On Sunday, 2 January 2022 22:01:51 CET H. Nikolaus Schaller wrote: > > you have probably pinpointed the most important aspect of all discussions. > > We have no high-quality power management in any of the devices... > We spend (spent) a lot of time to make it work, get hardware out just > to get the same feedback as you have cited above. > > We (as the OpenMoko and GTA04 community) have faced it. I think also > the Librem 5 has. And the Pinephone you have cited. > > What should be different? > - well it needs a team dedicated at making hardware reliable and improve > power efficiency > - this needs a lot of insights into hardware and good doscumentation > - and - maybe - a stable basis to work on > - there should also not be fragmentation between several groups > having multiple desktops to choose from is good, but having multiple > power managements?
To what extent do you think Linux itself is part of the problem here? We both know that it can be frustrating to adapt Linux to the realities of various devices, and then there is the matter of getting modifications adopted in the mainline. None of this is a particularly efficient process, and so doing things "the right way" doesn't really fit in with getting a product to work well, unless you have lots of resources, of course. It seems to me that, as you say, you need people with experience who have access to decent documentation, working at the lowest level of the software stack, making sure that the hardware is functioning properly. All of that is hard enough without a bunch of other people telling you that they just decided to rework the APIs and that you have to change your code to follow suit, or without weird regressions or deprecations that have been introduced elsewhere. I've presumably mentioned the use of L4Re to test the Letux 400 and other MIPS-based hardware on this list. One significant reason for doing so is to just eliminate all the noise from "Linux" when familiarising myself with the hardware and exploring how it works. And once one does that, one wonders why there can't just be a layer dealing with the hardware in a proper component- based architecture with things like documented interfaces and all the things that people have learned from object-oriented programming over the last few decades. > This raises an interesting question: can a loosely organised open source > community ever fulfill these user's expectaions? Or does it need a > commercial effort following a plan, an agenda, doing scrum etc. having > enough resources and not waiting for volunteers? This does not exclude to > make the results open source (like Google does with Android), but it needs > big funds... Although I think you and Michael have been lucky having various people show up and handle certain troublesome aspects of the Pyra software and hardware, getting people with the right expertise to help out with projects probably has to go beyond the "volunteers welcome" mindset. We saw this with Neo900, which admittedly suffered from other difficulties, where it was practically impossible to get people involved with the right skills, even when payment was offered. Also, there is a phenomenon where the people who might have the ability to accelerate a project tend to get given devices, sometimes on an almost speculative basis. Nokia sent out devices to developers - I think the N950 might have been a notable case of that - and I think the MIPS Creator CI20 was sent out to people who were perceived as being potentially helpful. How many of these devices quickly end up in the desk drawer in the office along with all the other things that those people get sent? Meanwhile, other people wait for wider availability of the product to have a chance at getting involved, if that ever even occurs. The more I think back ten years or so, the more I see that opportunities were lost. The Ben NanoNote was an interesting device, but the reaction from certain commentators was predictably consumerist. I only regret not getting interested in that sooner, just to try and sustain the momentum it had so that it might have led to other things. How much messing around ends up being done with single-board computers now to reproduce similar kinds of products to one that people were too cheap and sniffy to pay 99 EUR for? Similarly, with Openmoko there was a chance to iterate in the hardware design and to build a long term initiative, but a combination of factors brought this to an end prematurely. Despite the tendency of some people to deliberately portray that effort in a negative way in order to assert that they would not make the same mistakes, one significant repetition of history that such people have failed to escape is precisely the mismanagement of customer expectations that occurred with Openmoko. That may have been inadvertent with Openmoko, however, and people today have no such excuse. Ultimately, the conclusion must be that long term initiatives are a good thing: we cannot have things starting and then ending and then other people coming along and starting again from scratch. This makes the failure of crowdfunding campaigns particularly painful, since if they are not going to deliver a product, maybe the work that went into the product might be delivered so that people can genuinely believe the claims that seem to be made that supporters are somehow investing in Free Software and open hardware. And one might think that enduring Free Software organisations might seek to be custodians of these long term initiatives, too. But as previously noted, their cultural instincts render them passive: it is far better to badmouth Apple, apparently, than to actually invest in infrastructure and solutions that might keep the very basis of those organisations' existence viable for the population at large. If no-one can buy hardware that can conveniently run Free Software any more, it will be futile to exhort consumers to buy anything at all. Well, still nothing particularly constructive here: that will have to wait for another message! Paul _______________________________________________ Community mailing list [email protected] http://lists.goldelico.com/mailman/listinfo.cgi/community http://www.tinkerphones.org
