Why I left Pine64 • Hacker News Board

Re: Why I left Pine64

#31

Post by 3np » Wed, Aug 17, 2022, 1:11 PM UTC

MartijnBraam wrote: post #29

3np wrote: post #19

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,…

I hope PINE64 doesn't fail, they did great before and I think they could continue being great. luckily postmarketOS existed before the PinePhone and can easily exist after, the pine devices isn't even the majority of devices we support.

As someone who's more familiar with PINE64 than the rest of us, are you as confused as I am? I've noticed minor red flags slowly building up over time and at least from here there are some major inconsistencies with their stated vision and where they seem to actively be going. I think I started seeing it somewhere around the PPP announcement.

I really want them to succeed but I have a hard time making sense of them lately.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#32

Post by criddell » Wed, Aug 17, 2022, 1:15 PM UTC

HidyBush wrote: post #20

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?

These are things lots of people, even developers, do on their phones - play games and watch videos.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#33

Post by bluGill » Wed, Aug 17, 2022, 1:16 PM UTC

MartijnBraam wrote: post #29

3np wrote: post #19

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,…

I hope PINE64 doesn't fail, they did great before and I think they could continue being great. luckily postmarketOS existed before the PinePhone and can easily exist after, the pine devices isn't even the majority of devices we support.

AFAIK the pine devices are the only ones you support that are not a big pain to install. I have a few old android phones that you "support", but when I looked at what I had to do to install I decided it was too much effort. Pine devices claimed to be easier because you just throw in a SD card and go (of course the fact that the new ones are not this is why you left)

Re: Why I left Pine64

#34

Post by zozbot234 » Wed, Aug 17, 2022, 1:17 PM UTC

sigmaris wrote: post #24

dcz_self wrote: post #22

With my Librem 5 developer hat on, I'm surprised that a SPI chip matters at all. The Librem 5 eMMC contains a hidden "partition", which is preferred by the CPU to boot from over the "data partition" where the OS boot loader resides. It should be possible to put Tow-boot into this hidden area, and the OS stored in the data area will have no say. No separate flash chip needed to have an independent boot loader. I wonde…

The boot ROM in the RK3399 in the PinePhone Pro has a hardcoded boot order, and doesn't use the special boot partition of the eMMC - it only looks for a bootloader on the data partition at a fixed sector (64).

Would it be possible to flash Tow-Boot to that sector and only use the rest of the partition as actual data storage? It seems like it would effectively work the same as having a separate SPI hardware chip on-device, while also restoring distribution independence. The downside is that implementing this might require some special-case support though it could likely be implemented most conveniently by using, e.g. dm-linear, so only configuration changes would be needed, not new kernel code.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#35

Post by Linda703 » Wed, Aug 17, 2022, 1:18 PM UTC

[dead]

Re: Why I left Pine64

#36

Post by preisschild » Wed, Aug 17, 2022, 1:19 PM UTC

Some more information about Manjaro: https://manjarno.snorlax.sh/

Sad to see Pine64 only listening to them.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#37

Post by HidyBush » Wed, Aug 17, 2022, 1:20 PM UTC

criddell wrote: post #32

HidyBush wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

These are things lots of people, even developers, do on their phones - play games and watch videos.

Don't you think there's a difference between "it's annoying I can't watch full blown movies on this experimental phone" and "it's garbage because no Netflix"?

Re: Why I left Pine64

#38

Post by solarkraft » Wed, Aug 17, 2022, 1:20 PM UTC

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…

It seems like your expectations were wrong - and if they're really promosed those things you can't even be blamed.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#39

Post by preisschild » Wed, Aug 17, 2022, 1:23 PM UTC

3np wrote: post #19

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,…

The soldering iron pine64 made is also great. They released a upgraded version a few weeks ago. They also announced a RISC-V SBC, and its great to see them at least continuing to improve the SBC situation.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#40

Post by zozbot234 » Wed, Aug 17, 2022, 1:24 PM UTC

bluGill wrote: post #33

MartijnBraam wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope PINE64 doesn't fail, they did great before and I think they could continue being great. luckily postmarketOS existed before the PinePhone and can easily exist after, the pine devices isn't even the majority of devices we support.

AFAIK the pine devices are the only ones you support that are not a big pain to install. I have a few old android phones that you "support", but when I looked at what I had to do to install I decided it was too much effort. Pine devices claimed to be easier because you just throw in a SD card and go (of course the fact that the new ones are not this is why you left)

Flashing pmOS is not very different from flashing any other Android-native ROM. Of course it's more involved than simply booting from external storage (though some Android devices can use "fastboot boot" to achieve something similar), but it's pretty standard all things considered.