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Why I left Pine64

blog.brixit.nl

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181–190 of 227 posts

Re: Why I left Pine64

#181

Post by immibis »

detaro wrote: post #6
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

How does making alternatives harder to boot and pissing of maintainers of software components they rely on improve their quality long-term?

"Making alternatives harder to boot" is really no worse than what you get when trying to install Linux on any off-the-shelf PC with preinstalled Windows.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#182

Post by megous »

Fnoord wrote: post #156

Lack of warranty is the reason why I don't like this project. I still got some of their devices (PinePower is neat for its price, but again: without warranty).

There's 2 year warranty if you buy from EU store.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#183

Post by pbronez »

t-3 wrote: post #167
pbronez wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Fiiinnnnnneeeeeee I will try that. Thanks for the pointer!

Re: Why I left Pine64

#184

Post by megous »

zozbot234 wrote: post #174
megous wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm talking specifically about pinephone.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#185

Post by eschaton »

The ARM ecosystem is really hobbled by the lack of a standard boot loader and device tree mechanism, and the RISC-V ecosystem is heading down the same path.

There are several good Open Source implementations of IEEE-1275 Open Firmware available now (see https://github.com/openbios for some). Everyone should just use it instead of implementing their own solutions, to keep the boot loader independent of the operating system while still ensuring broad functionality.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#186

Post by megous »

betwixthewires wrote: post #108
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #2

On 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.

They're just picking the default SW. You can still run whatever, including any other bootloader or OS. It's not like it's locked like a typical Android phone.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#187

Post by megous »

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.

Haha. Don't forget to blame me for the green tint of your face. ;-)

Re: Why I left Pine64

#188

Post by zozbot234 »

megous wrote: post #176
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 .

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)

The discussion is mostly about PineBook Pro by now, where the SPI was left unflashed.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#189

Post by zozbot234 »

megous wrote: post #184
zozbot234 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm talking specifically about pinephone.

The point still applies. Do you really expect Linaro or Bootlin to be working on completing mainline support for the PinePhone, Pinephone Pro and other Pine64 devices? That seems like it would be a job for the distros.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#190

Post by pbronez »

pbronez wrote: post #183
t-3 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Fiiinnnnnneeeeeee I will try that. Thanks for the pointer!

SPI writing instructions here:

https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/Pinebook_Pro_SPI

Tow-boot releases here:

https://github.com/Tow-Boot/Tow-Boot/releases

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