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
How do the steps taken lead them to a better reference implementation? "we officially focus on distro X" - sure, that helps maybe, and I don't think many people object to if its just that, although its annoying if before you loudly promoted diversity. But it also means they need to be the ones doing the work.

But they implement it through "We make life hard for all the other people writing code for our system - including those whose code we want to put into our reference", and I don't see how that's helping anything. They seriously risk that instead of "camera works only in distro Y, so we need to port that from there to reference" they end up at "camera works nowhere, because people from Y gave up"