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Pine64’s response to “Why I left Pine64”

pine64.org

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Re: Pine64’s response to “Why I left Pine64”

#11

Post by noasaservice »

illuminerdy wrote: post #6
noasaservice wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About the pinephone pro - DONT. Much of the device still doesn't even work. And we're talking simple stuff like the cameras. Calling is also super sketchy. You can text but voice calls effectively is a fail. The IMU does appear to work correctly, for things like rotation. It is pretty fast. You can also fry your device (hardware damage!) if you get the pinephone keyboard and plug in USBC into the phone port instead o…

I literally just watched a video on the Pine64 Pro and the reviewer basically said he couldn't recommend it.

I can also speak about the Pine A64 LTS.

They claim that it supports eMMC booting natively. I bought 4 of each. And I bought a eMMC USB dongle to pre-liad the images.

And .... No booting off of eMMC. And utterly NO help from anyone. No guides, no nothing.

And that's hardware stuff that Pine attested would work. And it completely doesn't. I still have to boot using mSD at a whole class 10.

Their whole "plan" and company is a shit show. It's all gongkai crap. Using or buying will give you pain and suffering if anything goes even slightly wrong.

Re: Pine64’s response to “Why I left Pine64”

#13

Post by egberts1 »

As a veteran embedded engineer, I was shock to see that another variant of boot loader is being recommended.

I’m quite sure that the bootloop is more than fixable but have my doubts that SPI is not that option.

Tow-wut? Sounds something like “extoll-embrace-engulf” and Balkanization to me. Not to stand in the way, but if that fixes the low-charge/bootloop problem then so be it but it doesn’t.

Still have the PinePhone Classic, still works, on my anti-static pad, but it may not serve us much longer.

Re: Pine64’s response to “Why I left Pine64”

#14

Post by wiz21c »

Sakos wrote: post #4
ddevault wrote: post #2

This is a disappointing response. I don't have a horse in this race (besides wanting to have access to good hardware for FOSS platforms), but I do have my ear on the ground in this community, so here are my thoughts on this. > [removing SPI] was based on the fact that for years SPI was largely unused on PINE64 devices. People have been arguing that a u-boot firmware needs to be installed on that flash chip for years,…

The whole story has killed any interest I had in their products. I was interested in buying a Pinebook and Pinephone, but not anymore.

Me too, I was hoping to get a Linux phone at a price that match the current lack of polish (for me the pinephone had that price) but Linux means community and diversity for other OS'es to me. So if they don't work with the community, then half the value of the phone disappears...

I will now consider buying second hand phone with postmarketOS support. It means I'll have to accept proprietary hardware but, as it will be second hand, it means I'll be more in line with my eco-environemental-whatever-half-baked principles.

Nobody cares, I just wanted to illustrate what are the reasons I would like to buy a Pine64 and how those reasons revolves around some basic principles and trade off's.

Re: Pine64’s response to “Why I left Pine64”

#15

Post by egberts1 »

As a veteran embedded engineer, I was shock to see that another variant of boot loader is being recommended.

I’m quite sure that the bootloop is more than fixable but have my doubts that SPI is that option.

Tow-wut? Sounds something like “extoll-embrace-engulf” and Balkanization to me. Not to stand in the way, but if that fixes the low-charge/bootloop problem but it doesn’t.

Still have the PinePhone Classic, still works, on my anti-static pad, but it may not serve us much longer.

Re: Pine64’s response to “Why I left Pine64”

#16

Post by MartijnBraam »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #8

So they included all the hardware requested by Martijn. What remains the rub here?

I never said they didn't include SPI, it took an incredibly amount of arguing over several weeks to get it there on the PPP, then they again didn't want to ship it on the PBP. In the end the PBP does have SPI but still didn't ship with something flashed to it.

While they did in the end listen and add SPI _after_ manjaro finally agreed. that doesn't mean they listened to the whole community. Ofcourse PINE64 and Manjaro don't have to deal with how the other distributions boot.

Re: Pine64’s response to “Why I left Pine64”

#17

Post by noasaservice »

MartijnBraam wrote: post #9
noasaservice wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About the pinephone pro - DONT. Much of the device still doesn't even work. And we're talking simple stuff like the cameras. Calling is also super sketchy. You can text but voice calls effectively is a fail. The IMU does appear to work correctly, for things like rotation. It is pretty fast. You can also fry your device (hardware damage!) if you get the pinephone keyboard and plug in USBC into the phone port instead o…

The cameras are far from "the simple stuff", it's one of the more complicated systems in mobile devices with multiple high speed components from different vendors that have to work together and not very much documentation for the hardware existing.

Admittedly, that's doubly concerning. Pine chooses the BoM; we don't.

And if they're choosing unsupported/unsupportable chips without doing the barest of legwork to get them functional (or hell, get docs public), then that's a huge problem.

Pine should be showing on their pages a hardware matrix showing what works and what doesn't. The Pinephone Pro doesn't qualify for the definition "phone".

If they were serious, they'd put this page up front, with a list of all the stuff that they imply works, but doesn't: https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PinePhone_Pro_Software_State

Re: Pine64’s response to “Why I left Pine64”

#18

Post by ocdtrekkie »

ddevault wrote: post #2

This is a disappointing response. I don't have a horse in this race (besides wanting to have access to good hardware for FOSS platforms), but I do have my ear on the ground in this community, so here are my thoughts on this. > [removing SPI] was based on the fact that for years SPI was largely unused on PINE64 devices. People have been arguing that a u-boot firmware needs to be installed on that flash chip for years,…

So as is practically stereotypical for the Linux community, we're going to let a squabble over distros send us to buying proprietary hardware and more than likely... straight up giving Google more money, as seems to be the top hardware choice of vendors of so-called "secure Android forks".

Re: Pine64’s response to “Why I left Pine64”

#19

Post by NoahKAndrews »

egberts1 wrote: post #13

As a veteran embedded engineer, I was shock to see that another variant of boot loader is being recommended. I’m quite sure that the bootloop is more than fixable but have my doubts that SPI is not that option. Tow-wut? Sounds something like “extoll-embrace-engulf” and Balkanization to me. Not to stand in the way, but if that fixes the low-charge/bootloop problem then so be it but it doesn’t. Still have the PinePhone…

Tow-Boot is actually a really exciting project that wants to make it so that distributions don't have to manage device-specific u-boot packages for ARM devices, and can instead provide generic images like they do on x86.

Re: Pine64’s response to “Why I left Pine64”

#20

Post by candiddevmike »

egberts1 wrote: post #13

As a veteran embedded engineer, I was shock to see that another variant of boot loader is being recommended. I’m quite sure that the bootloop is more than fixable but have my doubts that SPI is not that option. Tow-wut? Sounds something like “extoll-embrace-engulf” and Balkanization to me. Not to stand in the way, but if that fixes the low-charge/bootloop problem then so be it but it doesn’t. Still have the PinePhone…

What is the current state of bootloaders for ARM?
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