Martijn Braam, a Linux developer working on mobile and embedded devices, writes about postmarketOS, Alpine, Flatpak, and hardware quirks.
HN commenters point to his posts on the PinePhone camera app, a USB Ethernet adapter fix, and Flatpak as useful technical detail.
It's interesting seeing how camera support is the biggest gaping hole in the open source smart phone world.
For example, almost everything in this graph is green, except for the camera column:
https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices
It's a complicated problem:
https://blog.brixit.nl/pinephone-camera-part-2/
But, in a world where open source almost always exceeds the commercial offerings, I'm surprised this is the case. It seems like the parent article and the LWN article posted (https://lwn.net/Articles/904776/) are suggesting that the trend is to just dump raw data and let software process it. I'm doubly surprised there aren't good libraries in the open source world that do this so much better than the commercial ones.
This is the main reason I feel stuck inside the duopoly of Android (barely tolerable and hostile) and iOS (completely unusable and unhackable). I need a good camera on my phone and there aren't good options for that at all.
Maybe extracting this code outside of gstreamer is a good idea if this takes us closer to that goal.
> …does “letting community down” matters?
Yes. A lot of contributors from the community put countless hours on making software work on this hardware. And a lot of work still needs to be done.
If the hardware vendor turns its back on the community, that'll drive developers away, demotivate them or burn them out. See also: https://blog.brixit.nl/why-i-left-pine64/
> can’t you just… put your own OS on there or whatever?
You can put your own OS on pretty much any hardware. But you need A LOT of effort, and if you drive contributors away, that goal also moves further away. If the hardware vendor doesn't collaborate, it's even harder.
For some additional context: https://blog.brixit.nl/why-i-left-pine64/ Comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32494659
> Supporting Manjaro has historically done very little to facilitate the development of the software stack which is necessary for these devices [Pinephone/Pinephone Pro] to work. In some cases the Manjaro involvement actually causes extra workload for the developers by shipping known broken versions of software and pointing to the developers for support. Which is why https://dont-ship.it/ was started.
I came across the tweet about this "Evil" dongle and instantly recognized it as the exact same thing I worked on before... It's not evil, it's just annoying.
https://blog.brixit.nl/making-a-usb-ethernet-adapter-work-sr9700/
In my case I disabled the SPI flash module to have it not appear as a CD drive, the author of this post actually found some documentation about the SPI being optional. Funnily enough this post now also gives you all the tooling to make an actual evil RJ45 dongle by reflashing one :D
In the old days, the age-old cry of the beleaguered developer was “My code isn’t buggy, it works on my machine!”, to which the response was “Well, we’re not shipping your machine to the customer!”. Well, science marches on, and we’ve invented a way to do exactly that. Instead of, you know, writing actually robust and simple-to-deploy software.
See also: <https://blog.brixit.nl/developers-are-lazy-thus-flatpak/>
SourceHut author here. Not sure what you're trying to say. The opposite is also true: using GitHub requires that your would-be contributors conform to the pull request workflow instead -- and many people prefer emails.
If anyone is skeptical about the email workflow, here's a write-up from another skeptic:
https://blog.brixit.nl/git-email-flow-versus-github-flow/