zlacker

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+(OP)
I don't entirely disagree. In fact I wrote a blog post making similar arguments:

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.

>>ocdtre+(OP)
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"

>>ocdtre+(OP)
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.