zlacker

You're oversimplifying tremendously and disingenuously.

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!

>>johnkl+(OP)
> 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!

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.

>>Pragma+T
> 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.

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.

>>yjftsj+0E
I don't think the Raspberry Pi does UEFI boot by default? You'd have to put in a SD card with Raspberry Pi-specific boot support, including proprietary blobs.

>>zozbot+OF
Yes, that's true; my point is that the pi will happily boot whatever, unlike the Pinebook Pro which has a default bootloader on internal storage that ignores the SD card. So a distro/OS has to add the pi-specific bootloader to their SD image, and that's a pain, but they can't do anything to make the PBP work, because the machine won't even pay attention to their SD image.

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...

>>yjftsj+OG
I haven't seen U-Boot in a while (I use levinboot on PBP), but if it has LCD and USB support already on PBP, then the user should be able to just self-erase the bootloader from eMMC using a command or two and then be free to boot from SD card or USB. Or just erase it from the booted default Manjaro.