jittery to watch. They've been on my poo-list ever since.
About 18 months ago i pulled them back out and ran XFCE on one of them. It crashed with the X11 error (i kid you not): "event arrived before it was sent (your hardware is too slow!)" (going from memory - it might have been phrased differently). i ended up giving them away to someone who wanted to use one for a pihole server, and i was glad to be rid of them. Utter garbage, they were.
Re: Why I left Pine64
#10On one hand, I understand your frustration here, for sure. But on the other hand, Pine devices have severely lacked for being able to tell users what the best place to start is. I've wanted to back to my PinePhone a few times and had to ask, like, what is in the best state to use, and nobody could tell me. Updating my PineBook Pro took a ton of investigating because the simple explanation of how to get from what mine…
Even supposing your premise is correct (and it's not: diversity is good), the question becomes if Manjaro is the right choice, and it is definitely not. Manjaro is a very poorly run Linux distribution with misaligned incentives, poor practices regarding stability and security, and a history of problems playing well with others -- and they don't even work on the software that still needs to be written to make Pine dev…
Diversity is good, but diversity is good once there's a baseline of support accomplished. From a user standpoint, PinePhone has felt like it's spinning it's wheels while each developer builds support for their favorite feature into their favorite distro, so you have one distro where the camera works and one distro where texting works.
I am not qualified to have strong opinions about particular distros, but I think Pine is extremely overdue for a defined reference implementation.