chylat

I don't feel let down by Pine64.

Pine64 produces affordable hardware that's easily hackable, and with more open schematics than most.

Pine64 fund a great community manager to collate and collaborate with the community.

Without Pine64, I don't think we'd have made as much progress as we have.

At this rate, we risk driving companies away from communities.

+1.

Installing another OS is trivial. Having Tow-Boot on SPI makes it slightly easier, and flashing Tow-Boot to the SPI is easy.

I don't understand how this minor issue has magnified to such drama.

I'm concerned this drama will make it less likely companies engage with communities.

I found logs. For context, tl_lim is the founder of Pine64.

2022-06-01, the Pine64 dev IRC chat:

[T] <tl_lim> I pause on move forward due to no one commit to maintain. If MayueIC interest to maintain, lets move forward and include Tow-Boot into the PBP factory build. @MayeulIC, you can send an email to info@pine64.org, we will ship a free Pinebook Pro to you so that you can maintain the Tow-Boot.

[T] <tl_lim> On the integration, just follow the recent PinePhone Pro way that flash OS build to eMMC then flash Tow-Boot to SPI Flash.

[T] <tl_lim> Frankly speaking, I am happy on developer commit maintaining Tow-Boot on Pinebook Pro. Thanks and a big shout out to @MayeulIC.

2022-06-02, in the Tow-Boot chat, which was discussing tl_lim's above comment:

spikerguy: Tllim asked on. 25th April about pbp tow boot support i replied it just work fine as it should. But just because i am the one to work on factory images plus i am the manjaro arm pkg maintainer maybe he didn't wanted to hear from me instead the community that was assuring him about tow boot and none replied

The current batch factory image is already submitted. So hopefully we can keep things ready for the next batch

I don't see all comms, but overall I see Tow-Boot on SPI at factory-time as nice-to-have but not essential (users can easily do this, distros don't need to require it, and the next batch can improve it if needded), Pine64 has showed willingness to use Tow-Boot. Tow-Boot has 1 developer, and I'm not sure if they were willing to commit to support this. I understand if they weren't.

This issue is blown out of proportion.

Maybe a good step would be for Pine64 to fund Tow-Boot's support of Pinebook Pro.

Would you rather find, download, and flash a special-purpose, pinebook-specific image onto a microSD card, pop it in, and boot that up to install a distribution, or would you rather it supports a standard UEFI booting interface over USB, netboot, whatever else, like every other laptop can?

It's possible to write Tow-Boot to the eMMC to do exactly this. SPI isn't needed, it's just more convenient. I happen to prefer SPI and Pine64 was willing to go with SPI too.

I think this issue is blown out of proportion.

Pine64 listened to feedback. The problem here was that timeline's didn't match, not bad intention.

+1.

Pine64 has listened to feedback, and made attempts to get Tow-Boot flashed on the PineBook Pro. It just didn't fit Pine64's manufacturing timeline.

Does any other manufacturer do better in this regard?

Disclaimer: I was in the Pine64 IRC channels at the time, so have some limited visibility, but not all visibility.

Pine64 was looking for somebody to commit to maintain PineBook Pro support in Tow-Boot (a relatively new project)

I don't know if the point-of-contact was made aware that PineBook Pro was not going to be shipped with Tow-Boot.