Is this a joke? How could you possibly believe in this delusion, when these apps have been shown over and over again to be gaslighting vulnerable people into divulging sensitive information about themselves to a VC-backed ad pipeline. Have you seen BetterHelp's ads on YouTube? Pure manipulation of people who are suffering.
I am taking a class in my college on environmental literature. One thing I learned is how environmental issues are consistently swept under the rug and underreported (like in this article, written by a former chemical & engineering news reporter) in society's discourse on cancer. All the blame for cancer is put on you and your habits, whether smoking or red meat. Big perps of this information campaign include the American Cancer Society. But as really good books like Silent Spring and When Smoke Ran Like Water show, environmental pollution and pesticides consistently correlate with rising cancer rates in modern society. It is ludicrous that one of two men and one of three women will be stricken with the disease in their lifetimes. Why is such a massive factor being hidden from the public? All this noise and focus on treatment... yet no focus on prevention. Because that would require economic changes that put a burden on corporations.
I would expect other systems to optimise/maximise other things, the current, especially in the US thanks to lobbies and borderline corrupt politicians + conflicts of interests, maximises wealth acquisition and cost reduction without any regard for health or long term effects
It's really similar to the tobacco industry back in the days, and will probably end up the same way (fingers crossed)
Not the first time, won't be the last. Google is an egocentric company with a nihilistic and destructive indifference towards its customers. Fortunately people are learning to avoid Google products, as seen with Stadia's demise. Here are some other instances of Google's negligence:
Manjaro is #4 on Distrowatch as of this comment, while Arch is #27. Not saying that popularity is all that matters in a distro, but widespread adoption is really important in getting non-technical benefits such as funding, clout, and people willing to devote time to the project.
About the shadiness: every project takes or is inspired by other projects, none have come up in a vacuum. Even with the sketchy reputation, Manjaro seems to have the support needed to actually turn into a Linux winner in the long-term.
MX Linux has been #1 on distrowatch for ages. Do you know anyone using it?
Distrowatch doesn't (and can't) measure actual popularity or distro usage, only how many people clicked a link on their page.
Manjaro seems to be a rather poorly run distro.
1. They just blanket delay every package from Arch for two weeks for higher "stability". That includes security patches! [1]
2. Specifically on the Pinephone, they've shipped WIP patches to get the camera working, breaking a lot of stuff in the process and adding an additional burden on the project maintainers who now have to deal with manjaro's users in the issue tracker for something that hasn't been released officially. [2]
They've also managed to let one of their website certificates expire for the FOURTH time.
> MX Linux has been #1 on distrowatch for ages. Do you know anyone using it?
I have always been super confused about MX Linux being number one on distrowatch but have literally never heard of anyone running it in my (probably limited) circle of friends, colleagues, podcasts I listen to, etc.
I was aware that they just measured clicks on websites, but I would be super interested if there is any more info on why MX Linux is always number one on distrowatch? Do they use bots or something to generate traffic? Or do tons of people actually visit their site?
Inspiration is absolutely not the crux of the problem, false attribution is.
Also, I would say that most of the Manjaro installs actually want an Arch install, they just don’t/can’t do the manual installation due to not having enough time/expertise. So these numbers are not really telling in my opinion.
> Pine64 is making enthusiast products for hackers, not mass-market devices for non-hackers. Non-hackers have access to plenty of phones which just werk. Part of the promise of Pine's platform and the appeal to the target audience is the commitment to community.
Sounds like either Pine64 has grown past this and decided to pivot, or has been losing revenue due to a lack of customers from this niche market. Personally, as a hacker I love playing with different OSes. However, if I was to use any open source device like a PinePhone or Pine64 board to build something, I'd prefer a stable environment backed by an established foundation. Environment setup is hell, and figuring out which open-source OS works best, if it will be supported in the future, and how to install it would slow me down immensely.
You come up on your niche, and then when you have access to the broader market, you pivot to the group that will help you grow market power [1]. Similar dynamics exist in a lot of different ecosystems, and Pine seems to be responding to the challenges that have come with becoming big. It's sad that they won't be supporting OS hackers anymore, but they have to pivot if they want to bring onboard more customers (which seems to be the goal behind this decision).
Can you really consider the "mass market" to be a key to power for Pine64 with their current lineup of products, though? The OS hackers seem to be Pine64's only key to power right now. And does supporting them really consume extra resources that could otherwise be better allocated?
My guess is that OS hackers could be considered as one niche, while hackers and builders who prefer not going through a custom Linux install/config for their project (i.e., a weather station or a mobile smart home dashboard) could be a larger one. Definitely not "mass market" or replacing Android levels, but at the same time a significantly larger portion of revenue for Pine64. The switch to Manjaro would provide them with a key backer that allows them to unlock this market. People have been discussing the software quality of Manjaro, so maybe it has a good foundation or connections?
Also: I've seen some hidden costs of supporting custom OS installs being discussed, i.e. procuring extra chips to allow open boot. This may have factored into Pine64's decision.
> while hackers and builders who prefer not going through a custom Linux install/config for their project
That's a false dichotomy, nobody is demanding that users be forced through "custom Linux install" (whatever that means). The problem is also not primarily that Pine64 have chosen a "flagship" distro, but how they and said distro behave towards the other options. I'm sure the quality of the flagship distro is massively improved by making life hard for the project that did useless things like making the camera in the phone work...
I think this is the inevitable outcome of any movement of Linux to the mainstream (Purism has done something similar). As Martijn said in the article, PinePhone devices were operable with 25 different projects. That's 25 different variations of Linux fighting over market share. As Pine enters a growth phase for their business, the consequences of this are going to manifest as paralysis.
Improvements and advancements would stagnate due to the 25x duplicated effort, and resources would be lost in keeping those projects happy. Also, any potential user looking to switch would be deluged with options, which is what crippled desktop Linux.
While I do not understand enough about Pine to know why they specifically made the business decision to gut their dev community and go with Manjaro Linux, my guess would be something along the lines of Manjaro's widespread dominance as a top Linux distro backed by a powerful foundation. Pine is pivoting to what they have decided is their future: a full-stack hardware to software open source offering that in their eyes would have a better shot at cracking open the phone market.
They probably were aware of the consequences, but have bet on making it big and creating a new, streamlined ecosystem after extinguishing this one. It remains to be seen if they will succeed.
People keep saying this, like too much effort is a bad thing. But OP makes it clear that there's very little duplication of effort in the Linux-on-phone/mobile/SBC community - most developments are shared community-wide. There are some technical divergences (Alpine/musl vs. glibc- and init-based systems for example) that can impact direct compatibility, but they're very minor.
Correct. This is non-sense speak by non-developers. Greedy non-developers.
they "sell" it as "25x duplicated effort" but in reality, there's 25x little tweaks to a build system, that give thousands of people zero effort to port their known platform right away. Now those thousands of people will have REAL effort to adapt their knowledge and existing ways to fit that one holy way enforced by the device true owners.
In reality it is "25x places where i will have to hide my plan for monetize this". Just like most other projects, greed always destroy everything the community help build in good will.
I would like to disagree with your characterization. I use Linux distros regularly at work (Amazon Linux), in school (Rocky Linux, currently studying), and at home (Ubuntu) when hacking together various projects. I've seen firsthand the issues that come with trying to get a distro to interop with Bluetooth, sound, and software not quite designed for it.
This is not a zero sum game: I believe we can have both an OSS approach to Linux while at the same time having a channel of commercial development that brings more adoption (and fun, hackable devices!). This "one holy way" and the multitude of community-based distros can coexist, in the same way that commercial software companies and OSS communities have already learned to.
> I've seen firsthand the issues that come with trying to get a distro to interop with Bluetooth, sound, and software not quite designed for it.
These issues crop up on bleeding-edge hardware due to different distros running differently-timed versions of the same underlying components. They fade away over time as software versions start supporting the formerly-bleeding-edge hardware across the board, and the issues invariably shift to the next bleeding-edge hardware release. This is not an immutable fact about the ecosystem, it's a consequence of wanting something to function before it's fully ready for serious use.
Right, this boils down to "Oh no! 25x many people are interested in our project. What can we do to reduce that to 1x people interested in our project?" If I can't easily boot my preferred distro, I don't buy your boards. That simple.
I think that's a huge overstatement of how much duplicated effort is involved. The process is much more akin to:
* OS 1 finds a bug in Gnome, reports it and perhaps fixes it
* OS 2 benefits from pulling in the new code as well, fixing bugs
* OS 3 writes a driver for the camera and publishes it as part of their kernel
* OS 4 finds a bug in the camera driver they started using, publishes their fix
Yes, there's some overheard to running 25 projects. There's also a huge downfall to excluding 24 projects from contributing as first class members of the project. To boot, it's also a situation where the more contributions make the fixes contributed even more battle tested and beneficial.
tl;dr - OSS development styles don't map onto commercial development styles cleanly
I guess it comes down to that: will Pine64 take an OSS development approach or a commercial development approach? I've been swimming on the question of why Linux isn't more accessible to more people for a while, and have come to believe that a commercial approach is the only way Linux can achieve the work-out-of-the-box dream.
Commercial development allows you to afford to control the hardware, make deals with other companies, and pay people to build compatibility with your system (i.e. Nvidia), which is what Microsoft and Apple did to keep their position. Server distros like Debian, Ubuntu, and Redhat already have deep foundational and corporate backing, and are a joy to use.
There are definitely drawbacks such as vendor lock-in and all the issues that come with corporate vs community control of the software. However, I believe having a single center of development and revenue (to pay for the development), while at the same time having fully open source software and hardware is possible and would have a huge impact.
Historically, "works out of the box" has largely been a matter of low-level hardware bringup. That's one part of FLOSS development where there is already a natural "center of development and revenue", namely ODM's and OEM's. They just need to stop pushing hacked-together, barely-working downstream BSP's tied to a single software configuration, and start cooperating with projects at relevant levels of the stack. Pine64 is actually a lot better at doing this than your average hardware vendor, the OP is mostly complaining about relatively minor quibbles (though important quibbles nonetheless, because they directly impact OP's work).
Pine has been very much in the "we make hardware, community figures out software" camp, otherwise we wouldn't even have the discussions of "different things worked in different distros" etc.
As someone who works for Purism on the Librem 5, I have to say that I never had the impression of stagnation due to duplicated effort. Quite the opposite - we benefited a lot from work done on projects like postmarketOS, Mobian or Plasma Mobile, and I'm pretty sure others are benefiting from Purism's work just as well. A lot of stuff is interconnected and the push to mainline as much stuff as possible was certainly worth it long-term, as we can clearly see its fruits in our everyday work now.
This is so detached from reality I don't even know where to start... A Grammy-nominated singer comes out of nowhere, and decides he will go to an African country to make a futuristic revolutionary city out of nothing powered by... crypto? I seriously can't believe this story has actual traction on here, this is peak crypto, head-in-the-clouds futurism, utopia mentality, and of course complete absurdity. Do people have no sense anymore?
The only philanthropy stories I am interested in are the ones where dedicated people of character start from the ground, consider the needs of actual human beings, and work with their representative governments to bring change. Not this technology-will-fix-everything glitzy renders cryptocurrency-upgrades-society hubristic bullshit. People give that crap way too much airtime. Plus, the singer involved seems to have a sketchy history, which makes his intent here even more dubious (probably not doing this out of the kindness of his heart...)
Akon has been an active entrepreneur in Africa for a while now. He runs a solar company that provides electricity and jobs to Africans who would otherwise just be dependent on charitable giving. This project involving Akoin started in 2018 and he's been working closely with Senegal leadership to make it a success.
It seems building "smart cities" is a trend now... Saudi Arabia started one, Elon Musk wants to build something like that on Mars, and there's all these ideas of floating cities being passed around. I don't know much about Akon's entrepreneurial record but "smart futuristic city powered by a blockchain in Africa" seems like a huge and mostly imaginary leap from "local solar company". You'd be hard-pressed to come up with the cash to build this in America, so doing it in Africa feels like an unrealistic utopian dream disguising a ploy for money.
Smart cities have been a thing for a while, like in China or South Korea.
At least for Songdo in South Korea, it turns out that employers have no interest in rolling the dice on a brand new city with no proven track record, and residents don‘t really want to move to a place with no jobs. Plus cities designed from scratch in ivory towers tend to be very poor places to live nicely.
> The only philanthropy stories I am interested in are the ones where dedicated people of character start from the ground, consider the needs of actual human beings, and work with their representative governments to bring change.
And asses the impact! So many projects that meet even this excellent definition of philanthropy still fail to have a tangible positive and verifiable output.
The "out of nowhere" is a bit unfair, since Akon is Senegalese-American and has spent a significant amount of time as a child in Senegal - his father is from Senegal, not sure about his mother:
I think that's the point - we are surrounded by devices that are always watching and listening. If they looked like eyes and ears, maybe we would think twice about how and where we use them.
