On one hand, I understand your frustration here, for sure.
But on the other hand, Pine devices have severely lacked for being able to tell users what the best place to start is. I've wanted to back to my PinePhone a few times and had to ask, like, what is in the best state to use, and nobody could tell me.
Updating my PineBook Pro took a ton of investigating because the simple explanation of how to get from what mine shipped with to what new ones shipped with was hard to find, discussion of what mine shipped with was nearly gone already, and the process for upgrading it also had since changed!
As someone who doesn't build distros, your post is actually really nice for me, now I know I should just install Manjaro on my Pine devices! About time they picked something.
I don't think the author meant that the problem was Pine "standardizing" on a single distro, but standardizing on a distro which has done (comparatively, AFAIK) little in terms of active software and driver development. By diverting people to a distro which mostly siphons up the work done by others, they risk poisoning the well and driving away the developers actually writing device drivers and infrastructure.
This is exactly right. And also a distro that is just refusing to disagree with pine64 when decisions are made that impact all distributions negatively
Even supposing your premise is correct (and it's not: diversity is good), the question becomes if Manjaro is the right choice, and it is definitely not. Manjaro is a very poorly run Linux distribution with misaligned incentives, poor practices regarding stability and security, and a history of problems playing well with others -- and they don't even work on the software that still needs to be written to make Pine devices useful. This is not the right horse to back.
Diversity is good, but diversity is good once there's a baseline of support accomplished. From a user standpoint, PinePhone has felt like it's spinning it's wheels while each developer builds support for their favorite feature into their favorite distro, so you have one distro where the camera works and one distro where texting works.
I am not qualified to have strong opinions about particular distros, but I think Pine is extremely overdue for a defined reference implementation.
There's not one distro where camera works. There's one distro (manjaro) that was willing to ship broken hacks first while the rest of the community made the actual working camera app. While that app was developed on postmarketOS first it was almost instantly available on the other distributions that didn't first have to undo their previous mess.
The diversity of the distributions has helped me _a lot_ to make sure that Megapixels does not have some flaws in it that makes it unable to run on other platforms. Things like musl/glibc differences, weird path requirements in nixOS all have made the actual software better.
If "the golden standard" is the manjaro distro then the requirements for good software plummet really hard because there's no quality standard at all there.
Ideally Pine64 would be facilitating the development of a software stack which is then shared among the distributions. But, that's not what they're doing -- they're all-in on relying 100% on "the community" to produce the software. So, given this constraint, are they doing it well?
The answer is "no". Choosing Manjaro alone is not going to get the software built. As explained in TFA, the previous solution encouraging diversity did more to get the software built and is largely attributable for the platform's initial success in building out basic software support. Manjaro does not have a monopoly on the software experts, in fact, they have none of the software experts. By throwing Pine64's entire lot in with Manjaro they are burning the people who actually work on solving these problems. That's not a productive way to build and maintain a community.
How do the steps taken lead them to a better reference implementation? "we officially focus on distro X" - sure, that helps maybe, and I don't think many people object to if its just that, although its annoying if before you loudly promoted diversity. But it also means they need to be the ones doing the work.
But they implement it through "We make life hard for all the other people writing code for our system - including those whose code we want to put into our reference", and I don't see how that's helping anything. They seriously risk that instead of "camera works only in distro Y, so we need to port that from there to reference" they end up at "camera works nowhere, because people from Y gave up"
Why should they pick something? I thought the whole point of this was to build open hardware and let me pick something?
If you want a manufacturer to decide for you what you should run on your phone, maybe just buy a Samsung or apple device. They've already got it figured out also.
They're just picking the default SW. You can still run whatever, including any other bootloader or OS. It's not like it's locked like a typical Android phone.
Many Android phones are also open like this as shown by pmOS: someone somewhere has to work on mainline Linux support and normally mainline doesn't really work and there are still some downstream patches left, meaning you can't run what you want unless you have a patched kernel (the same it true for the PinePhone and PinePhone Pro).
> But on the other hand, Pine devices have severely lacked for being able to tell users what the best place to start is. I've wanted to back to my PinePhone a few times and had to ask, like, what is in the best state to use, and nobody could tell me.
It's fine to have a default option. The problem is when you cut support for running anything else.
> As someone who doesn't build distros, your post is actually really nice for me, now I know I should just install Manjaro on my Pine devices! About time they picked something.
That's old news; if you buy a Pinephone/book, they've come with Manjaro pre-installed for a while now.
But on the other hand, Pine devices have severely lacked for being able to tell users what the best place to start is. I've wanted to back to my PinePhone a few times and had to ask, like, what is in the best state to use, and nobody could tell me.
Updating my PineBook Pro took a ton of investigating because the simple explanation of how to get from what mine shipped with to what new ones shipped with was hard to find, discussion of what mine shipped with was nearly gone already, and the process for upgrading it also had since changed!
As someone who doesn't build distros, your post is actually really nice for me, now I know I should just install Manjaro on my Pine devices! About time they picked something.