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Why I left Pine64

blog.brixit.nl

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Re: Why I left Pine64

#131

Post by CivBase »

nexthash wrote: post #126
CivBase wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. But is that really what PINE64 should be trying to do? So far their support hasn't come from the "mass market". It's come from a niche market of open source hackers trying to build and support various Linux distros for mobile devices. Why does improving mass mark…

You come up on your niche, and then when you have access to the broader market, you pivot to the group that will help you grow market power [1]. Similar dynamics exist in a lot of different ecosystems, and Pine seems to be responding to the challenges that have come with becoming big. It's sad that they won't be supporting OS hackers anymore, but they have to pivot if they want to bring onboard more customers (which…

Can you really consider the "mass market" to be a key to power for Pine64 with their current lineup of products, though? The OS hackers seem to be Pine64's only key to power right now. And does supporting them really consume extra resources that could otherwise be better allocated?

Re: Why I left Pine64

#132

Post by nexthash »

ddevault wrote: post #73
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 ev…

> 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.

Sounds like either Pine64 has grown past this and decided to pivot, or has been losing revenue due to a lack of customers from this niche market. Personally, as a hacker I love playing with different OSes. However, if I was to use any open source device like a PinePhone or Pine64 board to build something, I'd prefer a stable environment backed by an established foundation. Environment setup is hell, and figuring out which open-source OS works best, if it will be supported in the future, and how to install it would slow me down immensely.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#133

Post by zozbot234 »

nexthash wrote: post #120

I 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…

> 25x duplicated effort

People keep saying this, like too much effort is a bad thing. But OP makes it clear that there's very little duplication of effort in the Linux-on-phone/mobile/SBC community - most developments are shared community-wide. There are some technical divergences (Alpine/musl vs. glibc- and init-based systems for example) that can impact direct compatibility, but they're very minor.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#134

Post by goodpoint »

cycomanic wrote: post #88

I am a big FOSS proponent (I almost exclusively use FOSS), but I find it difficult to not become disillusioned recently. It seems the large corporations like FANGs are largely pushing OSS to use volunteer work to make software a commodity, while trying to accumulate more and more data, which they consider their main value. At the same time we have companies like pine, who seem to support FOSS through relatively open…

> corporations like FANGs are largely pushing OSS to use volunteer work to make software a commodity

Corporations has been coopting Free Software for two decades by opposing GPL, calling it Open Source and essentially turning it into unpaid labor.

Yet community-driven FOSS is still possible and thriving around things like mastodon.

Remember to use a license that protects your contributions, your community and your users.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#135

Post by goodpoint »

stjohnswarts wrote: post #105
cycomanic wrote: post #88

I am a big FOSS proponent (I almost exclusively use FOSS), but I find it difficult to not become disillusioned recently. It seems the large corporations like FANGs are largely pushing OSS to use volunteer work to make software a commodity, while trying to accumulate more and more data, which they consider their main value. At the same time we have companies like pine, who seem to support FOSS through relatively open…

The funny thing about manjaro is it would be abandoned in months if arch devs (for whatever reason) just disappeared. I suspect that Canonical could survive such a thing with debian, but manjaro could not.

More than 95% of Ubuntu packages come straight from Debian.

Ubuntu would not survive a day without it.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#136

Post by zozbot234 »

CivBase wrote: post #131
nexthash wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You come up on your niche, and then when you have access to the broader market, you pivot to the group that will help you grow market power [1]. Similar dynamics exist in a lot of different ecosystems, and Pine seems to be responding to the challenges that have come with becoming big. It's sad that they won't be supporting OS hackers anymore, but they have to pivot if they want to bring onboard more customers (which…

Can you really consider the "mass market" to be a key to power for Pine64 with their current lineup of products, though? The OS hackers seem to be Pine64's only key to power right now. And does supporting them really consume extra resources that could otherwise be better allocated?

> Can you really consider the "mass market" to be a key to power for Pine64

Not as long as they ship Manjaro as the default OS for their hardware. Rolling-release distributions are not fit for mass-market use.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#137

Post by goodpoint »

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

> I'd rather have any working software version than 10 that don't work well

This is a false dichotomy. Picking a (crappy) distribution does not make it magically better.

It's the opposite in fact. By hurting the ecosystem less people contribute to kernel, applications etc, making all distributions worse.

Besides, as somebody else pointed out, if I have to buy a phone that requires me to use only one (untrusted) software stack I can as well use an android phone.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#138

Post by nexthash »

CivBase wrote: post #131
nexthash wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You come up on your niche, and then when you have access to the broader market, you pivot to the group that will help you grow market power [1]. Similar dynamics exist in a lot of different ecosystems, and Pine seems to be responding to the challenges that have come with becoming big. It's sad that they won't be supporting OS hackers anymore, but they have to pivot if they want to bring onboard more customers (which…

Can you really consider the "mass market" to be a key to power for Pine64 with their current lineup of products, though? The OS hackers seem to be Pine64's only key to power right now. And does supporting them really consume extra resources that could otherwise be better allocated?

My guess is that OS hackers could be considered as one niche, while hackers and builders who prefer not going through a custom Linux install/config for their project (i.e., a weather station or a mobile smart home dashboard) could be a larger one. Definitely not "mass market" or replacing Android levels, but at the same time a significantly larger portion of revenue for Pine64. The switch to Manjaro would provide them with a key backer that allows them to unlock this market. People have been discussing the software quality of Manjaro, so maybe it has a good foundation or connections?

Also: I've seen some hidden costs of supporting custom OS installs being discussed, i.e. procuring extra chips to allow open boot. This may have factored into Pine64's decision.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#139

Post by kop316 »

LtWorf wrote: post #124

> And in my role for the postmarketOS distribution, I developed the camera stack. So now i know whom to blame for the fact that the camera app crashes 90% of the times before I manage to take a photo.

> So now i know whom to blame for the fact that the camera app crashes 90% of the times before I manage to take a photo.

Heh, so every so often, I read an L5 or Pinephone review and they say "I had some weird problem with MMS and it never worked". Naturally, since none of my apps have any tracking with them, I have no idea what happened or what is wrong. Thus, I reach out to the author to file a bug or send me logs. If they respond, they go "sure, I will get around to it", but I have yet to have it happen.

I tell that story because I wonder if you ever reached out to Martjin or any of the developers. It may be the first time they have ever seen the crash. You may have found an interesting corner case that they can fix for you.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#140

Post by jancsika »

MartijnBraam wrote: post #27
readingnews wrote: post #25

Hrm, where is there another "open source/hardware" phone that is not more than a new iPhone (e.g. not a libre phone)? I was really thinking about getting the Pine phone pro, but now I am a bit shaken.

I think that the situation is not that bad that you should skip the PinePhone Pro, these are definetly things that can be fixed. There's also a lot more platforms with varying degrees of linux-ness. There's the PinePhone and Librem 5 which are the most well known but on postmarketOS there's now also mainline linux on a bunch of qualcomm devices and I think the mainlining community for those qualcomm platforms is at t…

> There's the PinePhone and Librem 5

Just an FYI to anyone reading this:

Purism is actively making it difficult for its customers to receive a refund. Many of those customers have been waiting years for their phones.

Here's just one example I found scrolling through a list of complaints on the purism subreddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Purism/comments/syoydj/librem_5_ref...

That's a rare case because the user reports receiving a refund (only after a year and filing a complaint with their AG). There are many more complaints of users being told they have to wait until an unspecified shipping date to get a refund.

It is not ethical for a company to attempt to draw out or flat out refuse refunds to users who have been waiting years for a product. And while you are certainly free to hack away on their hardware, until/unless their business practices change you ought to be explicitly discouraging users from (attempting) to purchase a phone (or really, anything) from Purism.

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