I just want pine to provide hardware that can run a linux kernel without any binary blobs and leave the distros to whoever feels like working on that stack
Why I left Pine64
161–170 of 227 posts
Re: Why I left Pine64
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
The devices they make that don't ship with Linux on them are pretty good, those are also easier to get fully functional software since the scope is so much smaller. The whole linux side is just a bit of a mess
Do you think RISC-V will make any difference for the Pine64 situation (especially the SPI flash)? I remember seeing something about a UEFI standard. Would that help?
The currently shipping affordable RISC-V SBCs tend to be RISC-V cores embedded with a bunch of frustrating undocumented peripherals, more or less the same as with affordable ARM SBCs. It's disappointing :(
See for instance the Allwinner D1 chip.
Re: Why I left Pine64
#163At 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?
This has some weird amount of assumptions in it.
People may have any number of uses for pinephone HW. It's a nice SBC with display, touchscreen, battery, a lot of connectivity, very efficient suspend to ram implementation (find me a SBC that will suspend and run at 60mW), I2C and UART connectivity and a very nice GUI bootloader available for really pleasant SW development at any level.
Why waste any effort writing apps for Android, when you can only run them on Android? SW I wrote for Pinephone, I also use on my other Linux tablet unrelated to pine64, and on a Pocketbook E-reader, and on my workstation, without any weird hacks or emulation. It's a nice device/phone for developers used to GNU/Linux way of distributing software. If you don't want to, there's no "security" getting in the way of doing pretty much anything with the phone.
To devs who did nothing with Android, it's a massive waste of time learning all the idiosyncracies of Android, just to be able to make some simple app, or deal with restrictions like no audio recording of calls, no playback of audio into calls, background tasks limitations, etc. If I want to run rdbms on my phone to store data, I'll have it running in 1 minute. If I want to do it on Android and connect to it freely from whatever app I want, it will likely take longer if at all it would be possible.
"Why waste any more mindshare on the Pinephone?" just shows a complete lack of imagination
It's a versatile device that can be used for a lot of things. I can pop my Pinephone out of a backcover and pop it into this: https://megous.com/dl/tmp/1551fe95bdfade31.png and have fun making HW projects with it, for example.
Re: Why I left Pine64
#164If I want a phone locked to a single Linux distro controlled by the vendor I will buy an Android phone and it will beat the pine phone in about every single way.
It's not locked to anything. You're interpreting the original article wrong.
Re: Why I left Pine64
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I feel like you're inferring qualities in OSS that don't (explicitly) exist. This is not uncommon. Specifically; > >> It seems the large corporations like FANGs are largely pushing OSS to use volunteer work to make software a commodity > Why would you expect them to do anything different? Companies are driven by profit, not some sense of morality. OSS licenses allow them, even encourage them, to trade volunteer (ak…
I mean I think FOSS is objectively bad for humanity. But I'm an outlier.
What ? Why?
Re: Why I left Pine64
#166Anecdote: 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…
Well, thechnically A64 supports FullHD video decoding acceleration, and can run Kodi (librelec) smoothly. It's just SW is there only since 1-2 years ago.
Supercomputer it certainly is not, though. :D If you mean this: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pine64/pine-a64-first-1...
Here's libreelec running on Pinephone (same A64 SoC) https://xnux.eu/log/videos/libreelec6.mp4
Re: Why I left Pine64
#167Unless PINE64 changes course hard, I think this will be the moment they died, so to say. They may keep making SBCs etc alongside other vendors but the phones/tablets/laptops/watches/etc would continue being novelties and realistically majority e-waste. Really quite sad. If I'd name one single person in the FLOSS community who's done the most good for mobile open source, it'd be OP. Thank you so much for your service,…
I bought a PineBook Pro and was pretty excited about it. Unfortunately I just couldn't get it to boot reliably. I was ready to do a lot of fiddling with it, accept the slow overall speed, but just fighting with the boot system all the time was not fun. Haven't touched it in months.
I wa in the same boat, but flashing Tow-Boot to SPI flash made booting much nicer. Mine's currently booting from an SSD and works great.
Re: Why I left Pine64
#168> Much of the original hardware bring-up was done by Ubuntu Touch. Mobian developers built the telephony stack via their eg25-manager project. And in my role for the postmarketOS distribution, I developed the camera stack.
> Manjaro Linux has been largely absent from these efforts.
> In some cases the Manjaro involvement actually causes extra workload for the developers by shipping known broken versions of software and pointing to the developers for support. Which is why https://dont-ship.it/ was started.
Other distributions like Mobian and Ubuntu Touch are miles ahead that broken thing that Pine chose to adopt as their default distro.
When I got my PinePhone, nothing was working, not even the home screen! So I looked for help on the forums and people were like "LOL no one uses that, just install Mobian or Ubuntu Touch". I tried both, and they were actually pretty OK, I could more or less daily drive the PinePhone!
I think the main reason people repeat that the PinePhone is not ready for use as a daily driver, is that the default distro is completely broken. Pine64 are shooting themselves in the foot in a spectacular way.
Re: Why I left Pine64
#169Hrm, 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.
You can always boot/install whatever you want on the Pro, too. It's just one extra step. It's as open as it ever was.
Re: Why I left Pine64
#170I 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.
Right, this boils down to "Oh no! 25x many people are interested in our project. What can we do to reduce that to 1x people interested in our project?" If I can't easily boot my preferred distro, I don't buy your boards. That simple.