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to have to read endless IRC or Discord backlogs to figure out the current best distribution to use or read potentially outdated half-finished Wiki articles describing the tradeoffs of various distros.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.
Those 99.9% can go buy a phone. They don't need PinePhones.
What if the Raspberry Pi suddenly tried to be an everything computer for everyone? Now it needs a case, and a faster CPU, and expandable memory, and SSD, and a bigger power supply, and so on, until it's practically a NUC that costs $400.
Part of the success of the Raspberry Pi is that you can load whatever OS on it you want. Imagine if you could ONLY run Raspberry Pi OS!
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.
Pine64 is making enthusiast products for hackers, not mass-market devices for non-hackers. Non-hackers have access to plenty of phones which just werk. Part of the promise of Pine's platform and the appeal to the target audience is the commitment to community.
That’s not the issue with the Pine64 ecosystem, though.
The direction they’ve chosen is actually similar to what Raspberry Pi has chosen: You can boot alternate OSes, but the primary focus is Raspberry Pi foundations own needs and everything else comes secondary. This is what it takes to keep a project like this alive, and they know it.
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.
But is that really what PINE64 should be trying to do? So far their support hasn't come from the "mass market". It's come from a niche market of open source hackers trying to build and support various Linux distros for mobile devices. Why does improving mass market appeal have to mean alienating your existing supporters?
If I put a SD card with ex. Alpine Linux into a pi, it'll boot into Alpine Linux. If I put a SD card with Alpine Linux into a Pinebook Pro, it'll boot into... Manjaro.
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...
Sounds like either Pine64 has grown past this and decided to pivot, or has been losing revenue due to a lack of customers from this niche market. Personally, as a hacker I love playing with different OSes. However, if I was to use any open source device like a PinePhone or Pine64 board to build something, I'd prefer a stable environment backed by an established foundation. Environment setup is hell, and figuring out which open-source OS works best, if it will be supported in the future, and how to install it would slow me down immensely.
Not as long as they ship Manjaro as the default OS for their hardware. Rolling-release distributions are not fit for mass-market use.
Also: I've seen some hidden costs of supporting custom OS installs being discussed, i.e. procuring extra chips to allow open boot. This may have factored into Pine64's decision.
That's a false dichotomy, nobody is demanding that users be forced through "custom Linux install" (whatever that means). The problem is also not primarily that Pine64 have chosen a "flagship" distro, but how they and said distro behave towards the other options. I'm sure the quality of the flagship distro is massively improved by making life hard for the project that did useless things like making the camera in the phone work...