Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your last link is 404ing
Weird it's working for me.
Yeah it's back now. Was briefly missing on the altfronts as well so not just here.
Why I left Pine64
111–120 of 227 posts
Re: Why I left Pine64
#112As an outsider, it sounds to me like Pine64 has failed to explicitly state how much support they are willing to offer each of the popular distro projects. The Community Edition releases implied a pretty high level of support for each of those projects at the time, but now that support has been dropped and the project developers feel lead on.
I don't think it's too late for Pine64 to recover from this, though. IMO, they should define a few support tiers and make it very clear what will be supported at each tier. Then they should commit to a support tier for each of the popular distros for some period of time (eg 3 years). I think it's okay if some projects receive more support than others. But the PinePhone will live or die by the health of its development community. Those developers need to know they're working on solid ground.
I understand that Pine64 is trying to position themselves for greater mass market appeal. I'm part of that market. Maybe Manjaro is best suited for appealing to that market. But regardless, Pine64 shouldn't loose site of what make the PinePhone so appealing to begin with. I haven't bought a PinePhone yet but I've been optimistic about its future and I've hoped to eventually get one. It's primary appeal to me is being able to easily setup whatever distro I want. Without that, I will be much less forgiving of its shortcomings next time I'm considering buying one.
Re: Why I left Pine64
#113I was burned pretty hard by Purism and no longer trust the company. Pine64 though I loved. I have an original PinePhone, the postmarketOs community edition unironically. I have been cheering Pine64 for a long time since, from the outside, they have been doing everything right.
This is sobering and saddening. I have a Pinebook Pro too and Manjaro is pushed heavily. Manjaro is just not a very good distribution and their security awareness is wanting, but even if they were the best of the best, the fact that they get special preference flies in the face of a FOSS phone. I don't know why Pine doesn't see this, what they were doing with community editions was golden!
I think Pine has their eyes on market capitalization at this point with Purism floundering, they probably think they can capture the niche. It's sad to see the shift. Hopefully they can course correct.
Re: Why I left Pine64
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It's not intentional, just a side effect of using musl libc instead of glibc (GNU C library). Some distros, such as alpine Linux, use musl libc as their system wide C library. glibc is pretty much ubiquitous, so any closed source software will be compiled against glibc and will not work with musl c libraries. That's not to say a vendor couldn't do a muslc build of a closed source software, just that it's pretty much…
> glibc is pretty much ubiquitous, so any closed source software will be compiled against glibc and will not work with musl c libraries.
> That's not to say a vendor couldn't do a muslc build of a closed source software, just that it's pretty much unheard of.
The ironic thing is that musl makes it easier to do static binaries, so in a world where glibc wasn't older I would have expected to see more proprietary software compiled against musl (albeit, statically linked so that it didn't really matter).
Re: Why I left Pine64
#115Anecdote: 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?
> 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?
The referenced Kickstart was for the first pine64 boards, not the phones or laptops:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pine64/pine-a64-first-1...
They were marketed as being "high performance" for both Linux and Android. They weren't, plain and simple. They were next to useless for anything.
Re: Why I left Pine64
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> Yes, but they probably should not be buying experimental products for this purpose.
You misunderstand. i didn't back the phone/laptop. i backed the first pine64 boards, which were marketed as being much more capable than they turned out to be:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pine64/pine-a64-first-1...
Re: Why I left Pine64
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ta…
> 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.
If I put a SD card with ex. Alpine Linux into a pi, it'll boot into Alpine Linux. If I put a SD card with Alpine Linux into a Pinebook Pro, it'll boot into... Manjaro.
Re: Why I left Pine64
#118On 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…
Why should they pick something? I thought the whole point of this was to build open hardware and let me pick something? If you want a manufacturer to decide for you what you should run on your phone, maybe just buy a Samsung or apple device. They've already got it figured out also.
PINE64 hardware is not open hardware and it has never been marketed as such.
Re: Why I left Pine64
#119On 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…
> 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.
It's fine to have a default option. The problem is when you cut support for running anything else.
> As someone who doesn't build distros, your post is actually really nice for me, now I know I should just install Manjaro on my Pine devices! About time they picked something.
That's old news; if you buy a Pinephone/book, they've come with Manjaro pre-installed for a while now.
Re: Why I left Pine64
#120I think this is the inevitable outcome of any movement of Linux to the mainstream (Purism has done something similar). As Martijn said in the article, PinePhone devices were operable with 25 different projects. That's 25 different variations of Linux fighting over market share. As Pine enters a growth phase for their business, the consequences of this are going to manifest as paralysis.
Improvements and advancements would stagnate due to the 25x duplicated effort, and resources would be lost in keeping those projects happy. Also, any potential user looking to switch would be deluged with options, which is what crippled desktop Linux.
While I do not understand enough about Pine to know why they specifically made the business decision to gut their dev community and go with Manjaro Linux, my guess would be something along the lines of Manjaro's widespread dominance as a top Linux distro backed by a powerful foundation. Pine is pivoting to what they have decided is their future: a full-stack hardware to software open source offering that in their eyes would have a better shot at cracking open the phone market.
They probably were aware of the consequences, but have bet on making it big and creating a new, streamlined ecosystem after extinguishing this one. It remains to be seen if they will succeed.