A plea

[MarkF]

@MarkF 

This 'Note' is posted prominently on the Pine phone webpage,

  Did you read this ? 

NOTE :Community Limited Edition PinePhones are aimed solely for developer and early adopter. More specifically, only intend for these units to find their way into the hands of users with extensive Linux experience.


Where does it even imply it is "consumer ready"  ?

To be entirely fair, it says "developers and early adopters", not just "developers who can fix their devices themselves".

It also elaborates: "More specifically, only intend for these units to find their way into the hands of users with extensive Linux experience." But extensive Linux experience won't really help if the release image doesn't boot. And "early adopters" don't have much to adopt if their phone hangs on the startup logo.

So while you're not wrong, that warning can also be read optimistically as "some stuff may not work great, and you may need to tinker". Aka expect to have trouble with e.g. bluetooth headphones. And be prepared to manually edit config files for system services. This kind of interpretation is perfectly consistent with the "developers and early adopters, with extensive Linux experience" description.

So while you're not wrong, the warning doesn't say either "this is intended solely for developers able to fix their own phones; don't expect it to work out of the box, at all, unless you're lucky". That kind of stuff was present for Braveheart preorders; the warning got toned down for the "release" version.

Exactly.  I'd expect - and am happy to live with - things like wifi and 4g being very flaky (as in Ubuntu Touch) and GPS just not working (again as in Ubuntu), or apps not scaling properly or aspects of functionality being unusable or the system crashing under certain circumstances - things I wouldn't tolerate in Android or iOS.  But if the thing won't even boot, there's not a lot to adopt.  

As I said in my original post, I have Mobian on emmc and it works well - not perfect, but completely acceptable for an 'in development' system.  But I do like to try other distros as well, and it's very frustrating to see releases coming out every day with the previous day's glaring issues (e.g. failure to boot) still present and no release notes to warn you "hey this thing doesn't boot - but you're welcome to try tinkering".

I really hope the efforts to develop a commercially viable Linux phone bear fruit, and challenge the Apple/Google duopoly - that's why I'm here.

[amosbatto]

In my experience, breaking stuff is a regular part of software development, and checking to see that your new code didn't break something takes a lot of time. I kind of agree that the distro developers should at least check that something boots before releasing it to the public, but I do think that you have unrealistic expectations if you expect the developers who are volunteers to spend hours testing before they release something.

At the end of the day, breaking stuff is just part of the process of improving the software. I think the best approach is to get involved with one of the distros and argue that there needs to be a waiting period before public release. More importantly, volunteer to be one of the people that tests the prereleases.

Complaining about it on this forum is like whistling into the wind. I suspect that the volunteer developers would tell you that their time is better spent writing code rather than testing their code to see what it has broken, but they would welcome your help if you volunteer to be a tester.