zlacker

How does making alternatives harder to boot and pissing of maintainers of software components they rely on improve their quality long-term?

>>detaro+(OP)
It's an entity that's in a position to make a design decision - "We will have one bootloader flashed onto the eMMC - the same for every device we produce." It creates a standard which users and developers alike can fix themselves to. It is definitely a good thing, if you are worried about productizing -- but perhaps not so great if you want a diverse community of hackers.

>>jovial+M
Well, with SPI it was the same bootloader too.

>>jovial+M
> The solution to this is Tow-Boot: a distribution of U-Boot that can be put in that flash chip. With this the U-Boot firmware can just be treated like system firmware and be updated through fwupd independent of what distributions ship. This would work not only for the PinePhone Pro, but would also enable things like installing your preferred Linux distribution on a PineBook Pro by popping in a flash drive with a UEFI installer, much like you can on any other laptop.

SPI + Tow-Boot would have standardized the boot process and made it more robust.

>>detaro+(OP)
"Making alternatives harder to boot" is really no worse than what you get when trying to install Linux on any off-the-shelf PC with preinstalled Windows.

>>e2le+V3
Late reply, but... The fact that there is a superior solution is kind of irrelevant. Everyone has their opinion on what is the best solution - I'm sure some people would disagree with your assessment of SPI+Tow-Boot. If there is no one who is actually in a position to make that call, you will just have chaos. That's my only point.