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igneo676

I think that's a huge overstatement of how much duplicated effort is involved. The process is much more akin to:

* OS 1 finds a bug in Gnome, reports it and perhaps fixes it

* OS 2 benefits from pulling in the new code as well, fixing bugs

* OS 3 writes a driver for the camera and publishes it as part of their kernel

* OS 4 finds a bug in the camera driver they started using, publishes their fix

Yes, there's some overheard to running 25 projects. There's also a huge downfall to excluding 24 projects from contributing as first class members of the project. To boot, it's also a situation where the more contributions make the fixes contributed even more battle tested and beneficial.

tl;dr - OSS development styles don't map onto commercial development styles cleanly

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I guess it comes down to that: will Pine64 take an OSS development approach or a commercial development approach? I've been swimming on the question of why Linux isn't more accessible to more people for a while, and have come to believe that a commercial approach is the only way Linux can achieve the work-out-of-the-box dream.

Commercial development allows you to afford to control the hardware, make deals with other companies, and pay people to build compatibility with your system (i.e. Nvidia), which is what Microsoft and Apple did to keep their position. Server distros like Debian, Ubuntu, and Redhat already have deep foundational and corporate backing, and are a joy to use.

There are definitely drawbacks such as vendor lock-in and all the issues that come with corporate vs community control of the software. However, I believe having a single center of development and revenue (to pay for the development), while at the same time having fully open source software and hardware is possible and would have a huge impact.

Historically, "works out of the box" has largely been a matter of low-level hardware bringup. That's one part of FLOSS development where there is already a natural "center of development and revenue", namely ODM's and OEM's. They just need to stop pushing hacked-together, barely-working downstream BSP's tied to a single software configuration, and start cooperating with projects at relevant levels of the stack. Pine64 is actually a lot better at doing this than your average hardware vendor, the OP is mostly complaining about relatively minor quibbles (though important quibbles nonetheless, because they directly impact OP's work).

Pine has been very much in the "we make hardware, community figures out software" camp, otherwise we wouldn't even have the discussions of "different things worked in different distros" etc.

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