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

221–227 of 227 posts

Re: Why I left Pine64

#221

Post by johnklos »

freedomben wrote: post #84
johnklos wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> others might see as a fragmented market So uneducated outside views matter more than the communities themselves? > multiple distributions and overlapping projects trades off deep development for broad development So volunteers are supposed to - I don't know - know better, stop working on what they want to work on, and coordinate? And it's the fault of these volunteers that there's "fragmentation"? You think this is…

I agree with your positions, but the level of snark was exceeding uncalled for.

If it seems snarky, that's because it was. It takes tremendous arrogance to project responsibility and obligation on to volunteers.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#222

Post by analognoise »

analognoise wrote: post #143
cycomanic wrote: post #109

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.

Well we've reduced the price of computing and made it ubiquitous. This coupled with worldwide networked communications systems has led to today, where we have impossible polarization and a large fraction of humanity that can no longer tell reality from fiction - we got the "worldwide communications and ubiquitous computing" part of the tech tree done before we got the "society able to handle worldwide communications and ubiquitous computing" trait.

Also, everyone wants to see "their struggle" as being "good for humanity" - but it's demonstrably false when it comes to FOSS software. All it's done has enabled our current tech monopolies to be built on the backs of free labor, enabled negative social effects, and led to our current digital panopticon. It's also skewed the labor market terribly because of network effects - there are comments on here where people left developing medical software to go sling javascript. Basically that's enabled by cheap, ubiquitous computing enabled by FOSS software.

Also, FOSS eases not only our current dystopian digital panopticon (adtech, tracking, biometric feature tracing) and it's meant to look like "fun work I do for free!" but what it really is, is Palantir getting an infinite supply of labor and code for nothing (and all other tech monopolists). Basically the entire FOSS movement plays into it and doesn't seem to recognize it. "Good for humanity"? The opposite.

In the long and the short, FOSS is not only not "good for humanity" - it's objectively bad for humanity, imo.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#223

Post by seba_dos1 »

bluGill wrote: post #33
MartijnBraam wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope PINE64 doesn't fail, they did great before and I think they could continue being great. luckily postmarketOS existed before the PinePhone and can easily exist after, the pine devices isn't even the majority of devices we support.

AFAIK the pine devices are the only ones you support that are not a big pain to install. I have a few old android phones that you "support", but when I looked at what I had to do to install I decided it was too much effort. Pine devices claimed to be easier because you just throw in a SD card and go (of course the fact that the new ones are not this is why you left)

Dunno about others, but the Librem 5 is similarly easy (and IMO even easier when you want to use the internal memory).

Re: Why I left Pine64

#224

Post by seba_dos1 »

nexthash wrote: post #120

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…

As someone who works for Purism on the Librem 5, I have to say that I never had the impression of stagnation due to duplicated effort. Quite the opposite - we benefited a lot from work done on projects like postmarketOS, Mobian or Plasma Mobile, and I'm pretty sure others are benefiting from Purism's work just as well. A lot of stuff is interconnected and the push to mainline as much stuff as possible was certainly worth it long-term, as we can clearly see its fruits in our everyday work now.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#225

Post by NoahKAndrews »

flatbub wrote: post #205
MartijnBraam wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it already is better than the PPP. Also the SDM845 is very very fast and a lot more power efficient compared to the current pine64 offerings. A few postmarketOS developers are working on improving the support for the SHIFT hardware and it seems to be going great.

What makes the SDM845 more power efficient than the SoC in PPP (RK3399s?)?

I imagine the 10 nm process (compared to the 28nm process of the RK3399s) probably is the biggest efficiency advantage of the SD8M45.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#226

Post by Roark66 »

It is up to Pine64 to decide if, and who, they choose to support with cash for OS development. Is what they did a good choice? Probably not. Are they still the only modern hardware vendor that published (almost) all the driver's source code and register level documentation for the MCU. Yes!

If I as an individual want to do something with a modern SBC that packaged in software doesn't do Pine64 is the only choice for hardware. Same in wearable tech space (pine watch). Good luck trying to get register level documentation for some parts of a raspberry pi's, or any other sbc's.

I've spent last few weeks working on pine64's hardware at a very low level (mostly rewriting sony's imx219 sensor driver to fit my needs and trying to squeeze out the latency out of the image processor). Specifically I use Soquartz and Quartz64-A (they're very similar).

I went from knowing nothing of the hw and the tool chain and finding every prebuilt image on the Internet as not booting to being able to rewrite the camera driver and tweak the rkISP drivers, generate my own os images etc in few weeks of spare time. This was possible only thanks to the rockchip documentation, the open source BSP kernel (that runs Linux 4.16) and someone at pine64 forums who published how to setup the tool chain. Without pine64 all I'm interested in would require significant reverse engineering effort. Also the mainline kernel support is progressing too.

Is the documentation really good? No, the English versions, save few crucial docs, are quite bad. The Chinese versions are better, but still they leave a lot of important stuff out. Is pine64 making only good decisions as a business? No way. Is the community vibrant? If you can call 2 guys doing all replying to questions on the forum than maybe.

Still, if we want truly hackable hardware to exist in future we should support their efforts. Let's explain what they do wrong, but let's not turn our backs on them completely.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#227

Post by jovial_cavalier »

e2le wrote: post #17
jovial_cavalier wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an entity that's in a position to make a design decision - "We will have one bootloader flashed onto the eMMC - the same for every device we produce." It creates a standard which users and developers alike can fix themselves to. It is definitely a good thing, if you are worried about productizing -- but perhaps not so great if you want a diverse community of hackers.

> The solution to this is Tow-Boot: a distribution of U-Boot that can be put in that flash chip. With this the U-Boot firmware can just be treated like system firmware and be updated through fwupd independent of what distributions ship. This would work not only for the PinePhone Pro, but would also enable things like installing your preferred Linux distribution on a PineBook Pro by popping in a flash drive with a UEF…

Late reply, but... The fact that there is a superior solution is kind of irrelevant. Everyone has their opinion on what is the best solution - I'm sure some people would disagree with your assessment of SPI+Tow-Boot. If there is no one who is actually in a position to make that call, you will just have chaos. That's my only point.
Post reply on HN