01-06-2020, 09:21 AM
(01-05-2020, 08:05 AM)tophneal Wrote: You may be interested in knowing that there has been talk in the last month of offering an upgrade kit for the old PB (I still boot up mine, but the PBP is still preferable) that would pump the PB to an RK3399, like the PBP. If this does happen, it should allow a lot of the newer development to benefit the PB, too.
Most of the time the development of software for this hardware is up to the community. Pine64 does make an effort to get working software available, but it's all really being down by the community. In an official capacity, the Pine company has only provided Android images. Something I've picked up over the last few years, maker board community developers tend to have varying hardware and will gravitate toward newer products.
Yes, I've seen the messaging around the PineBook Pro. While I think the project is interesting, the following applies:
- the product will be a lot more expensive (further) abroad due to taxes, shipping, import etc
- there is no guarantee at all about support for that board or availability of software
- I'm not about to pay extra to fix an issue I think shouldn't have existed in the first place
I don't want to be negative to the community in any way, and apologize if that might be the impression I'm giving. I know the community works hard for next to no gain (and certainly not for fame or money) to support their work to an extent. I think I was wrong in assuming I could make this work with a combination of a shiny new toy (the PB), my own knowledge and zeal and the community as a package deal. But either I painted an all too rozy picture or the message was a little to overzealous, because the reality is the hardware support is too limited for the community to fix
. I've had this thing for almost a year now. Even assuming I wanted to pay for a board upgrade; by the time it arrived and support for the new hardware might or might not be forthcoming this thing will be 2 years in my possession and I haven't gotten a single day's use out of it in any capacity other than a presse-papier.
It would help if the vendor would at least churn out one stable OS from time to time other than Android. Something Ubuntu based for instance, so they basically only have to worry about the kernel + driver support and can profit from the wide software base available. They shipped it with KDE Neon which would be a good start instead of having this myriad of half-finished OS's supported only by providing a tool to flash them to SD.
What I would want is an extremely lightweight OS (ultra simple GUI or maybe even an I3TWM-like environment) based on Debian or Ubuntu, but with full support for what's inside, so a working audio/video solution, webcam.... that would provide a broad base to start from and expand, hardware ánd software wise. Hell, I wanted to solder in some keyboard backlighting and a usb-c power connector but I never got around to that because I figured it wouldn't be much use if I can't get the laptop itself to work normally.
