8 ms·

It is frustrating to me that despite the blunt verbiage about it being a beta device for software and hardware developers, people even here are griping about it

by djent 5y ago

It is frustrating to me that despite the blunt verbiage about it being a beta device for software and hardware developers, people even here are griping about it being not ready for everyday use. If a free and open-source mobile operating system is missing software support for a feature you want, please contribute to its development.

542458 5y ago
Part of the problem is that the meaning of “beta” has gotten extremely diluted, and is often used as a CYA rather than an actual indicator of where the software is in the dev cycle. Gmail was in “public beta” for what, five years? Game companies routinely give out “alpha” access that’s really more of a pre-release test and hype tool.
officeplant 5y ago
As a owner of many pine64 products I wish there was a clear path to learning how to contribute. My last time coding was C++ class over 16 years ago and I wish I had some sort of idea on how to get started with hobby programming in my spare time as an adult. Edit// Especially since I've jumped on the ARM bandwagon and replaced my desktop with an M1 mac and my laptop with a Pinebook Pro.
- kop316 5y ago
  Heh. Contributing to open source is....interesting. Pine64 really seems to only do the hardware aspect, everything else is up to others. I guess I would ask: how do you want to contribute? Is there a specific niche you want to help fix? That's how I got involved, I wanted MMS (and later visual voicemail) for my Pinephone.. Or perhaps there's a specific project you like that needs help, or theres a particular bug that annoys you in a FOSS project. Those may be the best ways to get involved to help.
- bluGill 5y ago
  Mostly it is you just need to dig in and make false starts until you figure it out.
- djent 5y ago
  It certainly depends on what feature or what app you would like to work on. Mobian and Manjaro are both on GitLab, and the public is able to create an account. Issues there may be marked Help Wanted or similar. In regard to motivation to continue programming, that can be the most difficult. Overall if you are proud of your work and find it useful yourself, you will probably continue the habit of contributing and supporting your code.
- seniorivn 5y ago
  go smaller, if u use some open source software check it's repositories and community forums and find something that people don't like to do documentation is definitely a candidate also automated tests
- TobTobXX 5y ago
  btw, being on arm makes Pinephone development easier, since you don't have to cross compile.
- blihp 5y ago
  Just pick something that bothers you or you think is missing and start working on it. I'd recommend something application, as opposed to system, level to get started. That way you can develop using something like Python and not worry about lots of other dependencies on whatever you're working on. There generally isn't much in the way of formal organization in the open source world... just scratch an itch that you have. There are relatively few people working on things specific to Linux on mobile so even a modest contribution can have a big impact. For example, the developer of the Megapixels camera app, which is a vast improvement over what existed previously but still needs much work, just wanted a better camera app.
- ognarb 5y ago
  Create apps! This is the most needed. We created a tutorial for Kirigami here: https://develop.kde.org/docs/kirigami/ https://develop.kde.org/docs/kirigami/. There are also a few tutorials for GTK/libhandy with e.g. https://tuxphones.com/tutorial-developing-responsive-linux-smartphone-apps-gnome-builder-gtk-libhandy-gtk-part-1/ https://tuxphones.com/tutorial-developing-responsive-linux-s... Also join the developer channels on matrix: #plasmamobile:kde.org (not sure that the address for the GNOME one)
  - pseudoramble 5y ago
    Cool! This is the kind of thing I've wondered about for a while. This looks like some handy info. Is there an option to use a higher level language like Python and these QT libraries still? I don't have a ton of time to contribute, but this might be a way forward for me someday. EDIT: Your 2nd link is literally what I was asking about, although it's using Gtk3. I'm not familiar with either in depth, so I'm not picky there. That's really useful. Thanks for this!
unexpected 5y ago
I feel like programmers have become "soft". I bet the old guard is okay with something like this - a lot of C, C++, assembly skills - this is what it meant to mess around with computers! Now, you can just be modifying CSS and call yourself a programmer. You get one of these devices, and you're sorely disappointed!
- no_time 5y ago
  As the complexity of our every day devices increase, less and less people are capable of contributing anything meaningful to an OS like Linux, let alone in their free time. It also doesn't help that the abundance of high level languages discourages learning about computer internals in younger generations. Or that we indeed became softies lol.
  - dylan604 5y ago
    Those harder classes used to be referred to as weed out courses. Incoming class of 100+ students to Assembler. After 2 weeks, 60%+ drop the class.
    - 3836293648 5y ago
      I'm currently TA:ing my uni's Introductory Computer Engineering class (from logic gates to assembly). It's not as much of a weed out class as you'd think and yes, it's the first class they take, along side some introductory python. Most of them do seem to hate the assembly part though personally I found the part where you have to actually make an instruction to be much harder when I had to take this class
  - megous 5y ago
    Language is very small part of it. For example me contributing a anx7688 driver for pinephone to make convergence work was C coding, yes, but also reading through type-c spec, battery charging 1.2 spec, usb-pd specs, alt-dp specs, and figuring out how it all works from 0 knowledge, to tie all that together on a quirky HW design, with several hardware bugs that I had to discover first, and non-cooperating PMIC/and type-c controller, on 3 different pinephone HW variants. C coding is the easiest thing. Hard part is figuring out what needs to be done and getting quite detailed understanding of how everything works on HW level, lots of trying and testing with various USB devices in various scenarios. There's also a lot of reverse engineering, because no HW vendor cooperates with random fucks from the internet and gives them free support. :)
spaetzleesser 5y ago
From my experience a “beta” should be ready for daily use but some bugs should be expected. If it’s really unstable call it ”alpha”.
robbedpeter 5y ago
How many hundreds or thousands of enthusiasts are needed before it's suitable to be a daily driver? I see the fragmented approach on the software side as a major hindrance to the goal of achieving a device that can be used by a normal person as a reasonable replacement for other smart phones. I check in on it every l every 6 months or so, update my pinephone and give it a few days. So far, it doesn't meet reliability or usability for serious use. It's a high caliber foot gun of a methodology - if they corralled all of the effort and enthusiasm currently scattered amongst a dozen (!) different os's and communities, they could establish a high quality functional baseline. The hardware is great. The mission is great. The software is fragmented and scattered and missing the force multipliers that focused collaborative development could bring. There's not enough to riff on, toomuch goes wrong in complicated ways, and so the device is an exercise in frustration instead of a passion project.
- bluGill 5y ago
  > How many hundreds or thousands of enthusiasts are needed before it's suitable to be a daily driver? Zero. What is needed is a few hundred developers writing actually code to make it useful. The enthusiasts are at best nice to haves. You can blur the line if you write good bug reports, but right now the pinephone doesn't need end users. The above will change over time. Millions of users would be enough to force carriers to support activating it on their network, something that developers cannot do (at least not legally). Likewise large numbers of users would be enough to those banking apps written. However today millions of users wouldn't make any difference to the important parts of making it work (except in so far as users sometimes become developers)
  - mixmastamyk 5y ago
    Enthusiasts with wallets are another story.
  - EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y ago
    All my banks function just nice on my phone without any apps. There is one magic app that makes it happen, it's called a WWW browser.
mixmastamyk 5y ago
Unfortunately I'm fully booked, and would gladly pay an extra hundred or two for someone else to do it. Not clear on who that is yet.
- bluGill 5y ago
  Unless you are talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars though your money isn't really useful. Developers are on the higher end of the income curve and so few people alone can afford to hire them like that. You can donate a few hundred so several projects, it will make a difference, but thousands of other people need to do the same before they can hire even one person (and the first people hired will do more IT or administrative work that needs to be done)
  - mixmastamyk 5y ago
    It's done by purchasing the device, many folks purchasing it, which I already did. In fact someone might consider starting a company (haha), or funneling the money to a single engineering source.
- seba_dos1 5y ago
  I happen to work for a company that employs a team of people to do just that, which allows me and others to work on mobile GNU/Linux ecosystem full-time. It's called Purism, and the product that pays for it is called Librem 5.
loser777 5y ago
I bought a "beta edition" regular PinePhone and it seemed anything but "beta." Random crashes after boot every 30 seconds, even with "workarounds" such as patching the memory frequency (really?). This may have been a hardware defect but one of the nice things about calling everything a "beta" as an excuse for the flakiness I'll never know. It was essentially a paperweight, not something that would enable me to become a "contributor."
- sieabah 5y ago
  Sounds like a beta to me. Perhaps you're thinking of a release candidate?
turtlebits 5y ago
The product page doesn’t include the word “beta” anywhere. I wouldn’t even call it a phone if it can’t act as a phone out of the box, let alone use the “pro” moniker. Why is it not labeled as a development board with a touchscreen and cell modem?
- OJFord 5y ago
  It says it's available for developers.
hypertele-Xii 5y ago
You mean the thing called PRO isn't ready for professional use?

by djent 5y ago

542458 5y ago

Part of the problem is that the meaning of “beta” has gotten extremely diluted, and is often used as a CYA rather than an actual indicator of where the software is in the dev cycle. Gmail was in “public beta” for what, five years? Game companies routinely give out “alpha” access that’s really more of a pre-release test and hype tool.

officeplant 5y ago

As a owner of many pine64 products I wish there was a clear path to learning how to contribute. My last time coding was C++ class over 16 years ago and I wish I had some sort of idea on how to get started with hobby programming in my spare time as an adult. Edit// Especially since I've jumped on the ARM bandwagon and replaced my desktop with an M1 mac and my laptop with a Pinebook Pro.

kop316 5y ago
Heh. Contributing to open source is....interesting. Pine64 really seems to only do the hardware aspect, everything else is up to others. I guess I would ask: how do you want to contribute? Is there a specific niche you want to help fix? That's how I got involved, I wanted MMS (and later visual voicemail) for my Pinephone.. Or perhaps there's a specific project you like that needs help, or theres a particular bug that annoys you in a FOSS project. Those may be the best ways to get involved to help.
bluGill 5y ago
Mostly it is you just need to dig in and make false starts until you figure it out.
djent 5y ago
It certainly depends on what feature or what app you would like to work on. Mobian and Manjaro are both on GitLab, and the public is able to create an account. Issues there may be marked Help Wanted or similar. In regard to motivation to continue programming, that can be the most difficult. Overall if you are proud of your work and find it useful yourself, you will probably continue the habit of contributing and supporting your code.
seniorivn 5y ago
go smaller, if u use some open source software check it's repositories and community forums and find something that people don't like to do documentation is definitely a candidate also automated tests
TobTobXX 5y ago
btw, being on arm makes Pinephone development easier, since you don't have to cross compile.
blihp 5y ago
Just pick something that bothers you or you think is missing and start working on it. I'd recommend something application, as opposed to system, level to get started. That way you can develop using something like Python and not worry about lots of other dependencies on whatever you're working on. There generally isn't much in the way of formal organization in the open source world... just scratch an itch that you have. There are relatively few people working on things specific to Linux on mobile so even a modest contribution can have a big impact. For example, the developer of the Megapixels camera app, which is a vast improvement over what existed previously but still needs much work, just wanted a better camera app.
ognarb 5y ago
Create apps! This is the most needed. We created a tutorial for Kirigami here: https://develop.kde.org/docs/kirigami/ https://develop.kde.org/docs/kirigami/. There are also a few tutorials for GTK/libhandy with e.g. https://tuxphones.com/tutorial-developing-responsive-linux-smartphone-apps-gnome-builder-gtk-libhandy-gtk-part-1/ https://tuxphones.com/tutorial-developing-responsive-linux-s... Also join the developer channels on matrix: #plasmamobile:kde.org (not sure that the address for the GNOME one)
- pseudoramble 5y ago
  Cool! This is the kind of thing I've wondered about for a while. This looks like some handy info. Is there an option to use a higher level language like Python and these QT libraries still? I don't have a ton of time to contribute, but this might be a way forward for me someday. EDIT: Your 2nd link is literally what I was asking about, although it's using Gtk3. I'm not familiar with either in depth, so I'm not picky there. That's really useful. Thanks for this!

unexpected 5y ago

I feel like programmers have become "soft". I bet the old guard is okay with something like this - a lot of C, C++, assembly skills - this is what it meant to mess around with computers! Now, you can just be modifying CSS and call yourself a programmer. You get one of these devices, and you're sorely disappointed!

no_time 5y ago
As the complexity of our every day devices increase, less and less people are capable of contributing anything meaningful to an OS like Linux, let alone in their free time. It also doesn't help that the abundance of high level languages discourages learning about computer internals in younger generations. Or that we indeed became softies lol.
- dylan604 5y ago
  Those harder classes used to be referred to as weed out courses. Incoming class of 100+ students to Assembler. After 2 weeks, 60%+ drop the class.
  - 3836293648 5y ago
    I'm currently TA:ing my uni's Introductory Computer Engineering class (from logic gates to assembly). It's not as much of a weed out class as you'd think and yes, it's the first class they take, along side some introductory python. Most of them do seem to hate the assembly part though personally I found the part where you have to actually make an instruction to be much harder when I had to take this class
- megous 5y ago
  Language is very small part of it. For example me contributing a anx7688 driver for pinephone to make convergence work was C coding, yes, but also reading through type-c spec, battery charging 1.2 spec, usb-pd specs, alt-dp specs, and figuring out how it all works from 0 knowledge, to tie all that together on a quirky HW design, with several hardware bugs that I had to discover first, and non-cooperating PMIC/and type-c controller, on 3 different pinephone HW variants. C coding is the easiest thing. Hard part is figuring out what needs to be done and getting quite detailed understanding of how everything works on HW level, lots of trying and testing with various USB devices in various scenarios. There's also a lot of reverse engineering, because no HW vendor cooperates with random fucks from the internet and gives them free support. :)

spaetzleesser 5y ago

From my experience a “beta” should be ready for daily use but some bugs should be expected. If it’s really unstable call it ”alpha”.

robbedpeter 5y ago

How many hundreds or thousands of enthusiasts are needed before it's suitable to be a daily driver? I see the fragmented approach on the software side as a major hindrance to the goal of achieving a device that can be used by a normal person as a reasonable replacement for other smart phones. I check in on it every l every 6 months or so, update my pinephone and give it a few days. So far, it doesn't meet reliability or usability for serious use. It's a high caliber foot gun of a methodology - if they corralled all of the effort and enthusiasm currently scattered amongst a dozen (!) different os's and communities, they could establish a high quality functional baseline. The hardware is great. The mission is great. The software is fragmented and scattered and missing the force multipliers that focused collaborative development could bring. There's not enough to riff on, toomuch goes wrong in complicated ways, and so the device is an exercise in frustration instead of a passion project.

bluGill 5y ago
> How many hundreds or thousands of enthusiasts are needed before it's suitable to be a daily driver? Zero. What is needed is a few hundred developers writing actually code to make it useful. The enthusiasts are at best nice to haves. You can blur the line if you write good bug reports, but right now the pinephone doesn't need end users. The above will change over time. Millions of users would be enough to force carriers to support activating it on their network, something that developers cannot do (at least not legally). Likewise large numbers of users would be enough to those banking apps written. However today millions of users wouldn't make any difference to the important parts of making it work (except in so far as users sometimes become developers)
- mixmastamyk 5y ago
  Enthusiasts with wallets are another story.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y ago
  All my banks function just nice on my phone without any apps. There is one magic app that makes it happen, it's called a WWW browser.

mixmastamyk 5y ago

Unfortunately I'm fully booked, and would gladly pay an extra hundred or two for someone else to do it. Not clear on who that is yet.

bluGill 5y ago
Unless you are talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars though your money isn't really useful. Developers are on the higher end of the income curve and so few people alone can afford to hire them like that. You can donate a few hundred so several projects, it will make a difference, but thousands of other people need to do the same before they can hire even one person (and the first people hired will do more IT or administrative work that needs to be done)
- mixmastamyk 5y ago
  It's done by purchasing the device, many folks purchasing it, which I already did. In fact someone might consider starting a company (haha), or funneling the money to a single engineering source.
seba_dos1 5y ago
I happen to work for a company that employs a team of people to do just that, which allows me and others to work on mobile GNU/Linux ecosystem full-time. It's called Purism, and the product that pays for it is called Librem 5.

loser777 5y ago

I bought a "beta edition" regular PinePhone and it seemed anything but "beta." Random crashes after boot every 30 seconds, even with "workarounds" such as patching the memory frequency (really?). This may have been a hardware defect but one of the nice things about calling everything a "beta" as an excuse for the flakiness I'll never know. It was essentially a paperweight, not something that would enable me to become a "contributor."

sieabah 5y ago
Sounds like a beta to me. Perhaps you're thinking of a release candidate?

turtlebits 5y ago

The product page doesn’t include the word “beta” anywhere. I wouldn’t even call it a phone if it can’t act as a phone out of the box, let alone use the “pro” moniker. Why is it not labeled as a development board with a touchscreen and cell modem?

OJFord 5y ago
It says it's available for developers.

hypertele-Xii 5y ago

You mean the thing called PRO isn't ready for professional use?