[HN Gopher] Pine64 should re-evaluate their community priorities
___________________________________________________________________
Pine64 should re-evaluate their community priorities
Author : ingve
Score : 165 points
Date : 2022-01-20 14:41 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (drewdevault.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (drewdevault.com)
| yepthatsreality wrote:
| I agree, Pine64 is essentially waiting on other entities to carry
| this work, like Purism for example. They should at least have
| someone supporting software even if it only increases the rate to
| a drip.
| bluGill wrote:
| How long does it take from when Purism has hardware until they
| sell it? Pine64 it isn't very long.
|
| Different models, I'm glad Pine has this one as it is useful.
| That doesn't mean others are wrong models, but you can't be
| both.
| yepthatsreality wrote:
| Yeah but if my hardware I buy is effectively useless because
| the software is garbage then am I likely to buy Pine64 again?
| bluGill wrote:
| If that is your problem then you are not the target market
| in the first place. There are a lot of people who are
| unhappy with the type of devices we can buy. Pine64 is a
| refreshing improvement to us, but they are not to everyone.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Unfortunately, to make the whole thing work, all of the
| categories the author listed need to be at maximum priority.
| There's no stack-ranking them; fail in any and nobody cares about
| this platform.
|
| If the goal is to provide an alternative to iPhones and Android
| devices, the table-stakes is huge. It's an extraordinary amount
| of work to get a new mobile platform even as far as the "not as
| painful to use as a Blackberry" phase of polish if building it
| out from scratch.
| jcun4128 wrote:
| The Windows Phones were amazing. I recently bought a 920 just
| to have it because I was obsessed with the design in the past
| (though most APIs no longer work). It is sad what happened to
| those phones. The hardware/camera was great imo.
| chriswarbo wrote:
| It doesn't need to be "an alternative to iPhones and Android
| devices" _right now_. It just needs to be somewhat usable by
| developers; since those are the ones improving and fixing
| things, writing new drivers and applications, etc. Those things
| will be necessary for a 'consumer oriented product'.
|
| For example, it would be unacceptable on an 'iPhone
| alternative' to, say, have to tweak shell scripts to set the
| right driver options, or whatever. However, developers might
| find that OK (although annoying).
| asojfdowgh wrote:
| [topic of funding aside]
|
| for the pinephone specifically, it feels like its ignoring what
| does exist?
|
| https://xnux.eu/devices/pine64-pinephone.html there is a strong
| kernel which is upstreaming its changes.
|
| Now, as a time-strapped developer, who gets told "if you wait,
| the fixes will appear, or you can double/triple your effort to
| manually patch things, and then undo that when those patches go
| mainline anyhow" like, I would personally be happy leaving my
| distro broken for 6+ months for that stuff to settle, cause
| elsewise you are going to be building apps to support APIs that
| might change completely between patch and mainline, because there
| isn't an abstraction layer like ios or android.
|
| Its a new approach, drop hardware and specs, and embrace
| community passion, I thought it was a bad idea at the start, but
| I'm now sure I'm wrong.
|
| A Kickstarter phone beginning around the same time, custom
| hardware and OS, even with a budget and price 3x what pine goes
| with, would have probably far less progress than what exists now
| with pine devices
| Fnoord wrote:
| Pinephone give a month warranty, that's it. Its a dealbreaker
| for any consumer. Pinephone Pro can get you through the day,
| but it goes for 400 plus duties, and it also only has a month
| warranty. Kickstarter, Indiegogo can get away scamming or false
| advertising.
|
| Instead, look at Framework and Fairphone how a company can
| release a modular device, for a realistic price.
| asojfdowgh wrote:
| I'm not fussed about the warranty so much as the "updates"
| period, which, if everything gets upstreamed, might be 10+
| years with the pinephone, something that very very few can
| hold a candle to (afaik fairphone only gets there if you also
| include 3rd party support)
|
| Framework is, afaik, a bunch of people who have already
| several long years of wrangling laptop devices and their
| supply chains, similarly Fairphone is on their 4th iteration,
| a lot of long years
|
| And more importantly, even with all those years behind their
| products, I can't buy either of 'em, I however have a
| pinephone in my hands already
| usbqk wrote:
| In Europe they can't do that.
| 0xedd wrote:
| MartijnBraam wrote:
| I'd like to point out that megi (the author of that
| site/kernel) refuses to upstream the improvements to the
| mainline linux tree, which is why it's still impossible to boot
| the PinePhone with a kernel.org kernel and have things working.
| This is not even just an issue for the PinePhone but all other
| Allwinner A64 based devices hit the same issues and now have to
| pick patches from that kernel.
|
| The second megi decides the PinePhone or the A64 isn't
| interesting anymore (since the new one is Rockchip rk3399) that
| whole tree maintainership will collapse.
| asojfdowgh wrote:
| that doesn't seem correct,
| https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/linux-
| usb/patch/2021110... e.g. megi submitting patches as late as
| november last year
|
| Could you cite where they refuse to upstream?
| MartijnBraam wrote:
| It's mentioned in the pine64 developer chats when
| discussing this with megi, that +4-1 patch is a joke
| compared to the amount of patched code in the megi tree.
| tpxl wrote:
| Why doesn't he want to upstream the patches?
| MartijnBraam wrote:
| Because it isn't that much work to keep rebasing his tree
| according to megi.
| jagger27 wrote:
| Couldn't agree more with this. I recently got a PineNote as well
| and was disappointed with the lack of community organization. The
| wiki is bare, and the people hanging on Discord and IRC just seem
| to be hacking on their own things.
|
| I am motivated to start writing software for this device with a
| "do one thing well" philosophy, as a device like this should
| have. But it's hard to get started on that when the advice for
| getting started on it is "you should try getting your favourite
| distro to run on it and go from there."
|
| Yeah sorry, no. I want to contribute where I can to the project
| as a whole, not get Doom running on an e-ink tablet.
| belval wrote:
| I can empathize with the PinePhone folks because it's been out
| for a while, but if you decided to buy a PineNote that is 100%
| on you and no one else. This is fresh-off-the-chain new
| hardware that is only available through invites...
|
| The monthly blog is very clear on the current state of the
| PineNote with only one user having successfully run a GUI and
| touch screen as of last week.
|
| > the people hanging on Discord and IRC just seem to be hacking
| on their own things
|
| Last I check they are unpaid and don't have to work on "your"
| thing.
| bluGill wrote:
| > his is fresh-off-the-chain new hardware that is only
| available through invites...
|
| That changed two weeks ago. Anyone can buy it now. (if it is
| in stock, and Chinese New Year means you won't get it for a
| couple months...) They try to be clear that it boots and you
| can see something on the display but that is about it.
| belval wrote:
| Yeah I remember reading that somewhere as well, but the
| page does not allow you to order one it seems?
| https://www.pine64.org/pinenote/
| bluGill wrote:
| The "pre orders only open for developers" is a button
| that will take you to a page allowing you to add it to
| your cart. I am not ready to buy one so I removed it from
| my cart instead of paying, but it looks to me like anyone
| can buy one.
| jagger27 wrote:
| > I can empathize with the PinePhone folks because it's been
| out for a while, but if you decided to buy a PineNote that is
| 100% on you and no one else.
|
| I'm not sure why you and the other commenter are so keen to
| throw me under the bus. I'm not saying that the purchase was
| a waste, nor that I regret buying it. And neither of you have
| said nothing to address any of my points about the lack of
| direction and community structure. I want to help make it a
| nice device to use but there's _nothing to latch onto_. The
| hardware is nice and worth what I paid.
|
| > The monthly blog is very clear on the current state of the
| PineNote with only one user having successfully run a GUI and
| touch screen as of last week.
|
| Yeah, great. Where are the efforts to package this hard work
| up and build on it?
|
| > Last I check they are unpaid and don't have to work on
| "your" thing.
|
| Of course they're unpaid. What I'm trying to get at is that
| few people are working together towards something that's
| usable because there's no organization. If there is anything,
| it's certainly not obvious. I'm not asking anyone to work on
| "my" thing, I don't have a "thing". I'm looking for "things"
| to help with, but people are just playing around.
| bluGill wrote:
| > I want to help make it a nice device to use but there's
| nothing to latch onto.
|
| I'm completely confused - what do you want to latch onto?
| Pine64 has never been in the business of telling you what
| you should run. Latch onto your community. Are you a KDE
| guy, then latch onto the plasma community. If you are GNOME
| guy, then latch onto their community. There are dozens of
| other communities you can latch onto. Or create your own
| community.
|
| Pine64 will be happy to document any community that gets
| their stuff to run on the PineNote, but for now they are
| waiting on communities to do something. If you are looking
| to Pine64 for a community then you are in the wrong, they
| intentionally do not create a community because they want
| every community to feel equally welcome (this isn't
| possible, but it seems to be their goal).
|
| I'm explicitly saying I see your complaint as invalid and
| something I don't want Pine to fix. Sure they can do
| something about your complaint, but it will make the whole
| worse for everyone else.
| bgorman wrote:
| It doesn't matter if you work on KDE or Gnome when the
| boot loader doesn't work, when the display driver doesn't
| work, and mainline Linux doesn't run on the device.
| Everyone needs these things to work, but no one is
| working on them
| smorgusofborg wrote:
| It's quite the paradox that people are off doing weird
| stuff but they have no bootloader. The pmOS page refers
| to U-Boot like it exists and people seem to be working on
| the SoC and eink display at the rate they can.
|
| Most other devices are consumer released so you get an
| old kernel that gets everyone at the top of the stack
| going right away, but then blocks mainlining since no one
| can correctly claim authorship of the implementation for
| the process of porting and fixing it.
| jagger27 wrote:
| > Everyone needs these things to work, but no one is
| working on them
|
| A few people do seem to be working on these critical
| things, just not together towards any common goal. The
| way GP puts it, the Pine64 communities are ideologically
| opposed to reducing development friction because that
| would mean people could start thinking about doing useful
| things to do with these devices. Who would want that? The
| suggestion that the status quo is working out positively
| is completely baffling to me.
| bluGill wrote:
| This has only been out for a few weeks. What makes you
| think the people who actually know how to do anything are
| not working together, as opposed to working with each
| other via email and other private channels that we don't
| know about?
|
| I suppose the *BSD and linux communities working on this
| might not work together much, but they are working to
| very different things so there isn't much they can do
| together. (even then I expect that they are in contact
| about "have you figured out X, I can't get it to work"
| "oh, I got that, the docs say 0x35 which doesn't work but
| I tried 0x36 and that seems to be everything I need" )
|
| If you are not part of those communities, then it will be
| tricky to get in. However I trust people who know what
| they are doing in those communities are working on it.
| They have been in the past, it just takes them a few
| months.
| jagger27 wrote:
| > via email and other private channels that we don't know
| about
|
| That would be 0/3 on the slogan of "Open. Friendly.
| Community driven."
|
| All of your replies have been complete non-sequiturs to
| my comments.
| jagger27 wrote:
| > [...] they want every community to feel equally welcome
| ( _this isn 't possible_, but it seems to be their goal).
|
| > I'm explicitly saying I see your complaint as invalid
| and _something I don 't want Pine to fix_.
|
| What a joke.
| bluGill wrote:
| PineNote has been out for only a month or so, there are only a
| few thousand units in total out there and you are surprised
| there isn't a community yet? The only people who should be
| buying it these days are those trying to build a community. It
| isn't Pine's fault you bought something without knowing what
| state it was.
| jagger27 wrote:
| This kind of attitude and response is extremely offputting,
| toxic, and rude and doesn't make me want to donate my time to
| "the project".
|
| I posted my genuine thoughts and experience and this is the
| response I get? I _want to contribute to the software_ but
| there isn't any meaningful structure in place to do so. This
| isn't Pine's first device, far from it, yet it feels like I
| have to start from square one.
| bluGill wrote:
| This is how Pine has always operated and it has worked for
| them. Other places don't make you start from square one -
| and it is years before you get anything because of all the
| tim they spend getting all the parts ready.
|
| Actually most places spend years getting Windows (android
| or whatever) and you are lucky if they acknowledge hobbies
| at all.
| metabagel wrote:
| Counterpoint regarding Manjaro. It just works. My install
| experience of Debian vs. Manjaro on the Framework laptop was that
| Manjaro was a snap while Debian asked me for driver info.
|
| Also, Valve's recommendation for Steamdeck developers was
| Manjaro. (I don't know if they've updated that guidance with
| other options.)
|
| https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2021/11/valve-adds-documentati...
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Did you try the "unofficial non-free" images for Debian?
| They're generally needed for full functionality on recent
| hardware.
| metabagel wrote:
| Thanks for the suggestion! I was actually unaware of the
| existence of this.
|
| I expect Ubuntu might also work quite well. I haven't tried
| it yet, but I may.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Majaro package manager was broken when my pinephone shipped!
| Took me hours with a crashing UI to update and recover.
| StillBored wrote:
| This is the entire arm community, and its so entrenched that
| despite SBBR/Systemready just about every single SoC manufacture
| and board vendor continue to follow this one off embedded mindset
| where everything is bound into a blob containing the firmware, OS
| and applications. (ex: see rpi) when just focusing on conforming
| the existing firmware standards would allow not only one off
| hacked up linux to work, but windows and various other OS's.
| There isn't any reason other the stubbornness and ignorance that
| the arm ecosystem doesn't work just like the desktop PC market at
| this point when it comes to being able to install any random OS
| on any random board.
|
| There are some notable exceptions to this (Solidrun?) but the
| senior engineering has blinders on (and lots of false excuses why
| it wont work), and the mgmt chain likes the status quo because
| they see it as some kind of market segmentation strategy.
| someguydave wrote:
| I suspect that the manufacturers are frightened that someone
| will undercut them if they conform to an open standard.
| marktangotango wrote:
| Indeed, seems like the IBM "fiasco" with PCs looms large
| here. The dominance of clones was awesome for consumers, not
| so much for IBM.
| bluGill wrote:
| > The dominance of clones was awesome for consumers, not so
| much for IBM.
|
| Are you sure? it is really hard to predict what would have
| happened. Without the clones would the Apple II have taken
| off (it did have clones, but they would have needed to come
| up with a 16/32 bit upgrade pretty soon - the IIgs comes to
| mind though it was too late) , or maybe the mac?
|
| Sure IBM had a name and would have got some sales, but
| would the platform take off? IBM did make a ton of money on
| PCs even if they were a bit player overall.
|
| We can never know the above.
| bbarnett wrote:
| someguydave wrote:
| The IBM (also Apple) clone fiasco looms large over every
| sector of electronics. Nobody seems interested in investing
| in manufacturing electronic hardware without some prospect
| of customer lock-in.
| bArray wrote:
| I have mentioned a few times in the Pine64 community that they
| should really focus more on their compute modules. It means they
| can mass manufacture a single board that can be well tested,
| reducing overall risk and offering an upgrade path for their
| hardware. They can then fit their product lines with an
| appropriate module, even if this ends up being at the slight cost
| of size.
|
| Another thing that kind of bugs me is that they currently have
| some "star devs" they send all of the new hardware too, but they
| are very over worked and split between many projects. Even they
| don't really get a heads up regarding what is in the pipeline. I
| believe if you want devs to be involved, you should somewhat
| consult them in the process.
|
| > Many of the distros targetting Linux for mobile devices have
| people working on the important focus areas, but as a matter of
| necessity: to accomplish their goals when no one else is working
| on these problems, they had to become experts and divide their
| limited volunteer time between distro maintenance and software
| development.
|
| Not sure if it's distro maintainers that become software devs, or
| the other way around.
| rjsw wrote:
| They are using the same SoCs across the compute modules and the
| products in cases, a lot of stuff is shared between them.
|
| I deliberately got a Quartz64 instead of something like a
| Pinenote as I expected to work on core drivers.
| speedcoder wrote:
| What are Pine Phone plans about the swtich from 3G to 5G?
| 0xedd wrote:
| asabjorn wrote:
| They should see if they can sponsor Collabora work on this
| instead. Collabora has a solid track record of delivering high-
| quality work that is upstreamed, and former Intel Vulkan Driver
| lead Jason Ekstrand joining them this is exactly in their
| ballpark.
| deltaonefour wrote:
| A footnote in the article:
|
| "I will go on the record as saying that Manjaro Linux is a bad
| Linux distribution and a bad place to send this money. They have
| a history of internal corruption, a record of questionable
| spending, and a plethora of technical issues and problematic
| behavior in the FOSS ecosystem. What limited budget there is to
| go around was wasted in their hands."
|
| I use manjaro and I love it. Never knew the community was like
| this though. Does anybody have more information on the above?
| odiroot wrote:
| Same here. Manjaro is IMHO the best "gateway drug" to Arch.
| pedrolucasp wrote:
| https://github.com/arindas/manjarno
| pmarreck wrote:
| How do you prevent manjaro from bricking itself every few
| months? Do you just not update it? That's why I stopped using
| it. I have no idea what their QA looks like but it can't be
| very extensive.
|
| I'm now testing out straight-up Arch with a manually-installed
| KDE Plasma for a few months now (inside a VM that I frequently
| snapshot). No issues so far.
| deltaonefour wrote:
| I just update it all the time and it never bricks.
| pmarreck wrote:
| Interesting. I was updating it once a day or so and this
| still happened.
| ryantgtg wrote:
| It never bricked for me, but I had regular issues from
| updates when I used it a few years ago. I don't remember
| the details, though. I switched to Arch and things are
| much more stable.
|
| The only thing that annoys me on Arch (or any rolling
| distro) is that you have to update things like postgresql
| as they come, because holding that package back counts as
| a "partial upgrade".
| jethro_tell wrote:
| To me that's one of the benefits for most things, I can
| understand something like not wanting to take a feature
| bump when there's still support for a version.
|
| You can just install that version out of aur and that
| package will track that specific major version.
|
| Next time instead of an upgrade. Backup, remove the
| pacman package, install the air package and restore and
| you'll save yourself a lot of headaches.
| rienko wrote:
| They are a small company with small revenue
|
| Funding (1) $1.7M
|
| Yearly Revenue (2) <$5M
|
| How much funding can they realistic provide for those priorities?
| State grants from Horizon Europe projects or similar could be an
| alternative source for funding, probably with better recurring
| probabilities but it would require a champion to lead through the
| burocracy and in the end it's a coin toss (or lower) to get
| approved.
|
| Sources: (1) https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/pine64 (2)
| https://www.zoominfo.com/c/pine64-inc/372007622
| wpietri wrote:
| I would turn that question around. Given the stories here of
| bad user experience, it sounds like there is a very limited
| niche for the hardware. If they made something more reliable,
| they might be able to provide a lot more funding.
| bluGill wrote:
| It doesn't matter what they do, someone will be unhappy. They
| fill a niche that I'm glad someone does. They could go for a
| different niche, but then they leave this one unfilled.
| bo1024 wrote:
| (a) I think the article isn't asking them to provide more
| funding, but to consider re-allocating what they already do.
|
| (b) I think even without actual funding, PinePhone can set the
| tone of priorities for the community. If they speak about this
| issue, people will at least listen.
| cogman10 wrote:
| And, to that end, there's a lot of routes they could go to
| get this sort of thing done.
|
| A public bug tracker + bounty, for example, would go a LONG
| way in messaging what needs to be done. Even a small amount
| of money ($100, $200) towards whatever issues are important
| would be a good signal to the community that "hey, we really
| need someone to do this".
| ehvatum wrote:
| What if I make a $1b fund and put the Krita guy and the
| Blender team in charge of forming the company apparatus to
| produce a phone that's not a god damn piece of shit? I
| would want to stipulate right out the gate that there
| should be at least 100,000 $1,000 bounties paid in the
| first three years.
| ralls_ebfe wrote:
| Go ahead, i'd like to see the result.
| poleguy wrote:
| I bought a PinePhone hoping to be able to start using it and
| developing on it. But until it can reliably make it through the
| day, stay connected to the network, and not miss calls and texts,
| I have to use my android phone and I don't have two sim cards, so
| I can't really use it and develop on it.
|
| I'm a electrical hardware design engineer.
|
| I agree, that if Pine64 has enough money to fund a full time
| engineer, that's a much better use than giving any money to the
| distros. They should be funding an embedded specialist who should
| focus on board bring up, because clearly we're not out of that
| stage yet.
|
| I've built lots of high-volume electronics hardware that is
| easily as complex as a cell-phone, and the order of development
| is very important. I'm in the middle of such development right
| now... Working on software and UI is a dead last on that priority
| list every time.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| > I don't have two sim cards
|
| Having a twin SIM card is rather cheap here, and would be a
| decent option for something like that. I've gotten one for
| tinkering with a Raspberry Pi 4G module.
|
| I totally agree with your point though.
| capableweb wrote:
| > I bought a PinePhone hoping to be able to start using it and
| developing on it. But until it can reliably make it through the
| day, stay connected to the network, and not miss calls and
| texts, I have to use my android phone and I don't have two sim
| cards, so I can't really use it and develop on it.
|
| I recently also looked at the PinePhone but felt it was too
| early for me to get involved, because it's very, very clear
| that you can't actually use it as a day-to-day phone yet, at
| least that's from what I gathered, but somehow you ended up
| with the idea that you could actually use it as a phone. I'm
| wondering if you never looked at their official resources for
| PinePhone as they make it kind of clear it's not ready to be
| used in any normal fashion yet?
| chriswarbo wrote:
| Not sure what your experience has been, but I've been using
| mine as my only phone for over a year and it's been fine.
| Running Manjaro, which it came with (although I've been
| tinkering with NixOS on an SD card).
|
| It's been a smoother ride than my previous phone, an OpenMoko
| FreeRunner which I got around 2008. The default OS on that
| was already abandonware by the time I got it!
| choward wrote:
| What's the NixOS experience like? I haven't tried in a
| while but my phone would get stuck on the NixOS splash
| screen. How did you install yours? So you have a public
| repo I could look at?
| chriswarbo wrote:
| I used a pre-build image from Hydra. The mobile-nixos
| project site links to their Hydra jobs:
|
| https://hydra.nixos.org/jobset/mobile-nixos/unstable
|
| That links to the latest build for pinephone aarch64,
| e.g. https://hydra.nixos.org/build/164693256
|
| That gives the output path, e.g. /nix/store/6py525nywqdby
| js7jy1rm9vw53hmm5f1-pine64-pinephone_full-disk-image.img
|
| We can look up that hash on cache.nixos.org, e.g. https:/
| /cache.nixos.org/6py525nywqdbyjs7jy1rm9vw53hmm5f1.nar...
|
| That gives us the download URL, e.g. https://cache.nixos.
| org/nar/087ljdm30k8wqgdhdjdhc15bmkk01g69...
|
| We can unxz that, then trim the leading bytes according
| to the Nar file format (described in Dolstra's PhD
| thesis, figure 5.2, page 93
| https://edolstra.github.io/pubs/phd-thesis.pdf ). Since
| this .nar only contains one file, we can just ignore the
| header bytes (they're padded to multiples of 8 bytes; I
| think in this case we need to skip the first 96 bytes).
| We can do this while dd-ing the image to our SD card,
| e.g. sudo dd if=087ljdm30k8wqgdhdjdhc15
| bmkk01g69zqvr3gv13sra8pkgk387.nar of=/dev/my-sd-card
| bs=96 skip=1
|
| This is quite convoluted, but I did this while stuck on a
| crappy Chromebook ;)
|
| Note that the above images have no usable user accounts.
| I mounted the resulting SD card and edited the
| /etc/shadow file to enable root login without a password.
| I could then log in to a text console, using an external
| keyboard :)
| choward wrote:
| Thanks! I'll try it out again soon and see what happens.
| jcun4128 wrote:
| Some notes from a Pinephone owner:
|
| Wondering if the thoughts in this thread factor in the
| Pinephone Pro yet or no? I am looking to get one of those
| eventually. I think it just started doing pre-orders.
|
| I got a second basic text/call line for my Pinephone but I
| don't use it as a phone right now. The modem is finicky when
| it works, seems to need a certain battery charge (like near
| full). I also have to restart it several times to get the
| modem to work. I'm using Mobian/Phosh. I'm not 100% a fan of
| the Phosh look/how it works multi-task wise but it does work
| out of the box more than a couple other "front ends" I tried.
| KDE Plasma was pretty but I couldn't just plug in an external
| monitor and have it work. Overall I like the idea of the
| phone/want to learn to develop for it. Unfortunately my
| screen is falling apart/peeling near the top edges. Also the
| battery even in airplane mode will die within a day or so.
|
| What was neat was running ARM VS Code but it was slow as hell
| eg. 5 second click lag.
|
| Old screenshot https://i.imgur.com/a7OHjcZ.png
| ironmagma wrote:
| Are these firmware-level issues that can be fixed by flashing a
| ROM somewhere? Or something endemic to the chip that has no
| hope of being fixed?
| Underphil wrote:
| I can't quite understand what you're saying here. A PS5 devkit
| can't make calls but it's still developed for. Why does a phone
| need to be your daily driver to be able to develop for it?
|
| I call tell I'm obviously missing something here and happy to
| be called out.
| spicybright wrote:
| A PS5 dev kit functions as a full PS5 though, so you can be
| reasonably certain a game developed for it will work on a
| real PS5. You can test it like someone playing a PS5 would by
| sitting in front of it with a controller.
|
| A phone that has trouble with basic features you're expecting
| a final product to get right is much more effort. If you're
| not going to be using it like a normal phone daily, you won't
| find certain bugs.
|
| What if your map app crashes when the GPS location jitters
| too much like in the real world? Or gives inaccurate results
| when you walk next to high current power line that screws
| with it's internal compass? It's nearly impossible to
| simulate day to day usage to catch these things.
|
| But sure, you can develop for it now. But when bugs with
| basic features you rely on happen, you'll have to make a
| guess whether it's your code or the phone's bug.
|
| Then when bugs are either fixed or deemed not OS issues,
| you'll have to re-test and re-develop parts of your code to
| cope with that over and over.
|
| A proper working dev kit that works as a day to day phone is
| much more worth developing for, unless you're REALLY into the
| pinephone and don't mind extra work.
| goombacloud wrote:
| A question to you as someone from the hardware side: Why is it
| not a focus for hardware devs to build hardware that works with
| existing software? Why do I always need a special kernel for
| every arm64 board out there?
|
| Often it's that there are hardware components chosen without
| mainline drivers, then there is also the problem of each board
| having a different layout. With arm64 EFI things get better but
| it's still a difference compared to x86 where you can boot
| almost any old OS on your newest laptop, thanks to PCI and
| other standard interfaces.
| rjsw wrote:
| NetBSD builds one kernel for all supported ARM64 devices,
| there is no reason why Linux can't do the same. The
| devicetree selected by the firmware provides the description
| of a particular board.
| tremon wrote:
| _supported_ really is key in that sentence. Does NetBSD
| build one kernel to rule them all because they only support
| a limited number of very similar ARM64 devices, or is their
| kernel just more flexible in adjusting itself at runtime?
|
| Also, ARM64 is only one ISA. 32-bit has at least v5, v7 and
| thumb in wide circulation (though I may be off-target on
| what's exactly referred to as an ISA on arm).
| avianlyric wrote:
| Cost and power efficiency. If you want cheap portable
| electronics that have batteries that last forever, then you
| need to build SoCs that have exact features needed for a
| specific application and no more.
|
| Maintaining software compatibility would mean sacrificing
| either price or power consumption. So a manufacturer can
| choose between spending money rewriting the software, or
| having to pay anywhere between 15C/ to $100 more per unit. If
| you're making millions of units, then savings from using more
| limited SoCs will quickly pay for an army of software
| engineers.
| ac29 wrote:
| > A question to you as someone from the hardware side: Why is
| it not a focus for hardware devs to build hardware that works
| with existing software? Why do I always need a special kernel
| for every arm64 board out there?
|
| Because the SoCs used in these sort of boards originally went
| into things like cheap Android set top boxes and the like.
| Those customers just need an image that can boot to Android
| and work well enough, and it is easier for the hardware
| vendors to hack at their in house kernel branch than to get
| everything upstream.
| emptysongglass wrote:
| I feel this. I've had a PinePhone, PineBook Pro, and was looking
| at their Clusterboard but I sold the PP and the PBP and didn't
| buy the Clusterboard all because of small hardware issues that
| basically persist on all of these devices today. The PBP still
| doesn't sleep properly without special consideration ("hacks"
| basically). The Clusterboard also needs tweaks to get PXE boot
| working (more "hacks") and a plethora of other outstanding issues
| that make running it for, let's say, experiments in local K8s
| clusters, aggravating.
|
| With the hardware so unreliable for day to day computing it's
| really only for the same kinds of people who can be found with a
| motorbike in their garage that works, without any issues, for one
| glorious day out of the year.
|
| I agree with Drew: the efforts could really use some focus but
| people like Drew who can both lead with wisdom and scratch a
| bigger itch than just theirs are in short supply in the FOSS
| community.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > Implementing and upstreaming kernel drivers, u-Boot support,
| etc
|
| I agree that this is important and I totally want to contribute
| but the truth is I don't have the knowledge to do this. Not yet
| at least. How does one learn how to do this?
|
| I've written a small user space driver for some laptop USB stuff.
| I reverse engineered the manufacturer's proprietary applications
| and drivers and made a Linux program that talks to the hardware
| the same way. Is this the correct approach here?
| zozbot234 wrote:
| The postmarketOS wiki has some nice guides on how to work on
| hardware enablement for a mobile device - including mainline
| kernel support.
| Mystlix wrote:
| >How does one learn how to do this?
|
| It's not something you can learn in a fortnight. You first have
| to learn C and Assembly for the architecture you're using, then
| you need to study how different OSs on different hardware
| manage to make themselves boot and then you need to use this
| knowledge to study the SoC's documentation and implement the
| stuff there. If documentation were perfect maybe you'd only
| need to know how to program and simply follow the
| specification, but in these cases experience with a large
| number of cases is a must to navigate the environment.
| chriswarbo wrote:
| Which telephony stack is generally used on PinePhones (e.g. by
| Majaro, Mobian, etc.)?
|
| I've found the freesmartphone.org stack to be reasonably
| pleasant; e.g. a couple of years ago I used it to manually delete
| SMS messages from a SIM
| http://chriswarbo.net/blog/2019-11-29-openmoko_sms_deletion....
|
| Unfortunately the freesmartphone.org page seems to be down
| (archived at
| https://web.archive.org/web/20210327153615/http://www.freesm... )
| jpsamaroo wrote:
| Sxmo uses ModemManager[0] for calls+texts, and mmsd-tng[1] for
| MMS support. It generally works quite well (in my limited
| experience), modulo some dropped messages (might already be
| fixed?) and the modem occasionally getting filled up with
| messages which take a while to clear (causing newer messages to
| not be delivered).
|
| I can't speak for what other distros use.
|
| [0] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mobile-
| broadband/ModemManager [1] https://gitlab.com/kop316/mmsd/
| kop316 wrote:
| > modulo some dropped messages
|
| mmsd-tng is a lot more stable in dealing with transient
| network issues with 1.7, which was the cause of dropped
| messages (dog fooding your work helps!).
|
| I think almost all other distros have moved to the modem
| manager stack (to my knowledge, UBPorts is the only one who
| still uses oFono). Phosh uses MM, Plasma Mobile moved to MM,
| and SXMO uses MM, which are the major players in phone DEs.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| For the record, FSO code is archived at
| https://github.com/freesmartphone/
|
| Most distros use ModemManager these days, although some still
| use oFono.
| Rd6n6 wrote:
| The librem costs more than a pine phone iirc. Does it offer
| things the pine phone doesn't? Eg, I heard purism has better
| microcode access to their chips so maybe drivers will be easier
| to write?
| bArray wrote:
| > I will go on the record as saying that Manjaro Linux is a bad
| Linux distribution and a bad place to send this money. They have
| a history of internal corruption, a record of questionable
| spending, and a plethora of technical issues and problematic
| behavior in the FOSS ecosystem. What limited budget there is to
| go around was wasted in their hands.
|
| Can anyone elaborate on this? I did a little search-foo but
| couldn't easily find some information regarding this claim...
| asojfdowgh wrote:
| https://github.com/arindas/manjarno
| rank0 wrote:
| You can't even access the arch repositories from manjaro. It's
| pretty wack.
| metabagel wrote:
| This is part of their model. Manjaro's repositories are
| downstream of Arch.
| chaosharmonic wrote:
| Except, their model is also to ship an AUR helper out of
| the box, despite the fact that holding back distro packages
| compared to upstream actively breaks AUR ones that depend
| on those in the core Arch repo.
|
| If they bothered to do the same thing with the AUR that
| they're doing with the upstream Arch packages, it'd be one
| thing. But as is, basically they're claiming that their
| design keeps the experience "stable" despite the fact that
| this same decision directly causes other parts of the
| experience to become _un_ stable.
| jethro_tell wrote:
| I believe there was also a problem where some bad coding
| had every Manjaro box in the world spamming the shit out
| of the arch repos to the point they were crashing. I'm
| not sure if the fix was amicable agreement or just an
| upstream block.
| gue5t wrote:
| My experience attempting to contribute to Manjaro (fixes to
| packages including some without with which packages simply hung
| when being built interactively, as they depended on stdin being
| EOF as it is in their CI environment) was met with not just a
| cold shoulder but active offense and hostility. They don't
| accept pull requests (in fact, their gitlab configuration
| doesn't even let one fork), nor is there a mailing list for
| patches. There simply is no contribution workflow, and this
| isn't even clearly documented (it's fine to be a "cathedral",
| but you should be up-front about it).
| silisili wrote:
| I rarely like to speak bad of an individual, but the lead
| developer is an absolute dunce. Maybe the rest of the team is
| wise and can make up for it, I don't care enough to check. They
| make braindead decisions(holding packages for weeks for
| 'stability'), braindead recommendations (cert expired, just set
| your system clock back duh), and steal code. It was obvious
| from the code at the time that the developer didn't even really
| know how to code.
|
| /rant
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| From my perspective as a Phosh developer, my experience with
| Manjaro was that they're often packaging unmerged work-in-
| progress branches with known issues just to ship new features
| as first (without even mentioning that they ship experimental
| code or where it comes from), which then causes their users to
| fill bunch of invalid bug reports upstream.
| jancsika wrote:
| > Implementing and upstreaming kernel drivers, u-Boot support,
| etc
|
| Which drivers haven't been upstreamed?
|
| Also, you say it'd take a few weeks to create a standard
| installer by upstreaming "the last 6 patches?" What are these
| patches, and where's the link? Has someone already done the work
| and it's just waiting to be submitted, or are you saying these
| patches would form the basis for two weeks _more_ work on top of
| getting everything upstreamed?
|
| > Building out a robust telephony stack for Linux
|
| What's the current state of the telephony stack for Linux? Are
| there competing projects? For the most complete project, what is
| missing WRT the pinephone? What isn't possible to do on it
| currently-- say, by fucking around in a terminal window-- that
| must be developed for pinephone be considered to have an API
| suitable for a cheap, modern smart phone?
|
| > Building a mobile user interface for Linux
|
| Isn't Phosh this? If not, what would you suggest as an
| alternative to what Phosh is currently doing?
|
| I'd like to hear the details on this. E.g., if the biggest
| problem with the telephony stack were that it doesn't yet support
| animated emojis, I'd go ahead and buy a pinephone. I suspect the
| problems go deeper than that. But commenters here seem to just
| say, "Definitely not a daily driver." I have no idea what the
| scope of the problem is from that.
|
| Edit: clarifications
| blendergeek wrote:
| > What's the current state of the telephony stack for Linux?
| Are there competing projects? For the most complete project,
| what is missing WRT the pinephone? What isn't possible to do on
| it currently-- say, by fucking around in a terminal window--
| that must be developed for pinephone be considered to have an
| API suitable for a cheap, modern smart phone?
|
| I can't answer this from a technical perspective. I can answer
| this from a user experience perspective. I use a pinephone as a
| daily driver. I mainly communicate with people via SMS/MMS. The
| current state of things is this:
|
| Ususally SMS/MMS works, but sometimes it will stop working for
| a few weeks. Then I have to track down the magic AT commands I
| need to send to the modem to make it work again. The modem
| constantly disappears and reappears. This happens about 10
| times a day. It will disappear for sometimes hours at a time
| before coming back. During this time, I cannot receive SMS/MMS
| or phone calls. Phone calls work, but call waiting and three
| way calling do not. And I forgot to mention, MMS doesn't work
| just yet. I have to compile a (fairly stable) MMS application
| from source because distros are waiting to ship it until it
| gets a "stable" release.
|
| In general, I would not yet recommend a Pinephone to anyone
| whoever relies on their phone for anything mission critical.
| Jach wrote:
| Does Pinephone use the same stuff that Purism has been
| building or is there a standalone SMS/MMS app now? It was
| always my impression that they've been piggybacking (and
| good!) but the progress rate from Purism leaves a lot to be
| desired. I was rather surprised they were building SMS/MMS
| stuff on top of libpurple, like I never considered the idea
| of using pidgin (technically Chatty for them) for text
| messaging even if it makes a sort of sense. Last I heard in
| March, MMS was so broken that if you even just received an
| MMS message, it would corrupt that contact and you couldn't
| send or receive anything anymore from them. One 'solution' at
| the time seemed to include trashing the .purple/chatty/db/
| folder and restarting phosh. I know someone who has both
| phones so I've been hearing some fun stories of brokenness,
| but I've yet to receive my own librem.
| bluGill wrote:
| PinePhone does nothing. The different software stacks are a
| different story. You can several different phone software
| stacks on the phone, one is Purism's and so of course it
| does, but I'm not sure about the other choices.
| 0xedd wrote:
| wpietri wrote:
| Holy moly! I'm amazed you put up with that. I would hardly
| call my SMS messages mission critical. But it'd be a
| nightmare for me to be constantly making excuses to friends
| about why I was appearing to ignore them.
| rabbitofdeath wrote:
| YES- I recently got a PinePhone and after distro hopping I felt
| the same way but couldn't put my finger on it. Somethings work in
| some distros (Mobian vs Manjaro) and it was really frustrating
| and its not immediately clear why it doesn't work- obviously
| people are working on it just not together. This is a good
| priority list that would help herd these cats!
| mikepurvis wrote:
| I have similar feelings about my retro handheld device (RGB10,
| an Odroid Go Advance knockoff). Yes, the fact that it works at
| all and is so cheap is pretty nifty, and no, I don't really
| expect any support from the kind of company making this type of
| device. But at the end of the day, when everything is such a
| jumble, with a fractured ecosystem of multiple OS options that
| all have their own little quirks and rough corners, it's hard
| to get too excited about investing a lot into it.
| itomato wrote:
| No mention of the Pinecil?
|
| https://pine64.com/product/pinecil-smart-mini-portable-solde...
|
| Does this dilute the brand or grow it?
| 1MachineElf wrote:
| Hard to say in a business sense, but that's the next soldering
| iron I want to own. I think it packs many great features that
| others can't match.
| asddubs wrote:
| isn't it just a slightly different ts100?
| elkos wrote:
| There's some context I'm missing from Drew's take on the Manjaro
| distribution in the note of the article.
| jwatt wrote:
| He could be referring to multiple things, but the one I recall
| was the treasurer resigning, claiming he felt/was removed by
| the founder for blocking what he saw as misuses of donated
| funds and breach of the agreed spending guidelines:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23940824
|
| The original link is dead because the database for the entire
| Manjaro forums was lost shortly after that, so you'll need to
| use archive.org if you want to read the original discussion:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20200807042341/https://forum.man...
| kodah wrote:
| > I will go on the record as saying that Manjaro Linux is a bad
| Linux distribution and a bad place to send this money. They have
| a history of internal corruption, a record of questionable
| spending, and a plethora of technical issues and problematic
| behavior in the FOSS ecosystem. What limited budget there is to
| go around was wasted in their hands.
|
| Can someone explain this?
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| What is PinePhone's business/development model that they hope to
| avoid the pitfalls that befell OpenMoko?
|
| To me, it just looks like a repeat of that attempt, and its
| floundering around the basics of the telephony stack.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openmoko
| znpy wrote:
| Ah, another software guy telling a hardware company how to run
| their business.
|
| Nothing new under the sun I guess.
|
| It's worth nothing that Pine64 is already succeeding where a lot
| of other companies have failed and is also designing, producing
| and delivering way more than many bigger companies even promised.
|
| They probably know better.
| stonogo wrote:
| Pine64 has yet to deliver a single fully-functional compute
| device. Their chargers and their RISCV-based soldering iron are
| excellent. They should pivot to non-computers exclusively.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| I think the big issue with these niche products is they need to
| be much cheaper if the company's want to push out broken
| software.
|
| Like, let's say, the pine phone was 100$.
|
| Cool, even if it bricks after a month I'm okay. At 400$ , I'm
| upset.
|
| I don't understand how anyone can feel it's ok to charge so much
| money for non functional products
| karmanyaahm wrote:
| the pinephone is $150, the pinephone _pro_ is $400
|
| Additionally, they have a very clear disclaimer about the
| target audience, you don't have to buy it if you don't like it.
|
| > Beta Limited Edition PinePhones are aimed solely at early
| adopters. More specifically, only intend for these units to
| find their way into the hands of users with extensive Linux
| experience.
| [deleted]
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