Comment by asojfdowgh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by asojfdowgh | Hacker News Reader

[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

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.

Why doesn't he want to upstream the patches?

Because it isn't that much work to keep rebasing his tree according to megi.

Could the pmOS folks get involved and start submitting mainline patches themselves? The Mobian folks might also be interested since they probably want to minimize long-term deviations from Debian, which is based on the mainline.

We're working together with the maintainers of various distros now to first of all avoid this mess on the pinephone pro, and then on the longer term fix up pinephone in mainline.

AFAIK some things that are (or were, I may not be up-to-date there) present in the megi's tree aren't even upstreamable at all, like the modem power manager driver. When you maintain your own tree, you can be much more liberal in what goes there compared to what mainline maintainers will accept.

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?

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.

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.

In Europe they can’t do that.

In Australia, if they had an Australian presence they couldn’t do that, but given that they don’t, and each individual is importing a device, the Australian consumer protection laws don’t apply.

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

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