If they proved anything it was that they can’t build a phone. The world got a useless brick because politics. Whenever I read about the pinephone I somehow narrate it in the voice of Jordan Peterson
Pine64’s response to “Why I left Pine64”
41–50 of 109 posts
Re: Pine64’s response to “Why I left Pine64”
#42[deleted]
Re: Pine64’s response to “Why I left Pine64”
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
The whole story has killed any interest I had in their products. I was interested in buying a Pinebook and Pinephone, but not anymore.
I had been looking at an electronic soldering iron they had produced. Not sure how I feel now.
The pinecil is very good.
Although the firmware mine came with had an issue and I did have to update it, I now prefer it to my Hakko.
Re: Pine64’s response to “Why I left Pine64”
#44As 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?
Abysmal. If these devices were UEFI, this discussion wouldn't exist.
Re: Pine64’s response to “Why I left Pine64”
#45I'm a bit confused by the whole bootloader situation. Locking down a bootloader on an open device seems quite bad, but what's the issue here exactly? The user can install any bootloader they want, can't they? I know the ARM bootloader system isn't anything like the PC bootloader system, but even if the bootloader is loaded from eMMC, in what way is the user impeded? I would guess all the user should need to do to use…
> even if the bootloader is loaded from eMMC, in what way is the user impeded? The "bootloader" isn't just a bootloader, it's effectively a critical firmware component. If the "bootloader" is missing or garbled, the board is bricked and can only be recovered by removing the eMMC, which would be very difficult for most users. Such a thing should not be stored on a data partition and managed like any other distribution…
> only be recovered by removing the eMMC, which would be very difficult for most users.
No, it would require an SD-card to recover.
Re: Pine64’s response to “Why I left Pine64”
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is not really any good options for the sensors, it's all a few closed developers.
Martijn, I want to really give you some credit for these responses: It's rare to see someone who will step in and defend bad takes against the party they are also taking issue with.
Agreed, for someone who is watching from the sidelines it lends a lot of credence to Martijn.
Re: Pine64’s response to “Why I left Pine64”
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not just "distro preference issue" the way it sounds, more like "Manjaro is shipping barely working hacks and calls it 'this feature works'".
I never understood why the PinePhone does not ship with Mobian or PostmarketOS instead of Manjaro. Manjaro quickly felt buggy and fragile on the first minutes I tried it, while the two others felt more robust. I'd rather see the PinePhone ship with one of these distributions. Why does Pine64 favor Manjaro so much? What do they gain by doing so?
Personally, I don't get why the focus was on yet another mobile OS variant instead of creating a reasonably open hardware with an AOSP userland first. Users won't buy devices where they can't even be sure that basic functionality works.
And for what it's worth, I know Android isn't without its issues - but why not build something on top of at least its Linux kernel and HAL and save so much effort in getting a system running? Why do people always have to reinvent the wheel despite it being almost impossible to compete with Android and iPhone anyway, leading to burn-out and failures?
Re: Pine64’s response to “Why I left Pine64”
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
I never understood why the PinePhone does not ship with Mobian or PostmarketOS instead of Manjaro. Manjaro quickly felt buggy and fragile on the first minutes I tried it, while the two others felt more robust. I'd rather see the PinePhone ship with one of these distributions. Why does Pine64 favor Manjaro so much? What do they gain by doing so?
Personally, I don't get why the focus was on yet another mobile OS variant instead of creating a reasonably open hardware with an AOSP userland first. Users won't buy devices where they can't even be sure that basic functionality works. And for what it's worth, I know Android isn't without its issues - but why not build something on top of at least its Linux kernel and HAL and save so much effort in getting a system…
Because AOSP is controlled by Google and the incentives to develop an actually open platform are not there. Even the SDK to develop for it is guarded by a silly license.
That could have been a first step though, but at the risk of endangering the motivation to develop for mobile GNU/Linux and still be dependent of AOSP with nowhere to go when it really goes towards the wrong direction. More and more (essential) components are proprietary and shipped with the GApps. Even something as essential as the notification system relies on Google's servers and proprietary bits (this part has an open source re-implementation though, microG). At this point you need to recompile Android apps to avoid that… if you have access to the source code.
It's hard to fight against this direction, release after release, I think it is a lost battle.
I could live with AOSP today but I'd rather have a functional GNU/Linux environment with no bullshit in a few years.
Re: Pine64’s response to “Why I left Pine64”
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Personally, I don't get why the focus was on yet another mobile OS variant instead of creating a reasonably open hardware with an AOSP userland first. Users won't buy devices where they can't even be sure that basic functionality works. And for what it's worth, I know Android isn't without its issues - but why not build something on top of at least its Linux kernel and HAL and save so much effort in getting a system…
Because AOSP is controlled by Google and the incentives to develop an actually open platform are not there. Even the SDK to develop for it is guarded by a silly license. That could have been a first step though, but at the risk of endangering the motivation to develop for mobile GNU/Linux and still be dependent of AOSP with nowhere to go when it really goes towards the wrong direction. More and more (essential) compo…
> Even something as essential as the notification system relies on Google's servers and proprietary bits.
Agreed, but a notification broker that's usable for more than just "on-device" generation of notifications or wants to avoid every app polling constantly will always need some sort of centralized server infrastructure that costs a lot of money to develop, keep running and secure (something like "user A gets notifications intended for user B" or "attacker manages to dump notifications" must never happen).
> I could live with AOSP today but I'd rather have a functional GNU/Linux environment with no bullshit in a few years.
Same, but as long as people continue bikeshedding and insisting on complete 100% purity every such effort is doomed to fail.
Re: Pine64’s response to “Why I left Pine64”
#50As an outsider with no insights (but owning a PineBookPro and considering a PinePhonePro), it surely looks like Manjaro is the king of the mountain - and that Martijn's blogpost is likely close to The Truth. Listening and doing your own things anyways is the time-honored way of ignoring people... Even as an Arch user (that hence "gets" Manjaro) that is sad :(
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…
Compared to the PinePhone ~6 months after release which:
* Didn't have cameras working
* Wifi didn't come back after suspend
* Had numerous modem reliability issues
* Bluetooth, sensors & audio were available but unused by software
* Had some hardware bugs
So this seems about on-par. Though on the userspace side things have of course progressed hugely for all devices.