Hacker News Reader

Comment by mort96 | Hacker News Reader

For some people, Bluetooth will be the one important thing and everything else that doesn't work isn't so important. Other people will be able to live without bluetooth but can't live without the HDMI port. Other people again may not use external screens but absolutely require hardware acceleration. Others still may not care so much about any of that stuff, but need the camera to work for their meetings. And maybe some are absolutely dependent on external storage accessed through Thunderbolt.

There's _a lot_ of work still. It's not clear that Bluetooth should be the highest priority of what's left. And this whole undertaking is a monumental task which it's amazing that volunteers are even attempting. Saying "I want bluetooth, please focus on that guys" here seems a bit tone-deaf.

View on HN

It's a Linux project aimed at being a Linux OS to compete with MacOs. As per usual with the linux community it's "if you want it roll your own". That's why the year of the Linux desktop will never come.

> "if you want it roll your own"

Yes, and every other mainstream OS is: "No, this is not supported.". I don't see how Linux is seen as worse then that answer. If anything this post proves how rapidly the Linux community moves. Within a year there is working Linux on FULLY proprietary hardware. And not just a funny PoC. No, you can daily drive this thing. Let's see how long it takes for Windows to run on the M1...

This is ridiculous. Linux, including Bluetooth, works great on regular PCs. In fact with Pipewire, Bluetooth on Linux these days is generally in better shape than on other OSes.

Seriously my Jabra's and Senny BT headphones pickup and work flawlessly with my Linux desktop.

Meanwhile my Sennhesier headphones work sometimes with my POS mac to the point where I have to tell people If i don't immediately pick up it's because I'm wasting 15 minutes trying to get my headphones to pair with my Mac.

The year of the Linux desktop was March 2020-March 2021 when millions were given a Chromebook against their will.

EDIT: To everyone downvoting this: nobody cares, nobody is listening to you.

This makes me so upset.

I love honestly love a lot of Chromebook hardware. It's honestly exactly what I want in a laptop - long battery life, efficient, lightweight, decent enough keyboard.

But it's impossible to get without giving Google money, and without dealing with a massive warning every time you boot - if you're model even lets you install something other than Chrome OS.

I should really grab a Pinebook Pro I guess.

And that's without getting into all the privacy issues of students being forced to use Google software/hardware, or the schools spying on students through the Chromebooks.

Yeah it’s bleak but true.

Somehow I got downvoted for it.

> But it's impossible to get without giving Google money, and without dealing with a massive warning every time you boot - if you're model even lets you install something other than Chrome OS.

That's not even the most painful part. Full data wipe when switching between security modes is outright user-hostile, and would be widely considered as unacceptable if Microsoft or Apple did that on their general-purpose computing platforms.

> Full data wipe when switching between security modes is outright user-hostile,

I don't think it's user hostile to prevent all security models from being dragged to the lowest common denominator. If they didn't do that, an attacker could just switch to a more insecure mode and go after your data.

> being dragged to the lowest common denominator

It's rather the reverse. How macOS handles it is by asking for user credentials on a security policy downgrade, and enforcing that by the Secure Enclave.

(and if you have user creds, you _have access to user data anyway_)

On other platforms, that tying... just doesn't exist.

On modern Android you also need user credentials for OEM unlock; the user needs to enable the developer options menu and allow unlock from there, otherwise the fastboot step won't succeed. (Notably, this preserves the effectiveness of FRP; even "wiping" the hardware and restoring the stock OS install won't allow unlock unless the existing user is verified). But a successful unlock still wipes all data, same as in previous Android versions where the user-side step was not needed.

> But it's impossible to get without giving Google money, and without dealing with a massive warning every time you boot

You can get rid of the warning by physically removing a write-protect screw and replacing the firmware. It's still a very user-hostile feature because it's not just a 'warning' either, but actively prompts you to wipe your existing installation. That sort of thing is very much what you'd expect in a toy, not a machine for serious use.

The screws are long gone, to unlock you prove ownership by sitting for a few minutes pressing the power button when told.

Wiping the installation is very much expected. The security model includes protecting data, of course data has to be wiped when removing security. Data on disk is encrypted with a key stored in the security chip, which destroys the key when security settings are changed.

Android does the same for fastboot unlock.

What's the big deal? If you want to flash UEFI and use a custom OS, why would you want to preserve the ChromeOS partition?

>I should really grab a Pinebook Pro I guess.

Yes, however now is a bad time. They are out of stock and struggling to source parts last I checked. I think screens are the main issue.

The PineBook Pro was never fully supported by Linux despite shipping with Linux. I had one and sold it because of this. Suspend is still broken in mainline, for example. Direct NVMe booting is buggy. Hardware accelerated video is still in a weird state. Tons of tiny little things like this plague the device with many distros shipping their own fixes that never get upstreamed.

Check out this FAQ that's scoped around a custom Arch Linux ARM but gives you an idea of the pain: https://github.com/SvenKiljan/archlinuxarm-pbp/blob/main/FAQ...

For thoughts on why Pine64 seems to be stuck in this state of never fully working hardware I can recommend Drew DeVault's blogpost: https://drewdevault.com/2022/01/18/Pine64s-weird-priorities....

> The PineBook Pro was never fully supported by Linux despite shipping with Linux.

The postmarketOS folks have significant experience with mainlining kernel support for hardware that's only supported in downstream/vendor kernels. Please reach out to them and make sure they know about the issues; this work should be plenty relevant to them because Pine64 is also doing mobile HW.

How did that happen, and where can I apply to get a Chromebook against my will?

A lot of US based students were provisioned Chromebooks by their schools.

"Against will" probably only applies to the families with people technical enough to understand what having an enterprise managed Chromebook that their child has to be on for 8 hours a day means.

Office workers too. Lot of Chromebooks plus Citrix being used on couches out there still.

Google sent me one when I was evaluating google cloud. I ended up using neither.

It was a very low grade HP chromebook that was shamed by the performance of a raspberry pi 3b. I have been thinking of gutting it and installing a pi inside to make a pibook.

You're trying to run Linux on an M1. If you want to just have it work, grab a good x86 computer, and you'll have it mostly just work.

It's an early alpha version of such project. Clearly stated at the beginning of post.

Your comment indicates that you are expecting the community to serve your feature requests, while not even pointing out to the "beneath you" opportunity to contribute yourself. If not willing to put the effort into desktop configuration or "rolling your own" features, why are you bothering with Linux? You can be better served by Windows or MacOS. But you might find your feature requests to fall on deaf ears there.

In my experience, a Linux desktop is unparalleled in flexibility, productivity and stability, if given some time/effort to configure and adapt to your workflows - it's been years and years "of Linux desktop" already for people who care.

My "year of the Linux desktop" was 2018 when for the first time ever I was able to play a AAA video game (Deus Ex Mankind Divided) installed from Steam with nothing but normal GUI mouse clicks.

Sadly there haven't been many AAA games with Linux compatibility (that I wanted to play) since then. Valve is still pushing it though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com