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Why I left Pine64

blog.brixit.nl

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Re: Why I left Pine64

#51

Post by criddell »

HidyBush wrote: post #37
criddell wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

It depends on what you were expecting. On their A64 Kickstarter they said the graphics capabilities are higher than the original XBox's level of performance. That might lead a person to expect it to play games well. The screenshot included a Netflix icon. The Kickstarter FAQ says it can play UHD 4K video. That might lead you to believe you could watch Netflix on it.

As I understand it, the phone is based on the A64 board.

On top of all this, on the PinePhone page they link to a video titled something like "This $200 phone can do ANYTHING!".

Re: Why I left Pine64

#52

Post by v-yadli »

criddell wrote: post #41

> 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…

Well I think at this stage we can hardly call it a market -- it's not 10 different android distros that stem off from a solid codebase, but different groups of developers that interact with each other to bring up the base.

When you destroy the nest for these dev groups, there will be no more software for a fancy distro to package.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#53

Post by ocdtrekkie »

skymer wrote: post #50

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 e…

On the contrary, AOSP is a largely nonexistent OS thrown over the wall by an evil adtech company so they can claim the proprietary malware-laden version they ship to 99.9% of consumers is open source.

You cannot remove the stench of Google from Android and we should stop trying. We should use a scorched earth policy of avoiding any code that Google has written and assume it is harmful by default.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#54

Post by zozbot234 »

skymer wrote: post #50

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 e…

AOSP has way too much churn for a sensible system. A Linux phone should just work, and share as much of its code as possible with Linux systems running on other device classes; distributions like pmOS and Mobian (and quite possibly Debian Mobile in the future) are working towards this goal.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#55

Post by HidyBush »

criddell wrote: post #51
HidyBush wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

It depends on what you were expecting. On their A64 Kickstarter they said the graphics capabilities are higher than the original XBox's level of performance. That might lead a person to expect it to play games well. The screenshot included a Netflix icon. The Kickstarter FAQ says it can play UHD 4K video. That might lead you to believe you could watch Netflix on it. As I understand it, the phone is based on the A64 b…

It can play 4k videos and it can play games, but expecting it to play 4k videos through an unoptimized browser with DRM and play virtualized games is extremely disingenuous.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#56

Post by MartijnBraam »

zozbot234 wrote: post #47
MartijnBraam wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It seems like in the end the pinebook pro did get the SPI chip on it, but then they flashed a closed source U-Boot to the eMMC instead which does not allow booting from SD. So it's again a complete pain for the other distributions to help these users.

For the wiping issue, a lot of times I see suggestions to wipe the first few MB of the storage when there's booting and flashing issues to get rid of an old U-Boot, which is exactly what you don't want in the Tow-Boot case.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#57

Post by selfhoster11 »

skymer wrote: post #50

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 e…

> Why waste any more mindshare on the Pinephone?

Android is a horrible platform to hack on. I'd much rather hack on something closer to base Linux - think Maemo or similar.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#58

Post by dbeley »

skymer wrote: post #50

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 e…

AOSP is still a google-controlled project that requires a ton of blobs, whereas the Pinephone (and other linux compatible smartphones like the Librem 5) has an entire ecosystem of healthy linux distros (from Mobian to Archlinux) running as close as possible to mainline linux.

> GrapheneOS have put huge effort into de-googling

They are doing great work but they're still depending on google for maintaining Android (Can GrapheneOS do anything against a feature pushed by Google in Android 13/14 and so on? Nope).

> Cameras work

You still lose all the post-processing stuff which account for a good portion of perceived picture quality.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#59

Post by kop316 »

skymer wrote: post #50

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 e…

> AOSP is fully working, open source Linux-based phone software

Uhh....no.I know for a Pixel 3a, you cannot even boot AOSP without compiling in the driver binaries:

https://source.android.com/setup/build/downloading#downloadi...

https://developers.google.com/android/drivers

And there is an entire vendor partition (On the Pixel 3a, it was >400 MB). However, even if a user built AOSP with those drivers, VoLTE, SMS on LTE, Wi-Fi Calling, eSIM, and a few other things do not work.

To get those features, one has to extract them from a stock image:

https://wiki.lineageos.org/extracting_blobs_from_zips

I can't imagine this is any better for newer Pixel phones, nor for any non-pixel phones. This will be true for compiling AOSP or any Android ROM.

On top of which, that Pixel 3a is effectively frozen at the kernel it has when it reaches EoL

Re: Why I left Pine64

#60

Post by zozbot234 »

dbeley wrote: post #58
skymer wrote: post #50

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 e…

AOSP is still a google-controlled project that requires a ton of blobs, whereas the Pinephone (and other linux compatible smartphones like the Librem 5) has an entire ecosystem of healthy linux distros (from Mobian to Archlinux) running as close as possible to mainline linux. > GrapheneOS have put huge effort into de-googling They are doing great work but they're still depending on google for maintaining Android (Can…

The blobs are required by hardware OEMs, not by google themselves. You'd have the exact same issue when trying to run pmOS on the same hardware; it actually crops up throughout the embedded ecosystem. Pinephone and Librem 5 are quite exceptional wrt. minimizing the amounts of hardware-specific blobs that they require.
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