The Paperweight Dilemma | Hacker News Reader

The Paperweight Dilemma

blog.mobian.org

64 pointsnfriedly13 comments

Sadly, the situation for the PinePhone has been like this for quite a while.

What changed is that alternatives are more available/in a better, good enough for daily driver state, be it sdm845 powered community-driven device ports or the Librem 5.

Should there be some recycle drive for the devices, so as to reduce e-waste. if a company acknowledges they are dropping device support for end of life, Id think recovery of obsolete devices for waste disposal is a reasonable ask.

I bought two Pinephones early on -- the second because I figured my original one, a developer early-release device, must have been faulty -- and frankly they were paperweights the day they shipped. I tried several different OSes on them and they were all more or less unusable, and the camera support was and continued to be garbage.

I had high hopes for the project, but over the course of years it still never turned into something that even an open source masochist like myself could really consider a daily driver. Phone calls, a halfway responsive browser, and a camera that's no worse than a 2008 Razr and I'd be happy... too bad!

I agree that the device was a disappointment. I was hoping it would be a revival of the Nokia N900 spirit, but the poor battery life, the lack of a decent hardware keyboard at launch, plus a change in the FOSS development culture, just meant that it never attracted that critical mass of hackers.

The unresponsiveness of the browser seems all down to the very underpowerered A64 processor plus slow memory. With those hardware constraints, I'm not sure the community could have come up with any solution.

IMO, the PinePhone never had the specs to be a good daily driver. The Pro is closer but still not quite there.

That said, there's plenty of other things that could be used for: a wall mounted control panel for your smart home, retro game console, security camera, asset tracker, audiobook player, etc.

Just don't leave them to rot in a drawer forever - if you don't think you're going to use them, then put them up on ebay (or craigslist or r/hardwareswap, or whatever)!

If that became the expectation or legislation, I'd expect you'd see a lot more "officially not end of life, but no recent updates have been pushed".

How much would pine64 have to raise the pinephone's price to have one employee working on things like maintaining an up-to-date kernel (and upstreaming patches when possible)?

It would change Pine64's entire business model, which is that they just provide the hardware, and the software side is all on the community.

Right, I'm just wondering to myself if that would be a better business model.

Any comments by the postmarketOS folks? They have successfully upstreamed kernel patches in the past, and might be able to drive this effort for the original PinePhone and PineTab hardware.

The problem is up-streaming kernel patches shouldn't be a Mobian thing or a pmOS thing, it should be an entire community working together for it (and IMHO, Pine64 should be leading the part to making a healthy community and contributing to it). For at least the OG Pinephone, that community has more or less dried up. Many of the original folks that wanted to help moved on to other devices (or just left the community as a whole. The situation for upstreaming kernel patches hasn't changed in years, and I honestly don't see that situation changing as is.

I would recommend reading for some background:

https://drewdevault.com/2022/01/18/Pine64s-weird-priorities....

https://drewdevault.com/2022/08/18/PINE64-let-us-down.html

https://blog.brixit.nl/why-i-left-pine64/ (Pine64's response: https://www.pine64.org/2022/08/18/a-response-to-martijns-blo... )

Also, frankly, when we get a response like this: https://mastodon.social/@CounterPillow/110589778080526844 from a Pine64 developer when we worked to port over the PineTab2 to Mobian, it really doesn't make me want to work with them.

How don't grasp why megi would close their github account plus prevent pull. Seems like not only a very unsympathetic move (to be very euphemistic) but quite against the spirit of open source. Did they write the entirety of the Linux kernel? If not, then whatever their contribution might be pales in comparison to what they're building upon. To treat their own work in such a egoistical manner seems out of touch.

He laid out his reasons in his blog post and explained how people can get the source code from now on[1]. He is an unpaid volunteer so it is reasonable that he does not want to pay for an expensive server. There is also an update to the situation. He is trying out Codeberg [2]. I am grateful for the work he is doing. My Pinephone is much more usable than it was in 2020

[1] https://xnux.eu/log/094.html [2] https://xnux.eu/log/096.html

Reply on news.ycombinator.com