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Why I left Pine64

blog.brixit.nl

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Re: Why I left Pine64

#61

Post by MartijnBraam »

3np wrote: post #49
MartijnBraam wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I think it already is better than the PPP. Also the SDM845 is very very fast and a lot more power efficient compared to the current pine64 offerings.

A few postmarketOS developers are working on improving the support for the SHIFT hardware and it seems to be going great.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#62

Post by zozbot234 »

MartijnBraam wrote: post #56
zozbot234 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, whi…

So the SPI chip is effectively useless? Is this something that could be fixed in a newer hardware revision?

Re: Why I left Pine64

#63

Post by ddevault »

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…

It's not a market and it does not act like one. These are not a bunch of startups hoarding intellectual property, they're a group of open projects working together under different flags to build a single product. The work of each is incorporated into the rest.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#64

Post by PragmaticPulp »

While I’m sad to see the author leave such a project and grateful for his contributions, I have to say I think Pine64 is actually in the right here.

One of the biggest challenges in running an open source hardware project like this is catering to two very different audiences: The majority of your customers (99.9% or more) just want the hardware to get up and running quickly so they can get to their specific need or application. They don’t want to have to read endless IRC or Discord backlogs to figure out the current best distribution to use or read potentially outdated half-finished Wiki articles describing the tradeoffs of various distros. They want it to work and to get started quickly.

The open-source developers have an entirely different set of desires, preferring endless tinkering with the internals and actually enjoying the process of trying different distributions, building and testing bleeding-edge board support software themselves, playing in someone’s experimental fit branch to get one thing working, and other time-consuming activities relayed to the board itself.

If you let a project cater too much to the developer community at the expense of the 99.9% customers, it starts to become a huge problem.

For the best example, consider the huge success of the Raspberry Pi and their Raspberry Pi OS, while even the biggest competitors (such as PINE64) remain relegated to mostly obscurity. The hard truth is that if you want to make a product like this successful and mainstream, you need to narrow the focus and be ruthless about cutting costs, simplifying, and getting your users up and running with one easy, primary way to get started. I have several Pine64 products and they all suffer massively from the fragmentation and compromises they’ve made. Fun if you’re a kernel developer who spends tens of hours every week keeping up with your friends in the small developer community. Not fun at all if you just wanted to use the product for something and you realize you could spend weeks or months sorting through all of the disparate information sources and developer communities before you can have the product working enough to get started on that thing you actually wanted to build with it.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#65

Post by criddell »

ddevault wrote: post #63
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…

It's not a market and it does not act like one. These are not a bunch of startups hoarding intellectual property, they're a group of open projects working together under different flags to build a single product. The work of each is incorporated into the rest.

That makes sense. I was thinking it was KDE vs Gnome all over again with a lot of duplicated effort.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#66

Post by detaro »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #64

While I’m sad to see the author leave such a project and grateful for his contributions, I have to say I think Pine64 is actually in the right here. One of the biggest challenges in running an open source hardware project like this is catering to two very different audiences: The majority of your customers (99.9% or more) just want the hardware to get up and running quickly so they can get to their specific need or a…

How does making booting alternatives harder and pissing of people developing software components they themselves want to use in their "get started quickly" distro help Pine64? Prioritizing their own efforts towards one distro doesn't have to mean harming the rest of the ecosystem they benefit from.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#67

Post by criddell »

HidyBush wrote: post #55
criddell wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe they shouldn't include Netflix in their screenshot then.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#68

Post by MartijnBraam »

zozbot234 wrote: post #60
dbeley wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

With a bit of work a lot of this can be improved, Android likes to have userspace drivers while a bunch of that stuff is also already in the kernel, so postmarketOS uses kernel drivers.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#69

Post by ddevault »

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.

Yes, but they probably should not be buying experimental products for this purpose. Set your expectations according to your purchases. The Pine store makes it abundantly clear that this is not a device which you can expect to plug-and-play for whatever use-case you have.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#70

Post by johnklos »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #64

While I’m sad to see the author leave such a project and grateful for his contributions, I have to say I think Pine64 is actually in the right here. One of the biggest challenges in running an open source hardware project like this is catering to two very different audiences: The majority of your customers (99.9% or more) just want the hardware to get up and running quickly so they can get to their specific need or a…

You're oversimplifying tremendously and disingenuously.

Those 99.9% can go buy a phone. They don't need PinePhones.

What if the Raspberry Pi suddenly tried to be an everything computer for everyone? Now it needs a case, and a faster CPU, and expandable memory, and SSD, and a bigger power supply, and so on, until it's practically a NUC that costs $400.

Part of the success of the Raspberry Pi is that you can load whatever OS on it you want. Imagine if you could ONLY run Raspberry Pi OS!

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