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Why I left Pine64

blog.brixit.nl

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Re: Why I left Pine64

#71

Post by mindslight »

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 my laptops/desktops/servers, I can rebuild all of my many systems from source, with config kept in git, with a few commands using Nix, and it basically Just Works. Before using Nix, I could reproducibly reinstall my personal Debian environment in 15 minutes with similar uniformly-managed config. When I upgrade software, there's no wondering if I'm going to be forced to upgrade hardware. I'll routinely keep machines running for 10-15 years with no downsides apart from higher power consumption. And when I do upgrade hardware, I'm never forced to change my software environment because of incompatibility.

Meanwhile installing and administering Android is an unreproducible dumpster fire in the vein of of MS Windows - just with tedious swiping instead of tedious clicking. Even my Lineageos/microG phone, with only Free apps, was never really the comfortable experience I expect from a personal computer. Rather it was just something "good enough" that I had to use when mobile. Its camera produced terrible quality photos, as it lacked the proprietary blobs. Even the best-in-class Google-manufactured phones running community distributions with no compunctions about proprietary blobs seem to produce subpar photos. And I'm still not really sure how self-administered Android updates are supposed to work, besides occasionally paving over the whole thing and then going through the pain of manually setting it up again.

That microG phone has since fallen by the wayside due to the 4G deprecation. I've presently regressed to a stock "full take" Android distribution on a no-charge "upgrade" that was sent to me for the 4G deprecation. There are no community distributions for this model, never mind degoogled ones, because of model churn meant to confuse the market. And I don't see the point to throwing $500+ towards a new Pixel (seemingly what all the innovative community distributions want), and rewarding Google for creating this technological pox where 3-5 years of updates is touted as if it's a long time.

A true Linux-first phone is putting a line in the sand of what Freely works today, rather than constantly playing catchup on the shifting sands of what the ewaste-surveillance industry is pushing this quarter. I'm sick of playing catchup, I'm sick of having to choose one failure from (commercial surveillance, no security fixes, upgrade treadmill). The next device I buy to carry around in my pocket will run standard Linux with all its comfortable bells and whistles, whether that is something like Pinephone or Librem, or whether I flip the table on the whole tiny-device-with-touchscreen compromise and just use something like a GPD Micro PC.

My 25+ years of Linux experience has shown me that it's better to compromise on polish rather than compromise on intended functionality and incentives. The Free ecosystem will gradually get better, and my familiarity with it will continually increase. The proprietary offering, which the Android ecosystem most certainly is regardless of the openwashing, will be forever limited by upstream's corrupt primary goal of bootstrapping subjects into Google's (et al's) commercial surveillance nightmare.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#72

Post by PragmaticPulp »

detaro wrote: post #66
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 .

When you’re trying to make a mass-market hardware product at bare-bones pricing, you have to be ruthless about simplifying the hardware and cutting costs. A single SPI chip isn’t a huge investment in absolute terms, but it adds one more sourcing complication (in the middle of a chip shortage) and creates significantly more RMA complexity (for the reasons that the Pine64 organization accurately explained from their past experience) to cater to a relatively small number of users.

Contrast this with the Raspberry Pi organization, which has seen massive success by having an uncompromising stance on simplicity and focus, even if the ideological purity of the project isn’t up to certain people’s standards. Like it or not, it’s what made them successful while projects like Pine64 continue to be niche products that require a lot of work and research to use.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#73

Post by ddevault »

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…

This is one of the biggest strawmen I've seen on HN, a platform famous for building them. There's a lot wrong with this but the simplest is this: Pine's stated strategy is to deliver hardware and let the community deliver software. And the community did deliver working software under the earlier community model Pine was pushing, and it's thanks to these efforts that "getting the hardware up and running quickly" is even possible. Now they're adopting a different model which completely undermines what worked about the last one.

Pine64 is making enthusiast products for hackers, not mass-market devices for non-hackers. Non-hackers have access to plenty of phones which just werk. Part of the promise of Pine's platform and the appeal to the target audience is the commitment to community.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#74

Post by PragmaticPulp »

johnklos wrote: post #70
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 whate…

> 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!

That’s not the issue with the Pine64 ecosystem, though.

The direction they’ve chosen is actually similar to what Raspberry Pi has chosen: You can boot alternate OSes, but the primary focus is Raspberry Pi foundations own needs and everything else comes secondary. This is what it takes to keep a project like this alive, and they know it.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#75

Post by _chu1 »

MartijnBraam wrote: post #18
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 D…

Why prevent closed source software from running in userspace? Even in Fedora Linux I find myself having to use closed source software a lot for daily tasks.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#76

Post by johnklos »

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…

> others might see as a fragmented market

So uneducated outside views matter more than the communities themselves?

> multiple distributions and overlapping projects trades off deep development for broad development

So volunteers are supposed to - I don't know - know better, stop working on what they want to work on, and coordinate? And it's the fault of these volunteers that there's "fragmentation"?

You think this is a zero-sum game, and that volunteers are the equivalent of workers at a business who're dividing their energy amongst competing projects instead of working together. That's both incredibly naive of you and also incredibly presumptuous.

On the other hand, there is the problem that work in one project can and should be usable in another, but when that doesn't happen, that's just because that's how the Linux communities are sometimes.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#77

Post by detaro »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #72
detaro wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

When you’re trying to make a mass-market hardware product at bare-bones pricing, you have to be ruthless about simplifying the hardware and cutting costs. A single SPI chip isn’t a huge investment in absolute terms, but it adds one more sourcing complication (in the middle of a chip shortage) and creates significantly more RMA complexity (for the reasons that the Pine64 organization accurately explained from their pa…

I kind of doubt that adding an extra chip was the only way to preserve the ability to boot from microSD, given earlier hardware revisions did do it too - i.e. its something they decided to take away. (RPi btw nowadays can boot from multiple sources too ;))

And even then, it's only one of the complaints, and this isn't the only places I see backlash against pines treatment of the dev community - again for a company that relies on said community for a lot of software work across their products. My impression is that RPi foundation with Raspian relied a lot less on the community.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#78

Post by MartijnBraam »

_chu1 wrote: post #75
MartijnBraam wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 D…

Why prevent closed source software from running in userspace? Even in Fedora Linux I find myself having to use closed source software a lot for daily tasks.

That just happens to be a side-effect of using Alpine as base distribution. If you really need something closed source it's still very easy to just use a flatpak for that.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#79

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Why I left Pine64

#80

Post by 4oo4 »

I just wanted to say thanks to Martijn Braam for all the work he's put into PostmarketOS along with the other pmOS devs. I was lucky enough to snag a pinetab when the first batch was released, and I was blown away by the quality of pmOS.

This was my first taste of mobile Linux, and pmOS was easily the best distro I used on it in terms of documentation, install tools, performance, and package selection. pmOS has the advantage of being more mature than other mobile Linux distros, but all the work they've put in over the years has really paid off and helped make the ecosystem more viable, so thank you!

I'm really sad to learn about this with Pine64, I had a hint of this when I saw there has never been a second batch of pinetabs and no communication about it (at least that I saw). I had no idea it was this bad though and this makes zero sense why they would kill the ecosystem they spent so long building. It sounds like the decision was made purely based on reducing user support requests? Even though someone that buys one of these is likely to be a tinkerer/hacker with prior experience with *nix and distros already have their own community support channels and would already be doing most of that work for free?

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