Six years ago the entire Linux enthusiast space was super excited for the PinePhone, then everything fell apart. What went wrong? Was PINE64’s favoritism towards Manjaro the sole issue or were there other problems?
Six years ago the entire Linux enthusiast space was super excited for the PinePhone, then everything fell apart. What went wrong? Was PINE64’s favoritism towards Manjaro the sole issue or were there other problems?
Except it absolutely did. Sure, it got hardware in the hands of developers, but that effort didn’t amount to anything. Pinebook paved the way for Pinebook Pro, which made good on company’s promise of an open, affordable, low power laptop for Linux enthusiasts.
This never materialized with Pinephone, it didn’t even mature enough to satisfy most of the early adopters, who for the most part only wanted reliable calling and texting.
Having had both a Pinebook and a Pinebook Pro and two PinePhones and a PinePhone Pro at some point in time (I co-hosted a PINE64 podcast for a bit), I don’t follow. If your point is that the PinePhone (Pro) have never been a great for everybody, I think the same is true of Pinebooks (Pro), they’re definitely are among the worst laptops I have ever had. Various just as cheap ARM-based Chromebooks (especially the ASUS C101p) I’ve had were/are just so much better.
The PinePhone really helped with development of existing Linux on Mobile projects and caused the creation of some additional ones, as evidenced by the massive number of projects on https://pine64.org/documentation/PinePhone/Software/#software-releases.
The Community Editions helped projects like UBports or postmarketOS financially. Some people even daily drive the device (despite being slow, I’ve found Sxmo and Sailfish OS to be acceptable, with Phosh coming in third).
While I don’t recommend it anymore for anyone who wants to use GTK based stuff on it, I’d view it as a success (I don’t view the Pro as a success though, even though I believe they should have cancelled the A64-based PinePhone, not the Pro - a PP2 was IMHO overdue around 2023/2024). With better Quality Control, better relations between PineStore and the wider Community and a different default OS (putting the heavy Plasma Mobile on it was just nuts, and Manjaro definitely is not my favorite distro, to say the least) for the Beta edition, it could have been an even bigger success.
Yes, it didn’t work for everybody, but as getting to a working laptop is so much easier than getting to a working phone (think of calls: the device has to manage to wake up at any moment (and fast), audio routing must be switched, echoes must be cancelled etc.) with the sky-high user expectations attached to phones (and the shitload of semi-hostile phone carriers across the world), I regard the PinePhone as quite an achievement.