Kinda upset at the lack of response to GBe issues

[pfeerick]

I did mean that most people are not using it; and by most people I mean that most 'people with pine boards' are not using GbE, and that most 'common people' on the Internet are not connecting to the Internet with GbE either. GbE is not a common Internet standard used by most people.  We have 38,000 of these Pine64 boards in the wild and very few are reporting the GbE problem. Almost all of my machines connect with wifi, and most people connecting on the Internet are connecting via wifi.

I'd still be careful about making even that statement, Mark. If you mean most people with pine boards aren't using the ethernet period.... then there is a fair chance of that, depending on how many also bought the integrated wifi, and how many are using USB wifi adapters. It might be a good point to remind that (as stated on the kickstarter campaign page) that the Pine A64+ is the only one that supports GbE - the Pine64 (BASIC) only supports 10/100 Mbps ethernet. So that is another factor that could be considered. However, if you mean people with ethernet not using GbE... that is a curly one at best. Consumer grade GbE stuff has been been mainstream for several years now.

As an example, the 2010 mainboard on my desktop (which wasn't a particularly fancy or expensive one) natively supports GbE. The network switch I purchased a year or so later also supports this, as does my router. So theoretically, although my internet connection is only about 15Mbps on a good day, my network backbone is several orders of magnitude faster, which is really handy for high speed file transfers between systems. So does does the Cubietruck SoC board I bought about 2 years ago. However, that was about 4x more expensive than the pine64 :-D (And can I say that since I use if as a network file share / video streaming box, the 4x+ transfer speed increase of the GbE is well appreciated!)

However, that is beside the point. I haven't been following this thread, but I do believe that if the pine64 was promoted and advertised as supporting GbE, it should have worked out of the box with at least one of the official OS images. If that has not been the case, I see that as a failing on the part of the pine64 team, NOT the volunteers (us) on the forum. We can't be expected to know how to fix that and get it working. Heck, it has only been due to longsleeps efforts that the linux images have progressed as much as they have (and  I hope Simon has gotten some freebies / compensation / thanks for his efforts on that).

However, I suspect I digress from the OT, and I apologise for that. However, I felt a nudge redirecting the perceived (ir)relevance of GbE was needed. If people paid for this board with the intention to use the ethernet as GbE and it's not working, then it isn't fit for purpose or as advertised. If this were a retail store, you would be well within your rights to demand a refund. However, as this was a kickstarter campaign, then baring a DOA item, it will probably just take a little time for the dust to settle. I think they overcommitted - it should have been a capped campaign, but that is for another thread