zlacker

>>todsac+(OP)
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 shipped with to what new ones shipped with was hard to find, discussion of what mine shipped with was nearly gone already, and the process for upgrading it also had since changed!

As someone who doesn't build distros, your post is actually really nice for me, now I know I should just install Manjaro on my Pine devices! About time they picked something.

>>ocdtre+49
Even supposing your premise is correct (and it's not: diversity is good), the question becomes if Manjaro is the right choice, and it is definitely not. Manjaro is a very poorly run Linux distribution with misaligned incentives, poor practices regarding stability and security, and a history of problems playing well with others -- and they don't even work on the software that still needs to be written to make Pine devices useful. This is not the right horse to back.

>>ddevau+N9
Diversity is good, but diversity is good once there's a baseline of support accomplished. From a user standpoint, PinePhone has felt like it's spinning it's wheels while each developer builds support for their favorite feature into their favorite distro, so you have one distro where the camera works and one distro where texting works.

I am not qualified to have strong opinions about particular distros, but I think Pine is extremely overdue for a defined reference implementation.

>>ocdtre+Fa
I don't entirely disagree. In fact I wrote a blog post making similar arguments:

https://drewdevault.com/2022/01/18/Pine64s-weird-priorities....

Ideally Pine64 would be facilitating the development of a software stack which is then shared among the distributions. But, that's not what they're doing -- they're all-in on relying 100% on "the community" to produce the software. So, given this constraint, are they doing it well?

The answer is "no". Choosing Manjaro alone is not going to get the software built. As explained in TFA, the previous solution encouraging diversity did more to get the software built and is largely attributable for the platform's initial success in building out basic software support. Manjaro does not have a monopoly on the software experts, in fact, they have none of the software experts. By throwing Pine64's entire lot in with Manjaro they are burning the people who actually work on solving these problems. That's not a productive way to build and maintain a community.