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.
Sad to see Pine64 only listening to them.
Some more information about the shortcomings of Manjaro: https://manjarno.snorlax.sh/
Uhh....no.I know for a Pixel 3a, you cannot even boot AOSP without compiling in the driver binaries:
https://source.android.com/setup/build/downloading#downloadi...
https://developers.google.com/android/drivers
And there is an entire vendor partition (On the Pixel 3a, it was >400 MB). However, even if a user built AOSP with those drivers, VoLTE, SMS on LTE, Wi-Fi Calling, eSIM, and a few other things do not work.
To get those features, one has to extract them from a stock image:
https://wiki.lineageos.org/extracting_blobs_from_zips
I can't imagine this is any better for newer Pixel phones, nor for any non-pixel phones. This will be true for compiling AOSP or any Android ROM.
On top of which, that Pixel 3a is effectively frozen at the kernel it has when it reaches EoL
At the same time we have companies like pine, who seem to support FOSS through relatively open hardware, but which to me seem increasingly more about a way to make a profit of the FOSS trend by using volunteer work without any investment from their end. I question if they are actually interested in their devices actually being functional for regular use. See also this article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32330043
Finally we have distributions like Manjaro who seem more interested in growing their slice of the pie at the cost of other distributions instead of growing the whole Linux ecosystem. https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/hxpj87/change_in_man...
The referenced Kickstart was for the first pine64 boards, not the phones or laptops:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pine64/pine-a64-first-1...
They were marketed as being "high performance" for both Linux and Android. They weren't, plain and simple. They were next to useless for anything.
You misunderstand. i didn't back the phone/laptop. i backed the first pine64 boards, which were marketed as being much more capable than they turned out to be:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pine64/pine-a64-first-1...
EDIT: Actually I guess the Pi 4 added an onboard flash chip with an early bootloader, but I can't figure out if it impacts the boot order or changes how hard SD boot is: https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/computers/raspberr...
Just an FYI to anyone reading this:
Purism is actively making it difficult for its customers to receive a refund. Many of those customers have been waiting years for their phones.
Here's just one example I found scrolling through a list of complaints on the purism subreddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Purism/comments/syoydj/librem_5_ref...
That's a rare case because the user reports receiving a refund (only after a year and filing a complaint with their AG). There are many more complaints of users being told they have to wait until an unspecified shipping date to get a refund.
It is not ethical for a company to attempt to draw out or flat out refuse refunds to users who have been waiting years for a product. And while you are certainly free to hack away on their hardware, until/unless their business practices change you ought to be explicitly discouraging users from (attempting) to purchase a phone (or really, anything) from Purism.
Here's a similar report by someone else: https://www.reddit.com/r/PINE64official/comments/qq7wv8/pine...
I've seen a few others.
Given the complexities of USB PD, it could also be on the side of the iron and then down to the version of IronOS. The other reporter mentions it works fine with other chargers, but that doesn't speak to correctness/compliance. I did not investigate much since my bench PSU is right below the PinePower on my workbench :)
I will say it generally works nicely with the little USB-C-equipped power delivery breakout boards I use in projects, or MCU boards I've tried. I also park my phone on it a lot. So I am getting use out of it.
It goes for 655 EUR and has AMOLED, a feature I miss with my FP4. Both are popular smartphones in Germany but Fairphone is more internationally oriented. If you can wait a year you might wanna check the successor Shiftmu [2]
This has some weird amount of assumptions in it.
People may have any number of uses for pinephone HW. It's a nice SBC with display, touchscreen, battery, a lot of connectivity, very efficient suspend to ram implementation (find me a SBC that will suspend and run at 60mW), I2C and UART connectivity and a very nice GUI bootloader available for really pleasant SW development at any level.
Why waste any effort writing apps for Android, when you can only run them on Android? SW I wrote for Pinephone, I also use on my other Linux tablet unrelated to pine64, and on a Pocketbook E-reader, and on my workstation, without any weird hacks or emulation. It's a nice device/phone for developers used to GNU/Linux way of distributing software. If you don't want to, there's no "security" getting in the way of doing pretty much anything with the phone.
To devs who did nothing with Android, it's a massive waste of time learning all the idiosyncracies of Android, just to be able to make some simple app, or deal with restrictions like no audio recording of calls, no playback of audio into calls, background tasks limitations, etc. If I want to run rdbms on my phone to store data, I'll have it running in 1 minute. If I want to do it on Android and connect to it freely from whatever app I want, it will likely take longer if at all it would be possible.
"Why waste any more mindshare on the Pinephone?" just shows a complete lack of imagination
It's a versatile device that can be used for a lot of things. I can pop my Pinephone out of a backcover and pop it into this: https://megous.com/dl/tmp/1551fe95bdfade31.png and have fun making HW projects with it, for example.
Supercomputer it certainly is not, though. :D If you mean this: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pine64/pine-a64-first-1...
Here's libreelec running on Pinephone (same A64 SoC) https://xnux.eu/log/videos/libreelec6.mp4
> Manjaro Linux has been largely absent from these efforts.
> In some cases the Manjaro involvement actually causes extra workload for the developers by shipping known broken versions of software and pointing to the developers for support. Which is why https://dont-ship.it/ was started.
Other distributions like Mobian and Ubuntu Touch are miles ahead that broken thing that Pine chose to adopt as their default distro.
When I got my PinePhone, nothing was working, not even the home screen! So I looked for help on the forums and people were like "LOL no one uses that, just install Mobian or Ubuntu Touch". I tried both, and they were actually pretty OK, I could more or less daily drive the PinePhone!
I think the main reason people repeat that the PinePhone is not ready for use as a daily driver, is that the default distro is completely broken. Pine64 are shooting themselves in the foot in a spectacular way.
(I don't know why, but it was the most popular distro in the pine64 poll)
There are several good Open Source implementations of IEEE-1275 Open Firmware available now (see https://github.com/openbios for some). Everyone should just use it instead of implementing their own solutions, to keep the boot loader independent of the operating system while still ensuring broad functionality.
https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/Pinebook_Pro_SPI
Tow-boot releases here:
Uh, excuse me? It's user-friendly Arch; i.e., the best distribution.
>their security awareness is wanting
Admittedly, I don't know what this refers to or compared to what distro.
EDIT: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32503090 Ah, lol.
Anecdata for my weak defense: I used Manjaro for years, and none of the problems there affected me.
A lot of projects claim to be privacy-centric or love open source, but behave quite the opposite. After reading the above manual, I've been wondering if it's pure incompetence or someone deliberate pushing things that way.
