HW Acceleration Working

[MarkHaysHarris777]

 I can understand the cautionary position some of you will assume regarding the reality vs expectations set forth by the Pine64 team when the product was launched, but hey, this is where we are today. 

You are correct, of course, on all points in your full post;  I wish to address the piece of your post that I have brought forward in the quote|paste above;

... most of the people (yes I mean the overwhelming majority) did not understand that they were investing in a startup company... they thought they were purchasing a fully developed $15 media center appliance; and, none of them (there might be a 1 or 2 out of 38,000) are kernel developers.

If we were talking about blinking an LED using the GPIO pins, I'd totally and whole heartedly support and back your entire post;  but we're not. We are talking about kernel development; an afternoon walk in the part for folks like Xalius, lennyraposo, or longsleep; however, most folks simply do not have the skills nor are they likely to develope the skills in the near future. In the mean time, they ARE going to be very frustrated individually, perhaps angry, maybe even-- hostile.

We have been helping individuals (even terra854) on the irc chat site with these issues. It has become obvious that rolling one's own kernel is not a trivial task for most pepple, and is not (generally speaking) a good place to 'start learning'.  Most of the people in this community are windows users, have little or no experience with linux, and are having extreme trouble making SD cards that work, and getting their images to boot properly.  That is where we are.

Getting back to the quote|paste above (snippet from your full post) it really all comes down to wisdom; knowing how to set expectations for the audience at hand. The very last thing I want to do is to encourage someone without the skill set to undertake rolling their own kernel , which not only sets a false expectation but is in some sense either unethical or immoral, only to have them become frustrated and angry again because this 'fully developed product' didn't meet their expectations. It really does come down to reality vs expectation; totally.