Hardware shortcomings

[moonwalkers]

I'll apologise if I've managed to open an off-topic can of worms, for that was not my intent.  But this conversation has been well worth while, even if it has gone far afield.  All that I'm asking is that someone, preferably an experienced mechanical engineer, have a critical look at the hardware, preferably doing a few dumb things in an effort to make it break, BEFORE you go to the expense of committing even to beta test production.  It's bound to  drastically reduce your headaches and later redesign expenses while doing wonders for your reputation.  This is a good little box and it can have a bright future.  I just want to see that future come true so I can finally put X86 and AMD64 in the circular file for good.

Agree, in general.

And as to going off-topic, I don't think that you can actually claim to have an O/S distro on Pinebook Pro if that system does not have within it the means to either run from SD card or install to emmc or other disk and run from first boot attempt.  Much like what Linus did when releasing Linux, i.e. "It ain't Linux until I sez so!",  Pine64 really ought to consider not allowing a distro onto their website's list of same until the author has demonstrated that it will do just that on a stock, factory fresh Pinebook Pro.  Sorry for all the wind, but these are GOOD products and this is my two cents opinion on how to make them succeed as they so much deserve to.

So... Are you asking for distros to run on the firmware that's installed of factory-fresh PBP (Das U-Boot built with binary blobs), or you're asking that they work regardless of firmware shipped with PBP, if they ship their own firmware? Are you asking that users are blocked from editing the OS section of the PBP's wiki page until the OS passes some sort of Pine64's certification? Something else? Pine64 clearly advertises the product as "just the hardware", the rest is clearly intended to be a community effort - hence the OS list in the wiki, and the cornucopia of different U-boot builds and everything else.

Oh, and BTW something like Debian nowadays works on PBP just fine, including using fully open source U-Boot build in its repos. Well, there are minor issues like lack of deep sleep support, but that was the case for factory-installed U-Boot with blobs too, at least when I originally got my PBP in January 2020. The only problem with getting Debian to work there is that you have to manually partition, leaving enough space for U-Boot, manually install the appropriate U-Boot package using chroot (u-boot-rockchip is the package name, IIRC), and manually get U-Boot to actually be written onto eMMC or wherever you want it to be written. That is something that could benefit from either some automation, or at least better and more clear documentation, and I've been just too lazy to update the wiki pages, so feel free to blame the lack of docs me.