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Why I left Pine64

blog.brixit.nl

191–200 of 227 posts

Re: Why I left Pine64

#191
post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, that's even easier then to rid of the bootloader from just eMMC and have it booting whatever from SD card.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#192
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't expect anything. I'm just telling you how it is, as a maintainer of the pinephone kernel that most of the distros use, and the rest heavily borrow patches from.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#193

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.

There's also a middle ground somewhere between 1 and 25.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#194
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.

That's not a nice way to treat contributors.

Bugs are the community's responsibility. Anyone who works on them (reporting, fixing, testing) should be commended.

I doubt we'd have anywhere near what we have without Martijn and Megi.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#195

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 s…

Or UEFI, which works fine on ARM & RISC-V.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#196

I 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 thei…

>Manjaro is just not a very good distribution

Uh, excuse me? It's user-friendly Arch; i.e., the best distribution.

>their security awareness is wanting

Admittedly, I don't know what this refers to or compared to what distro.

EDIT: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32503090 Ah, lol.

Anecdata for my weak defense: I used Manjaro for years, and none of the problems there affected me.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#197
post #93

I really want such project to succeed but I guess there is no market or enough money to make it happen. I've also asked repeatedly why those kind of projects are not using android forks instead of other things, and I never got an answer that made sense. Android is open source and has proven that it's a robust system, I don't understand why people want to use something else.

I use an Android fork, but I can understand why they'd want to use Linux. If they succeeded you'd start seeing more cross pollination of apps from the desktop, and perhaps more mobile focus from Linux devs. Also, has anyone really done anything more than just tweak AOSP? Honest question, I don't know. If say Google completely abandoned the AOSP and went full Fuschia (I know this isn't likely), is there any individual…

> is there any individual or group out there that knows enough about AOSP to take it over?

Probably downstream vendors like Samsung have the technical capabilities. I seriously doubt that they'd be interested in continuing an open source project for wider use, but just maintaining their own fork would be totally doable.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#198
post #180

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)

Manjaro with Plasma Mobile had been the default for more than a year when that poll was conducted.

If you look at the results, you will notice that Manjaro is not the most popular distro for people who use the phone as a daily driver. This indicates that people who keep Manjaro are less likely to actually use the Pine phone as a phone.

So it seems that the reason it is the most popular is that is the default. If you look at what interface people like, the default (Plasma) only scores 21% in that poll and it falls to 18% amongst those who use the phone as a daily driver.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#199

Earlier 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.

You think FOSS is bad for humanity relative to proprietary software, or you think that all software (including FOSS) is bad for humanity?

Re: Why I left Pine64

#200

> 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?

oh yes, the problem is not Manjaro itself, it's the particular version of Manjaro that is used on PinePhone. I heard good things about Manjaro itself and I have no doubts that it's a good distro!

yes, I really don't understand why they chose to ship that half-baked mess. I get it, PinePhone is for "techies" and the average user knows how to change distro, but the default should be functional. System 76 or Purism laptops don't come with broken distros ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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