Comment by jagger27 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jagger27 | Hacker News Reader

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> 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.

> 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.

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

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

> [...] 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.

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