zlacker

>>todsac+(OP)
While I’m sad to see the author leave such a project and grateful for his contributions, I have to say I think Pine64 is actually in the right here.

One of the biggest challenges in running an open source hardware project like this is catering to two very different audiences: The majority of your customers (99.9% or more) just want the hardware to get up and running quickly so they can get to their specific need or application. They don’t want to have to read endless IRC or Discord backlogs to figure out the current best distribution to use or read potentially outdated half-finished Wiki articles describing the tradeoffs of various distros. They want it to work and to get started quickly.

The open-source developers have an entirely different set of desires, preferring endless tinkering with the internals and actually enjoying the process of trying different distributions, building and testing bleeding-edge board support software themselves, playing in someone’s experimental fit branch to get one thing working, and other time-consuming activities relayed to the board itself.

If you let a project cater too much to the developer community at the expense of the 99.9% customers, it starts to become a huge problem.

For the best example, consider the huge success of the Raspberry Pi and their Raspberry Pi OS, while even the biggest competitors (such as PINE64) remain relegated to mostly obscurity. The hard truth is that if you want to make a product like this successful and mainstream, you need to narrow the focus and be ruthless about cutting costs, simplifying, and getting your users up and running with one easy, primary way to get started. I have several Pine64 products and they all suffer massively from the fragmentation and compromises they’ve made. Fun if you’re a kernel developer who spends tens of hours every week keeping up with your friends in the small developer community. Not fun at all if you just wanted to use the product for something and you realize you could spend weeks or months sorting through all of the disparate information sources and developer communities before you can have the product working enough to get started on that thing you actually wanted to build with it.

>>Pragma+Du
How does making booting alternatives harder and pissing of people developing software components they themselves want to use in their "get started quickly" distro help Pine64? Prioritizing their own efforts towards one distro doesn't have to mean harming the rest of the ecosystem they benefit from.

>>detaro+6v
When you’re trying to make a mass-market hardware product at bare-bones pricing, you have to be ruthless about simplifying the hardware and cutting costs. A single SPI chip isn’t a huge investment in absolute terms, but it adds one more sourcing complication (in the middle of a chip shortage) and creates significantly more RMA complexity (for the reasons that the Pine64 organization accurately explained from their past experience) to cater to a relatively small number of users.

Contrast this with the Raspberry Pi organization, which has seen massive success by having an uncompromising stance on simplicity and focus, even if the ideological purity of the project isn’t up to certain people’s standards. Like it or not, it’s what made them successful while projects like Pine64 continue to be niche products that require a lot of work and research to use.

>>Pragma+rx
I kind of doubt that adding an extra chip was the only way to preserve the ability to boot from microSD, given earlier hardware revisions did do it too - i.e. its something they decided to take away. (RPi btw nowadays can boot from multiple sources too ;))

And even then, it's only one of the complaints, and this isn't the only places I see backlash against pines treatment of the dev community - again for a company that relies on said community for a lot of software work across their products. My impression is that RPi foundation with Raspian relied a lot less on the community.