Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why I left Pine64

blog.brixit.nl

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 227 posts

Re: Why I left Pine64

#171

Post by hutzlibu »

mastazi wrote: post #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 a…

"Other distributions like Mobian and Ubuntu Touch are miles ahead that broken thing that Pine chose to adopt as their default distro."

I really like Manjaro - on my desktop. So initially I was very happy that they went with it, but since manjaro is desktop focused - it is a great mystery WHY the choosed it at all and not indeed went with Mobian and co?

Re: Why I left Pine64

#172

Post by noasaservice »

Agreed. Pine the company is a bloody tirefire. I've tried to support them, and have gotten burnt again and again.

Nope. Just no. Let them due so a different company can take the oxygen and run with the community.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#173

Post by megous »

oefrha wrote: post #48
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

According to TFA (which I don't know enough to verify), the >10 distributions that "don't work well" are the ones pushing the platform forward and solving problems one by one. The blessed monoculture distribution is about packaging other people's work and doesn't really contribute to the development, in fact they only add annoyance due to shitty packaging policy, so with the other distributions pissed off, they won't…

The question is to what extent it's an accurate characterization.

There are two levels to this:

Kernel development / HW specific support. This is mostly being done by people unrelated to any distro, or unrelated to Pine64 at all. (linux-sunxi community, Google, linaro, bootlin, lima project, libreelec, and various individuals) One exception is Martijn, who did initial bringup for Pinephone Pro, and Mobian's maintainer. Nevertheless, vast majority of ongoing improvements, bugfixes, and HW support work comes from outside of mobile distros, and always did, even the work focused directly at the Pinephone SW support. And these efforts were not supported by Pine64 in any comparable way to how distros were supported initially.

Then there's userspace application work, and integrating all the normal user facing SW into a cohesive whole. This is where the distros come in. I don't know much about struggles with that.

So yeah, don't forget that TFA is just a view of one person, and the sky is not falling. (well, aside from the war, and energy crisis, ... but hey)

Re: Why I left Pine64

#174

Post by zozbot234 »

megous wrote: post #173
oefrha wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to TFA (which I don't know enough to verify), the >10 distributions that "don't work well" are the ones pushing the platform forward and solving problems one by one. The blessed monoculture distribution is about packaging other people's work and doesn't really contribute to the development, in fact they only add annoyance due to shitty packaging policy, so with the other distributions pissed off, they won't…

The question is to what extent it's an accurate characterization. There are two levels to this: Kernel development / HW specific support. This is mostly being done by people unrelated to any distro, or unrelated to Pine64 at all. (linux-sunxi community, Google, linaro, bootlin, lima project, libreelec, and various individuals) One exception is Martijn, who did initial bringup for Pinephone Pro, and Mobian's maintaine…

Mobian and pmOS do a huge amount of work wrt. bringing up overall support for OEM devices. The other efforts you mention mostly work at lower levels of the stack, focusing on supporting individual SoC's or IP blocks. Both are very much necessary, but if you care about polishing support for a specific OEM device the mobile distros are doing much of that work.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#175

Post by detaro »

nexthash wrote: post #149
igneo676 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's a huge overstatement of how much duplicated effort is involved. The process is much more akin to: * OS 1 finds a bug in Gnome, reports it and perhaps fixes it * OS 2 benefits from pulling in the new code as well, fixing bugs * OS 3 writes a driver for the camera and publishes it as part of their kernel * OS 4 finds a bug in the camera driver they started using, publishes their fix Yes, there's some ove…

I guess it comes down to that: will Pine64 take an OSS development approach or a commercial development approach? I've been swimming on the question of why Linux isn't more accessible to more people for a while, and have come to believe that a commercial approach is the only way Linux can achieve the work-out-of-the-box dream. Commercial development allows you to afford to control the hardware, make deals with other…

Pine has been very much in the "we make hardware, community figures out software" camp, otherwise we wouldn't even have the discussions of "different things worked in different distros" etc.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#176

Post by megous »

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 .

Tow-Boot is pre-flashed on SPI on Pinephone Pro. How is that making alternatives harder? (aside of course for people wanting to use an alternative bootloader, like levinboot)

Re: Why I left Pine64

#177

Post by megous »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #125
zozbot234 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the Raspberry Pi does UEFI boot by default? You'd have to put in a SD card with Raspberry Pi-specific boot support, including proprietary blobs.

Yes, that's true; my point is that the pi will happily boot whatever, unlike the Pinebook Pro which has a default bootloader on internal storage that ignores the SD card. So a distro/OS has to add the pi-specific bootloader to their SD image, and that's a pain, but they can't do anything to make the PBP work, because the machine won't even pay attention to their SD image. EDIT: Actually I guess the Pi 4 added an onbo…

I haven't seen U-Boot in a while (I use levinboot on PBP), but if it has LCD and USB support already on PBP, then the user should be able to just self-erase the bootloader from eMMC using a command or two and then be free to boot from SD card or USB. Or just erase it from the booted default Manjaro.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#178

Post by detaro »

nexthash wrote: post #138
CivBase wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

> while hackers and builders who prefer not going through a custom Linux install/config for their project

That's a false dichotomy, nobody is demanding that users be forced through "custom Linux install" (whatever that means). The problem is also not primarily that Pine64 have chosen a "flagship" distro, but how they and said distro behave towards the other options. I'm sure the quality of the flagship distro is massively improved by making life hard for the project that did useless things like making the camera in the phone work...

Re: Why I left Pine64

#179

Post by immibis »

humanwhosits wrote: post #161

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

It does this, except for the "without binary blobs" part, but at least the blobs are well-contained.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#180

Post by megous »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #110

It's really unfortunate. I remember being excited about the pinephone. I had no idea this was happening behind the scenes. Why elevate Manjaro if others were doing the work? Why was that decision made? It doesn't make any sense to me. Thanks for all the work you've done!

Why? Democarcy I guess. https://www.pine64.org/2022/01/31/pinephone-community-poll-r...

(I don't know why, but it was the most popular distro in the pine64 poll)

Post reply on HN