zlacker

Unless PINE64 changes course hard, I think this will be the moment they died, so to say. They may keep making SBCs etc alongside other vendors but the phones/tablets/laptops/watches/etc would continue being novelties and realistically majority e-waste. Really quite sad. If I'd name one single person in the FLOSS community who's done the most good for mobile open source, it'd be OP. Thank you so much for your service, work, and patience up until now.

I fail to understand the reasoning of PINE64 on stuff like this recently. It's like they became a spiritually fundamentally different company. Can't see how this is supposed to make them money either.

> Now I can just focus on making postmarketOS work better. On the PINE64 hardware, and all the many other devices supported by postmarketOS

...Maybe not so terrible after all. For a while there I almost thought pmOS was

>>3np+(OP)
I hope PINE64 doesn't fail, they did great before and I think they could continue being great.

luckily postmarketOS existed before the PinePhone and can easily exist after, the pine devices isn't even the majority of devices we support.

>>Martij+Y3
As someone who's more familiar with PINE64 than the rest of us, are you as confused as I am? I've noticed minor red flags slowly building up over time and at least from here there are some major inconsistencies with their stated vision and where they seem to actively be going. I think I started seeing it somewhere around the PPP announcement.

I really want them to succeed but I have a hard time making sense of them lately.

>>Martij+Y3
AFAIK the pine devices are the only ones you support that are not a big pain to install. I have a few old android phones that you "support", but when I looked at what I had to do to install I decided it was too much effort. Pine devices claimed to be easier because you just throw in a SD card and go (of course the fact that the new ones are not this is why you left)

>>3np+(OP)
The soldering iron pine64 made is also great. They released a upgraded version a few weeks ago. They also announced a RISC-V SBC, and its great to see them at least continuing to improve the SBC situation.

>>bluGil+i6
Flashing pmOS is not very different from flashing any other Android-native ROM. Of course it's more involved than simply booting from external storage (though some Android devices can use "fastboot boot" to achieve something similar), but it's pretty standard all things considered.

>>preiss+m7
The devices they make that don't ship with Linux on them are pretty good, those are also easier to get fully functional software since the scope is so much smaller.

The whole linux side is just a bit of a mess

>>preiss+m7
Oh yeah. I never thought I'd have the warm fuzzies for a USB PSU until the PinePower.

>>bluGil+i6
I would like the process for android phones with postmarketOS to be easier. In the end for a lot of these devices you have to work around vendor weirdness.

Luckily it seems like SHIFT Phones is actually improving the situation, they actually have one of their developers helping out with the kernel development and the device is not terribly hard to get postmarketOS on and I think it'll only get easier to dual boot that device in the future. Sadly the SHIFT 6mq that is supported is also not nearly as cheap as a PinePhone. Hopefully we can get similar levels of support on their cheaper mediatek devices.

>>Martij+Z8
Damn, somehow SHiFT phones have been flying completely under my radar. The SHiFT 6mq looks amazing if it'd be feasible to get pmOS running on it. A quick search yield a lot of results, all in German.

Do you think it's realistic to expect the power situation to be(come) better than it is on the PPP today?

>>3np+Oa
I think it already is better than the PPP. Also the SDM845 is very very fast and a lot more power efficient compared to the current pine64 offerings.

A few postmarketOS developers are working on improving the support for the SHIFT hardware and it seems to be going great.

>>Martij+Z7
Do you think RISC-V will make any difference for the Pine64 situation (especially the SPI flash)? I remember seeing something about a UEFI standard. Would that help?

>>3np+S8
wow... I hadn't seen that before but the PinePower looks absolutely incredible

>>freedo+ep
Having one, I don't feel as good about the PinePower. I bought it together with their Pinecil soldering iron (which is great!) as it seemed like the ideal way to provide power to it, but unfortunately it's a very unreliable combo, with the iron rebooting frequently. Discussion around many similar issue reports online suggests the possibility of bad implementations of USB PD. Perhaps this is more a criticism of the complexities inherent in USB power supply in general, though.

Running the Pinecil off a Riden bench PSU with a simple DC power plug is rock solid, for comparison.

>>freedo+vo
There are standards for ARM bootloaders to have UEFI compat. Pine64 just needs to care.

>>freedo+vo
RISC-V works exactly the same as ARM from the perspective of pine64 and distribution and it will not solve anything

>>sho_hn+Nx
Which PinePower model are you using? In my experience, the Pinecil works flawlessly with the 65W PinePower and the recommended heat-resistant red silicone USB-C cable.

>>3np+(OP)
I bought a PineBook Pro and was pretty excited about it. Unfortunately I just couldn't get it to boot reliably. I was ready to do a lot of fiddling with it, accept the slow overall speed, but just fighting with the boot system all the time was not fun. Haven't touched it in months.

>>common+V01
It's the "PinePower – 120W Desktop Power Supply – EU version" and I'm using that same recommended red cable on the PD65W port on the right side of the front plate.

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.

>>3np+(OP)
I hope they dont, the PINE64 works great for me and i have 12 of them in production as QR-code entrance scanners.

>>3np+Oa
See [1]. You can use Firefox Translations to translate the website locally.

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]

[1] https://shop.shiftphones.com/shift6mq.html

[2] https://shop.shiftphones.com/shiftmu.html

>>freedo+vo
The currently shipping affordable RISC-V SBCs tend to be RISC-V cores embedded with a bunch of frustrating undocumented peripherals, more or less the same as with affordable ARM SBCs. It's disappointing :(

See for instance the Allwinner D1 chip.

>>pbrone+311
I wa in the same boat, but flashing Tow-Boot to SPI flash made booting much nicer. Mine's currently booting from an SSD and works great.

>>t-3+aP1
Fiiinnnnnneeeeeee I will try that. Thanks for the pointer!

>>pbrone+S12
SPI writing instructions here:

https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/Pinebook_Pro_SPI

Tow-boot releases here:

https://github.com/Tow-Boot/Tow-Boot/releases

>>Martij+Re
What makes the SDM845 more power efficient than the SoC in PPP (RK3399s?)?

>>Fnoord+ru1
I can navigate and parse the webshop and website, but thanks.

Was more curious about reviews and user experiences.

>>t-3+aP1
Tow-Boot SPI installer reports something like this for me:

Expected board: 'pine64-pinebookPro'

Found board: ''

>>bluGil+i6
Dunno about others, but the Librem 5 is similarly easy (and IMO even easier when you want to use the internal memory).

>>flatbu+uz2
I imagine the 10 nm process (compared to the 28nm process of the RK3399s) probably is the biggest efficiency advantage of the SD8M45.