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Why I left Pine64

blog.brixit.nl

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Re: Why I left Pine64

#11

Post by jovial_cavalier »

detaro wrote: post #6
dtx1 wrote: post #3

I 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?

It's an entity that's in a position to make a design decision - "We will have one bootloader flashed onto the eMMC - the same for every device we produce." It creates a standard which users and developers alike can fix themselves to. It is definitely a good thing, if you are worried about productizing -- but perhaps not so great if you want a diverse community of hackers.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#12

Post by neilv »

It's good to see Martijn Braam fought the good fight on things like the PinePhone Pro bootloader in eMMC, and I'm sorry to hear the situation became untenable.

After Pine64 went to all the trouble to make a series of branded early developer editions for various distros, and ongoing community goodwill outreaches, I didn't expect something like this to happen.

IMHO, any handheld hardware right now wanting to be open and sustainable Linux should probably start by making sure it's solid with PostmarketOS configured with a mainline kernel, as a good test. (PostmarketOS is a litmus test for purity, and has had a bunch of work to make bringing it up easier than the usual server/desktop purity test of Debian.) Working Phosh and Plasma userlands running atop PostmarketOS are good further tests. Supporting additional distros, userlands, and hacking is also important.

(Even if the hardware is something like the Purism Librem 5, which has invested heavily in lots of good distro work, if PostmarketOS with mainline kernel boots cleanly and runs solidly, that's a good sign.)

Re: Why I left Pine64

#13

Post by ddevault »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #10
ddevault wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Pi…

I don't entirely disagree. In fact I wrote a blog post making similar arguments:

https://drewdevault.com/2022/01/18/Pine64s-weird-priorities....

Ideally Pine64 would be facilitating the development of a software stack which is then shared among the distributions. But, that's not what they're doing -- they're all-in on relying 100% on "the community" to produce the software. So, given this constraint, are they doing it well?

The answer is "no". Choosing Manjaro alone is not going to get the software built. As explained in TFA, the previous solution encouraging diversity did more to get the software built and is largely attributable for the platform's initial success in building out basic software support. Manjaro does not have a monopoly on the software experts, in fact, they have none of the software experts. By throwing Pine64's entire lot in with Manjaro they are burning the people who actually work on solving these problems. That's not a productive way to build and maintain a community.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#14

Post by detaro »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #10
ddevault wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Pi…

How do the steps taken lead them to a better reference implementation? "we officially focus on distro X" - sure, that helps maybe, and I don't think many people object to if its just that, although its annoying if before you loudly promoted diversity. But it also means they need to be the ones doing the work.

But they implement it through "We make life hard for all the other people writing code for our system - including those whose code we want to put into our reference", and I don't see how that's helping anything. They seriously risk that instead of "camera works only in distro Y, so we need to port that from there to reference" they end up at "camera works nowhere, because people from Y gave up"

Re: Why I left Pine64

#15

Post by mkesper »

jovial_cavalier wrote: post #11
detaro wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does making alternatives harder to boot and pissing of maintainers of software components they rely on improve their quality long-term?

It's an entity that's in a position to make a design decision - "We will have one bootloader flashed onto the eMMC - the same for every device we produce." It creates a standard which users and developers alike can fix themselves to. It is definitely a good thing, if you are worried about productizing -- but perhaps not so great if you want a diverse community of hackers.

Well, with SPI it was the same bootloader too.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#16

Post by MartijnBraam »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #10
ddevault wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Pi…

There's not one distro where camera works. There's one distro (manjaro) that was willing to ship broken hacks first while the rest of the community made the actual working camera app. While that app was developed on postmarketOS first it was almost instantly available on the other distributions that didn't first have to undo their previous mess.

The diversity of the distributions has helped me _a lot_ to make sure that Megapixels does not have some flaws in it that makes it unable to run on other platforms. Things like musl/glibc differences, weird path requirements in nixOS all have made the actual software better.

If "the golden standard" is the manjaro distro then the requirements for good software plummet really hard because there's no quality standard at all there.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#17

Post by e2le »

jovial_cavalier wrote: post #11
detaro wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does making alternatives harder to boot and pissing of maintainers of software components they rely on improve their quality long-term?

It's an entity that's in a position to make a design decision - "We will have one bootloader flashed onto the eMMC - the same for every device we produce." It creates a standard which users and developers alike can fix themselves to. It is definitely a good thing, if you are worried about productizing -- but perhaps not so great if you want a diverse community of hackers.

> The solution to this is Tow-Boot: a distribution of U-Boot that can be put in that flash chip. With this the U-Boot firmware can just be treated like system firmware and be updated through fwupd independent of what distributions ship. This would work not only for the PinePhone Pro, but would also enable things like installing your preferred Linux distribution on a PineBook Pro by popping in a flash drive with a UEFI installer, much like you can on any other laptop.

SPI + Tow-Boot would have standardized the boot process and made it more robust.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#18

Post by MartijnBraam »

neilv wrote: post #12

It's good to see Martijn Braam fought the good fight on things like the PinePhone Pro bootloader in eMMC, and I'm sorry to hear the situation became untenable. After Pine64 went to all the trouble to make a series of branded early developer editions for various distros, and ongoing community goodwill outreaches, I didn't expect something like this to happen. IMHO, any handheld hardware right now wanting to be open an…

We've spend a lot of time optimizing the developer experience in postmarketOS by making easier tooling and writing more documentation, I'm glad it helps.

While Debian has more strict policies on software licensing etc the musl component of postmarketOS pretty much makes sure that no closed source software will ever run in userspace. The main difference is that postmarketOS does deal with firmware for hardware while Debian doesn't. Hopefully we someday get at a point where even the firmware for these devices isn't problematic anymore.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#19

Post by 3np »

Unless PINE64 changes course hard, I think this will be the moment they died, so to say. They may keep making SBCs etc alongside other vendors but the phones/tablets/laptops/watches/etc would continue being novelties and realistically majority e-waste. Really quite sad. If I'd name one single person in the FLOSS community who's done the most good for mobile open source, it'd be OP. Thank you so much for your service, work, and patience up until now.

I fail to understand the reasoning of PINE64 on stuff like this recently. It's like they became a spiritually fundamentally different company. Can't see how this is supposed to make them money either.

> Now I can just focus on making postmarketOS work better. On the PINE64 hardware, and all the many other devices supported by postmarketOS

...Maybe not so terrible after all. For a while there I almost thought pmOS was

Re: Why I left Pine64

#20

Post by HidyBush »

sgbeal wrote: post #9

Anecdote: 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…

So you backed a developer-oriented project all about open source software and your test to see if it was garbage or not is to consume proprietary video content and play video games through virtualization?
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