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Why I left Pine64

blog.brixit.nl

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Re: Why I left Pine64

#41

Post by criddell »

> The original PinePhone was brought up on the existing Linux Mobile projects like Ubuntu Touch, postmarketOS, and Maemo Leste, and also spawned new Linux distributions like Mobian and Danctnix ARM. This grew until there were 25 different projects working on the PinePhone — an apparently thriving community.

What you see as a thriving community, others might see as a fragmented market. I don't know if this makes sense, but it feels like the multiple distributions and overlapping projects trades off deep development for broad development.

Maybe it's the inevitable result of everybody scratching their own itch and doing what they can do, or maybe it's a sign of a community that can't work together.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#42

Post by MartijnBraam »

preisschild wrote: post #39
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.

The devices they make that don't ship with Linux on them are pretty good, those are also easier to get fully functional software since the scope is so much smaller.

The whole linux side is just a bit of a mess

Re: Why I left Pine64

#43

Post by preisschild »

ddevault wrote: post #5
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #2

On 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…

Glad to see you here Drew. I really enjoy reading your blog now and then.

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

Re: Why I left Pine64

#44

Post by MartijnBraam »

zozbot234 wrote: post #34
sigmaris wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-lin…

The issue with that is it's really easily wiped or changed when installing an OS. In the end the SPI hardware did get added and it just works, it's by far the simplest and most reliable solution.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#45

Post by 3np »

preisschild wrote: post #39
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.

Oh yeah. I never thought I'd have the warm fuzzies for a USB PSU until the PinePower.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#46

Post by MartijnBraam »

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)

I would like the process for android phones with postmarketOS to be easier. In the end for a lot of these devices you have to work around vendor weirdness.

Luckily it seems like SHIFT Phones is actually improving the situation, they actually have one of their developers helping out with the kernel development and the device is not terribly hard to get postmarketOS on and I think it'll only get easier to dual boot that device in the future. Sadly the SHIFT 6mq that is supported is also not nearly as cheap as a PinePhone. Hopefully we can get similar levels of support on their cheaper mediatek devices.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#47

Post by zozbot234 »

MartijnBraam wrote: post #44
zozbot234 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-lin…

The issue with that is it's really easily wiped or changed when installing an OS. In the end the SPI hardware did get added and it just works, it's by far the simplest and most reliable solution.

> In the end the SPI hardware did get added and it just works

What about their new PineBook Pro, though? Is that situation still in flux?

> The issue with that is it's really easily wiped or changed when installing an OS.

I'm not really seeing this. If the OS supports this special scheme, they need only deal with the soft block device that's created by mapping "the rest" of the partition. And if they don't, then all bets are off anyway.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#48

Post by oefrha »

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

According to TFA (which I don't know enough to verify), the >10 distributions that "don't work well" are the ones pushing the platform forward and solving problems one by one. The blessed monoculture distribution is about packaging other people's work and doesn't really contribute to the development, in fact they only add annoyance due to shitty packaging policy, so with the other distributions pissed off, they won't have stuff to pick up. That's not a promising path to "one working version".

Re: Why I left Pine64

#49

Post by 3np »

MartijnBraam wrote: post #46
bluGill wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

I would like the process for android phones with postmarketOS to be easier. In the end for a lot of these devices you have to work around vendor weirdness. Luckily it seems like SHIFT Phones is actually improving the situation, they actually have one of their developers helping out with the kernel development and the device is not terribly hard to get postmarketOS on and I think it'll only get easier to dual boot tha…

Damn, somehow SHiFT phones have been flying completely under my radar. The SHiFT 6mq looks amazing if it'd be feasible to get pmOS running on it. A quick search yield a lot of results, all in German.

Do you think it's realistic to expect the power situation to be(come) better than it is on the PPP today?

Re: Why I left Pine64

#50

Post by skymer »

At best, the Pinephone is buggy software on low priced but mediocre hardware. It has always been like this, and it is not going to change. There is nobody willing to spend the millions of dollars it would take to make it otherwise.

Meanwhile, AOSP is fully working, open source Linux-based phone software that runs on lots of modern hardware from a variety of manufacturers. Distributions like GrapheneOS have put huge effort into de-googling, privacy and security. Cameras work. SMS works. Phone calls work. There are lots of apps. I hear there are even a few phones that can do wireless charging!

Why waste any more mindshare on the Pinephone?

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