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[return to "Why I left Pine64"]
1. ocdtre+49[view] [source] 2022-08-17 12:12:23
>>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.

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2. ddevau+N9[view] [source] 2022-08-17 12:18:43
>>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.
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3. ocdtre+Fa[view] [source] 2022-08-17 12:25:39
>>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.

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4. Martij+Ub[view] [source] 2022-08-17 12:32:57
>>ocdtre+Fa
There's not one distro where camera works. There's one distro (manjaro) that was willing to ship broken hacks first while the rest of the community made the actual working camera app. While that app was developed on postmarketOS first it was almost instantly available on the other distributions that didn't first have to undo their previous mess.

The diversity of the distributions has helped me _a lot_ to make sure that Megapixels does not have some flaws in it that makes it unable to run on other platforms. Things like musl/glibc differences, weird path requirements in nixOS all have made the actual software better.

If "the golden standard" is the manjaro distro then the requirements for good software plummet really hard because there's no quality standard at all there.

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