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Pine64’s response to “Why I left Pine64”
- ddevault 4y agoThis is a disappointing response. I don't have a horse in this race (besides wanting to have access to good hardware for FOSS platforms), but I do have my ear on the ground in this community, so here are my thoughts on this. > [removing SPI] was based on the fact that for years SPI was largely unused on PINE64 devices. People have been arguing that a u-boot firmware needs to be installed on that flash chip for years, too. Essentially everyone in the dev community has been pushing them to do this for essentially the entire lifetime of their product line. Would you rather find, download, and flash a special-purpose, pinebook-specific image onto a microSD card, pop it in, and boot that up to install a distribution, or would you rather it supports a standard UEFI booting interface over USB, netboot, whatever else, like every other laptop can? > We created a space for development talks to be held (as we always had) My understanding from speaking to friends and colleagues who work with Pine64 is that these spaces are pretty toxic. Manjaro has the loudest voice and other projects don't get the respect they deserve. And I'm prepared to believe it if this flippant response quoted in Martijn's article is accurate: "people who want [an SPI chip] can just solder one on." This is not the behavior that I expect from a project which claims to honor its community. I'm very disappointed in this response and in PINE64 generally. I expected an apology and a promise to improve, and this isn't it. Pine, I believed in you from the start.[0] I thought you were better than this. The past few years of your behavior has disillusioned me to your project and I can no longer offer you my support. [0]: https://drewdevault.com/2019/12/18/PinePhone-review.html https://drewdevault.com/2019/12/18/PinePhone-review.html
- Sakos 4y agoThe whole story has killed any interest I had in their products. I was interested in buying a Pinebook and Pinephone, but not anymore.
- illuminerdy 4y agoI had been looking at an electronic soldering iron they had produced. Not sure how I feel now.
- mschuster91 4y agoIt's an excellent soldering iron, hardware wise. Lightweight, heats up extremely fast, holds up heat very well. Never tried a custom firmware, but had no need either.
- MartijnBraam 4y agoThe Pinecil works really great. Have been using it for a while now. The non-linux products from pine64 are pretty good.
- kube-system 4y agoThe pinecil is very good. Although the firmware mine came with had an issue and I did have to update it, I now prefer it to my Hakko.
- wiz21c 4y agoMe too, I was hoping to get a Linux phone at a price that match the current lack of polish (for me the pinephone had that price) but Linux means community and diversity for other OS'es to me. So if they don't work with the community, then half the value of the phone disappears... I will now consider buying second hand phone with postmarketOS support. It means I'll have to accept proprietary hardware but, as it will be second hand, it means I'll be more in line with my eco-environemental-whatever-half-baked principles. Nobody cares, I just wanted to illustrate what are the reasons I would like to buy a Pine64 and how those reasons revolves around some basic principles and trade off's.
- linmob 4y agoYou could also get a second-hand PinePhone (just buy postmarketOS CE or later to avoid bad hardware bugs). Regarding other postmarketOS supported devices, I quite like the Xiaomi Pocophone F1 and the OnePlus 6 - but be aware that bootloader unlock on the Xiaomi is a bit painful and charging on the OnePlus 6 is really slow (although that might have been fixed lately/be fixed soon).
- ocdtrekkie 4y agoSo as is practically stereotypical for the Linux community, we're going to let a squabble over distros send us to buying proprietary hardware and more than likely... straight up giving Google more money, as seems to be the top hardware choice of vendors of so-called "secure Android forks".
- tartoran 4y agoThis is the achilles heel of linux
- chylat 4y ago> Would you rather find, download, and flash a special-purpose, pinebook-specific image onto a microSD card, pop it in, and boot that up to install a distribution, or would you rather it supports a standard UEFI booting interface over USB, netboot, whatever else, like every other laptop can? It's possible to write Tow-Boot to the eMMC to do exactly this. SPI isn't needed, it's just more convenient. I happen to prefer SPI and Pine64 was willing to go with SPI too. I think this issue is blown out of proportion. Pine64 listened to feedback. The problem here was that timeline's didn't match, not bad intention.
- megous 4y ago> "people who want [an SPI chip] can just solder one on." That's how many of the SBCs I own (from differen vendor) are distributed. There's a space to solder the chip. (and you can pick the size you want)
- MartijnBraam 4y agoMight be acceptable for SBCs, definitely not for phones and laptops
- immibis 4y agoIf you want to buy a phone that Just Works, buy a Samsung Galaxy or a Google Pixel. You can also buy a Pine64 product and if you do not like the hardware you are free to modify it to your heart's content. However, they don't owe it to you to perform the modifications you want, certainly not if there is a shortage of the part you want them to install.
- svennek 4y agoAs an outsider with no insights (but owning a PineBookPro and considering a PinePhonePro), it surely looks like Manjaro is the king of the mountain - and that Martijn's blogpost is likely close to The Truth. Listening and doing your own things anyways is the time-honored way of ignoring people... Even as an Arch user (that hence "gets" Manjaro) that is sad :(
- noasaservice 4y agoAbout the pinephone pro - DONT. Much of the device still doesn't even work. And we're talking simple stuff like the cameras. Calling is also super sketchy. You can text but voice calls effectively is a fail. The IMU does appear to work correctly, for things like rotation. It is pretty fast. You can also fry your device (hardware damage!) if you get the pinephone keyboard and plug in USBC into the phone port instead of the keyboard port. You read that correctly. Hope you don't mess up if you're tired. And if your battery on the PPP goes too low, the utter shit firmware goes into a boot loop and can't charge. You have to take off the case and hit the recessed button to put it in DFU mode. That bypasses the firmware causing bootloops. And it's slllloooowwwww charging. I completely and utterly regret such a shit device. And I say that about the very hardware, AND the reticence in actually putting out base builds of working software.
- illuminerdy 4y agoI literally just watched a video on the Pine64 Pro and the reviewer basically said he couldn't recommend it.
- noasaservice 4y agoI can also speak about the Pine A64 LTS. They claim that it supports eMMC booting natively. I bought 4 of each. And I bought a eMMC USB dongle to pre-liad the images. And .... No booting off of eMMC. And utterly NO help from anyone. No guides, no nothing. And that's hardware stuff that Pine attested would work. And it completely doesn't. I still have to boot using mSD at a whole class 10. Their whole "plan" and company is a shit show. It's all gongkai crap. Using or buying will give you pain and suffering if anything goes even slightly wrong.
- cunidev 4y agoOriginal post for context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32494659 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32494659
- ocdtrekkie 4y agoSo they included all the hardware requested by Martijn. What remains the rub here?
- MartijnBraam 4y agoI never said they didn't include SPI, it took an incredibly amount of arguing over several weeks to get it there on the PPP, then they again didn't want to ship it on the PBP. In the end the PBP does have SPI but still didn't ship with something flashed to it. While they did in the end listen and add SPI _after_ manjaro finally agreed. that doesn't mean they listened to the whole community. Ofcourse PINE64 and Manjaro don't have to deal with how the other distributions boot.
- ocdtrekkie 4y agoAs their blog addresses, what was requested to ship on the chip apparently wasn't available in time?
- MartijnBraam 4y agoWell the issue with this happening in private telegram channels is that this will now turn into a "he said" "they said" situation, none of this happened publicly and neither side can provide sources. At the time the argument was definitely not that the chips weren't available. Instead of delaying the PPP production by one day to get U-Boot sorted they decided to not ship mainline U-Boot at all. Which was only possible because Manjaro provided them with an image to ship with that. In the end the only response there is is a blog post that never claims anything is wrong or should happen differently, after acknowledging all that I've done. I only wrote why I left, that they themselves think they're manjaro focussed because the hardware that can't ship Linux doesn't ship manjaro doesn't change that this whole behind the scenes situation really burned me out, and I left.
- ocdtrekkie 4y agoYou have every right to leave, and obviously if you're feeling burnt out, you made the right call for yourself. But it is frustrating that it seems like a distro preference issue has expanded into what will probably end up selling more proprietary phones at the end of the day.
- egberts1 4y agoAs a veteran embedded engineer, I was shock to see that another variant of boot loader is being recommended. I’m quite sure that the bootloop is more than fixable but have my doubts that SPI is not that option. Tow-wut? Sounds something like “extoll-embrace-engulf” and Balkanization to me. Not to stand in the way, but if that fixes the low-charge/bootloop problem then so be it but it doesn’t. Still have the PinePhone Classic, still works, on my anti-static pad, but it may not serve us much longer.
- NoahKAndrews 4y agoTow-Boot is actually a really exciting project that wants to make it so that distributions don't have to manage device-specific u-boot packages for ARM devices, and can instead provide generic images like they do on x86.
- candiddevmike 4y agoWhat is the current state of bootloaders for ARM?
- MartijnBraam 4y agoMessy
- Avamander 4y agoAbysmal. If these devices were UEFI, this discussion wouldn't exist.
- robotnikman 4y agoThis right here. As much as I would love to see more faster and powerful ARM processors come to laptops and desktops in the future, I dread the current ARM bootloader situation coming along with it.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y agoIt's my understanding that Tow-Boot implements UEFI
- egberts1 4y agoAs a veteran embedded engineer, I was shock to see that another variant of boot loader is being recommended. I’m quite sure that the bootloop is more than fixable but have my doubts that SPI is that option. Tow-wut? Sounds something like “extoll-embrace-engulf” and Balkanization to me. Not to stand in the way, but if that fixes the low-charge/bootloop problem but it doesn’t. Still have the PinePhone Classic, still works, on my anti-static pad, but it may not serve us much longer.
- reitanuki 4y agoI am a big fan, but I also find this situation and the response to be a bit disappointing. I highly respect Martijn and the effort he has poured into pmOS and Pine64 and surrounding projects. Without wanting to make other important people feel left out, I consider him an absolute legend and the fact that he has felt compelled to write this blog post (and, unfortunately, to leave) is massively concerning. I think it's very possible that there has been no malice here and it's all just an accident of one thing leading to another, but something has gone awry here and I think it would be nice to hear what Pine intend to do to put it right, or to know that there is such a plan at all. > As for the reason why Pinebook Pro doesn’t ship with a bootloader on SPI – it isn’t caused by favoritism for a particular group of developers or disregard for good ideas, but rather something more trivial. Namerly, a functional Tow-Boot build for the Pinebook Pro wasn’t available at the time of manufacture and shipping. One particular point I want to make: I'm willing to believe Pine about the above, but it's too late to hear about this after crucial people have been miffed. This seems to indicate that communication with the various projects has not been good. This seems like a crucial thing to improve on to prevent this recurring. I don't have enough knowledge of the situation and am incapable of making any judgements as to what is really going on, but I sincerely hope that Pine will consider this situation carefully and whether something can be done to put things right again. I really wish to see Pine and their hardware do well and flourish. That was never going to be easy, but it will be even less easy with the loss of people like Martijn.
- MartijnBraam 4y agoThere has been zero communication towards Tow-Boot developers during this process, nothing about the issues on the new batch. The moment Tow-Boot learned about this is when people received the new Pinebook Pro and it came with a different bootloader. This is a massive communication issue.
- chylat 4y agoDisclaimer: I was in the Pine64 IRC channels at the time, so have some limited visibility, but not all visibility. Pine64 was looking for somebody to commit to maintain PineBook Pro support in Tow-Boot (a relatively new project) I don't know if the point-of-contact was made aware that PineBook Pro was not going to be shipped with Tow-Boot.
- jeroenhd 4y agoI'm a bit confused by the whole bootloader situation. Locking down a bootloader on an open device seems quite bad, but what's the issue here exactly? The user can install any bootloader they want, can't they? I know the ARM bootloader system isn't anything like the PC bootloader system, but even if the bootloader is loaded from eMMC, in what way is the user impeded? I would guess all the user should need to do to use their own bootloader is to pacman -R manjaro-arm-uboot and pacman -S pmos-uboot to hand over control of the bootloader image if you buy a device flashed with Manjaro, or overwrite the eMMC bootloader with one that manually tries to boot from the SD card before resuming normal boot? It seems that the frustrations about Manjaro go further than just the bootloader but I don't really understand why a SPI flash chip would even be a necessity in the first place.
- MartijnBraam 4y agoI've written about the SPI situation before on https://tuxphones.com/booting-arm-linux-the-standard-way/ https://tuxphones.com/booting-arm-linux-the-standard-way/
- zozbot234 4y ago> even if the bootloader is loaded from eMMC, in what way is the user impeded? The "bootloader" isn't just a bootloader, it's effectively a critical firmware component. If the "bootloader" is missing or garbled, the board is bricked and can only be recovered by removing the eMMC, which would be very difficult for most users. Such a thing should not be stored on a data partition and managed like any other distribution package. If they aren't going to ship a separate SPI chip, the eMMC should at least be repartitioned to include a separate "firmware" partition and the bootloader should be shipped there. Distributions should then boot via a chainload mechanism, just like on x86 hardware. (This mechanism can be UEFI based but need not be.)
- Avamander 4y ago> only be recovered by removing the eMMC, which would be very difficult for most users. No, it would require an SD-card to recover.
- fezfight 4y agoI think I'm on Team Pine here. I don't really understand the problem Martijn has. It seems to boil down to that they agreed to everything he wanted, just not fast enough?
- BeefWellington 4y agoI don't think many in the community agreed with making Manjaro the distribution of choice.
- fezfight 4y agoSure, but that's not a deal breaker when you can just change it? I too don't particularly like Manjaro but here's a situation where he's doing damage to basically the only brand that even remotely supports his interests (and that would even listen to him personally) at a low cost. Or maybe there's other better phone options to run Phosh that I don't know about? Seems like a bad idea to me.
- chylat 4y ago+1. Pine64 has listened to feedback, and made attempts to get Tow-Boot flashed on the PineBook Pro. It just didn't fit Pine64's manufacturing timeline. Does any other manufacturer do better in this regard?
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- what-imright 4y agoIf they proved anything it was that they can’t build a phone. The world got a useless brick because politics. Whenever I read about the pinephone I somehow narrate it in the voice of Jordan Peterson
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- Aeolun 4y agoI kinda feel like half of the message here is “We listen to our community, we just don’t always act on it.” I realize that’s healthy, but the way they’re going about it makes me feel like they’re trying to weasel out of it or something. I’m left with a mild feeling of disappointment and I’m not sure why.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y agoI think the problem is that as an external observer, it's almost impossible to distinguish "we listen but don't/can't always act on it" and "we don't listen", because they produce the same actions and are only possible to tell apart by closely following the exact communications (which isn't always possible since some happen in private, and is unreliable anyways if some is trying to appear engaged while not actually listening).
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y agoThis seems easy enough, right? If the SPI chip is in shipped units, and tow-boot is available for it now, then it should be simple enough to ship out of the box starting with the next batch of hardware, and it should be simple enough to post official instructions for installing it from Manjaro. While that wouldn't change the past, it would fix things going forward and let Pine back their words with actions.
- 3np 4y ago> I may add that the decision was made among ourselves, without the input of any third parties or partners Maybe this, right here, is actually a major part of the bigger problem and not exonerating like it seems to be intended > The reasoning behind not including SPI on the PCB wasn’t motivated by any single project or outside source – it was based on the fact that for years SPI was largely unused on PINE64 devices. So if they only talked amongst themselves, how could they have any idea of if the SPI was already being used or not? > And yet, despite this, we agreed to include it on the PinePhone Pro because developers from multiple projects – postmarketOS being one of them – were adamant that it was an absolute necessity. So yeah, sounds like if they had engaged earlier, a lot of unnecessary frustration and grief could have been completely avoided. Unfortunately this post does not even hint at the more significant point in Martijns post, the one about the relationships between PINE64 and the community distributions.
- yellowapple 4y ago> The example given in the blog post supposes that the community team and Pine Store employees were firmly intent on removing SPI on the PinePhone Pro and coerced not to ship Tow-Boot. I don't see where in Martijn's blog post that "coercion" was "supposed" at all. What he actually wrote: > Negotiating this solution was hell. Manjaro is incentivized not to agree to this, since it cedes their sole control over the bootloader, and PINE64 listens to Manjaro before anyone else. Furthermore, PINE64 does not actually want to add SPI flash chips to their hardware. Apparently, there has been some issues with people using SPI flash as RW storage on the A64-LTS boards, which would be a support issue. > After months of discussions between the community, Manjaro, and PINE64 leadership, we finally were able to convince them to ship the PinePhone Pro with an SPI flash chip with Tow-Boot installed on it. He doesn't even claim that Manjaro objected at all to the idea of adding an SPI chip and preloading Tow-Boot on it; only that they have a possible vested interest in resisting it, and that PINE64 therefore also does for as long as it considers Manjaro the preferred OS for PinePhones.
- Havoc 4y agoI get the feeling that Martijn's situation was very much death by a thousand cuts and that didn't quite get captured well by the focus on the SPI issue - which Pine64 seems to have defended reasonably well here.