Tech Over Tea - The State Of Pine64 | Camden

Episode Date: August 14, 2026

You probably haven't thought to much about Pine64 and the PinePhone in quite a long time but they're still around so lets talk to someone involved about how things are going.==========Support The Channel==========► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson==========Guest Links==========Pine64 Website: https://pine64.com/Community Site: https://pine64.org/==========Support The Show==========► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson=========Video Platforms==========🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBq5p-xOla8xhnrbhu8AIAg=========Audio Release=========🎵 RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/149fd51c/podcast/rss🎵 Apple Podcast:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-over-tea/id1501727953🎵 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3IfFpfzlLo7OPsEnl4gbdM🎵 Google Podcast: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8xNDlmZDUxYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw==🎵 Anchor: https://anchor.fm/tech-over-tea==========Social Media==========🎤 Discord:https://discord.gg/PkMRVn9🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/TechOverTeaShow📷 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techovertea/🌐 Mastodon:https://mastodon.social/web/accounts/1093345==========Credits==========🎨 Channel Art:All my art has was created by Supercozmanhttps://twitter.com/Supercozmanhttps://www.instagram.com/supercozman_draws/DISCLOSURE: Wherever possible I use referral links, which means if you click one of the links in this video or description and make a purchase we may receive a small commission or other compensation.

Good morning. Hello. Oh. Immediately. Yeah, you know what? Perfect. We're not cutting that. Good morning, good day and good evening. I'm as always your host of Brody Robertson.

Hopefully, you know, this is the worst part, right? Like, that was just you Steffick over the words. Like, you are the closest person I've had on this show. Have I had an Australian? Yeah, well, yeah, okay. I've had some mates from uni. Besides my mates from uni, I've never had anyone this close. So there is no excuse today for us to have any place to the issues.

Anyway, putting that to the side. Today, we are talking about something that I feel like a lot of people just haven't really acknowledged for a while. And that being Pine, because today we have the Pine Community Manager on. Talk about, well, I guess no point really me explaining it. How about you just talk about who you are and then what Pine is and sort of will go from there. Yeah, sure. So hi, my name is Camden. I'm the current community manager and the Pine 64 community manager. And I am from New Zealand. So right next to him, we have a bit of a feud, actually. But we're going to mend those relations today. I've been the community manager for a little over a little under a year now.

Okay. And so I've been contributing for a bit over like two or three years. And I've been in the community since 2020. So I've been around. Right, but having more of an official role as a more recent thing. Yes, yes. So for anyone who might be entirely unaware of Pine, because I feel like the people have been using Linux for a while,

probably have, you know, heard about it, maybe knew about the Pinephone and stuff like that. But for anyone who maybe started using it ever since, like, the steam deck came out or maybe more recently with the steam machine, I feel a lot of people probably don't know what Pine is and what they've done. Yeah, sure. So basically Pine is a, you know, they make open source hardware. They make a lot of like Linux devices and better devices, like home devices. They make a bunch of like really random stuff. And the difference between

like Pine and other companies is that they do not have any developers. The community is basically the developer database for the devices, right? Right, right, right.

And that can be a really good thing. So that can keep the prices down for Pine stores like hardware and all of that. but people have to actually want to work on them so that can be like if people aren't on board with like the hardware idea then there's going to be nobody there so for example there is a device called a pine cam it was like you know an IP camera it was an interesting idea but the board that it's you know based on So they used an existing board called the Oz 64.

They went nowhere. Uh-huh. Right. So it's this, it's this issue where you can make the hard way. You can sort of put things out there. But if nobody is sort of backing it, it's like, it's cool. But like, you know, you need that, you need someone to get sort of get that snowball rolling. Because when people start building stuff, then more.

stuff will be built and then goes from there. But if nobody is really doing that initial first step, right? Like, nothing's really going to start from that point. Yeah, basically. So that's why the pine can, uh, the pine cam failed. Mm-hmm. And other devices, like the more exciting devices like the pine note, they have had a lot more recent development.

Oh, which one sorry? After getting the pine notes. Oh, pine note. Okay. Yep. So that's the one, uh, that recently got, well, recently. got a, like a proper second batch. And then a lot of development started after that.

Okay. So, Pine's been around for a while at this point, hasn't it? I'm forgetting which year it started. I think it was like 2014. Yeah, something like... With the Pine 64, like the $10 single board computer. That was the original. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

And I feel like Pine was, especially a couple of years ago, I heard quite a lot about Pine. Like that was when people were talking about the Pine Phone and, you know, the, the, the, what was the laptop? The Pine Book, the Pine Book, yes. Pine Book Crow, yes, yes. There was a lot of discussion around that. Like, these are really cool devices. And then at some point, like, I kind of just stopped hearing about Pine. Um, and I feel like that's sort of directly related to a big thing you wanted to talk about.

here but I don't know if you want to get into that first. Do you want to talk more about what your role as community manager is? Oh, sure. Well, yeah, I can do that. I would like to do that. So as a community manager currently, I'm not really like what people would consider like a technical community manager. I'm kind of a people person rather than like doing a lot of the development.

I do like blog posts. I do like documentation writing. and all of that kind of thing. But mainly I'm like interacting with the community, making sure that people are getting hardware. So I found out like a while ago that gadget bridge, the software that connects to the pine time on Android, none of the developers actually had a pine time.

Oh. So we sent them a couple of them. Oh, Gadget Bridge. Yeah, okay. I do know this one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah.

And so basically what I do is that I find projects and I'm like, hey, would you like some free hardware? Like where it would make sense, right? Right, right. Yeah. Right, because you can't really support. Well, you, okay. Assuming there is good documentation, you can support it without having the device, but having it there is always going to be better because then sometimes the documentation doesn't

fully line up. Maybe there's parts where things are not being documented or there are bugs and various things like that. So actually having the device in front of you, you know, that is the easiest way to be able to properly ensure the software is actually working on it. And if you have the hardware there, it sort of acts as a incentive to work more on that specific support. Yeah, exactly. It's like you get your mates to like do all the testing for you. you and you're kind of it's it's just easier to have the device on you so you actually know what's going on in real time it just you know not having it on you waste a lot of time i think and so that's basically like one of the really important things because let's be honest paying a developer

is a lot of money let's just give people free hardware that doesn't cost as much for pine just giving away devices so that is what they do basically is that they will give hardware to projects and all of that. Right. And has that been sort of, was that the strategy before you were there as well, or is that more of a recent thing? No, they've always given out hardware to projects and all of that. They sponsor a lot of hardware for, you know, they've done that for postmarking and

all that. We've done it, I've done it personally for a few. projects so QuillOS which is a operating system for the Pino and Pye Notes for the Arch Linux image so there's been a lot of work on that from a few individuals I postmark for anyone who doesn't know is a mobile Linux distro just just as anyone's unaware and a few other individual developers who do like a lot of up streaming work, we will send them hardware as well. Yeah. Right, right, right. Right, if there's someone who is clearly, I guess, the pillar of a project, or the pillar of a bunch of different projects, and they, they sort of like, contribute around to a lot of different places.

It kind of makes sense to, I guess, single them out as someone who, to, like, directly provide support to, right? If they're doing, like, 10x the work of everyone else, like, they are, they're, like, the person who you really want to like encourage more and support and you know get as much get as much work with as you know how to say it give as much encouragement as you can to basically exactly you want to encourage them as much as possible and that's as much as i can do sure sure and in terms of like because i don't actually like have much of much of affiliation at all with Pine Store. Right.

So actually, I want to explain that. Yeah, yeah. Okay. I'd like to hear that. So I'm community manager of Pine 64, which is the community part. So I basically make sure the community members are, you know, all good, treated right and all of that. And Pine Store is the actual company. So Pine Store Limited, they make the.

hardware and all of that. They're originally based in California, but then due to basically, like, you know, sending money overseas and all of that back and forth. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's difficult and, you know, tax and all of that. So they just ended up moving it to Hong Kong instead, and that's alleviated. So technically still the founder lives in California, but, you know, it accompanied. is just now in Hong Kong.

Right, right. So, I'd assume they would have, like, the same, it was just, like, one single thing. I actually didn't know there was the separation here. I think a lot of people were doing. Yeah. I've been trying to get this out for a while. Like, ever since I've, like, started doing stuff, I've been using the terms pine store and, like, Pine 64 community.

That's why I'm mastered on as cool Pine 64 community, not just Pine Street. We are the community making the content and not just content, but like doing all of the documentation work and all of that on like four Pine Store products. Right. I guess that makes sense because I did see when the Pinephone Pro was discontinued, there are a bunch of comments on the Mastodon Post under that being like, why was this not an out? Like, and trying to, there was a lot of confusion why there was not more explanation from the community account. But I guess the separation trying to make here is that this was something that was coming from the company side of things.

This is not something the community itself had control over. Okay, I think I remember what happened now. Okay. I think we started talking about it and then that got out before I actually made a proper announcement. Ah, okay, that doesn't help. So I actually feel really bad about that because, you know, I should, you know, I should be making the announcement first. Yeah, yeah. But then people found out beforehand that they, like, officially discontinued the device.

I'm like, okay, I'm going to get to that. And then someone else, like, one of the reporters or something, I don't remember who it was, did it for me. Okay, that's maybe a bad example then, but. No, it's fine. Sure. It is an example. I didn't mean it to be that. I thought that's what went on.

No, no, no, no, it's fine. If I'm wrong there, like that, yeah, I'll take that back. But, like, the, the idea here is that the, the company, the company doesn't have direct oversight of the community, and the community doesn't directly control the company. There are two separate entities. Yes. And there is a really difficult thing about that.

We aren't allowed to talk to any hind-store employees. except for the founder. And there is a very important reason why. So the founder X is a filter for us. Right. For NDAs. So he knows what he can tell us. But, and, you know, in case we, like, hear anything

that we're not supposed to know. Okay, I guess that... That sounded worse when you initially said it, but I, I, that makes sense, right? Because there's going to be contracts which have not been made public. There are going to be contracts which were being discussed that never, that never went through. When we're dealing, especially with phone hardware,

there's a lot of, there's a lot of weirdness on what you can and cannot publish there. I know there's always been weirdness with like, um, the, like the modem in the phones for your mobile network. So there's definitely a lot of like, intercompany stuff that you wouldn't want to just have sort of put out there. Yeah, exactly. And that's the reason why

Pine Star isn't allowed to ship the open modem firmware on the Pine phone is because of, you know, all of that legal stuff. I don't understand it. This is like a really, really old discussion. I might have made a video on it a very long time ago. Because I feel like

Was it? I don't know if you know this. I'm not sure how much you know about stuff that's happened before you were involved with Pine. Oh, I've had a lot of discussions. Okay, okay. Because I believe there was... Didn't the FSF specifically have problems with

defining the Pine phone as a like as a free software device? I might be think of another company. I feel like it was pine, though. I would be surprised if you've said that. I specifically think it was about the modem, though, if I recall correctly.

Because it's a black box. Yeah, yeah. I don't think there's any modem other than this one that is, like, truly open, because modems aren't supposed to be open at all. Yeah, the problem with modems is then you're dealing with radio signals.

And radio signals are very, very, like, highly, restricted in pretty much every country and you know regulated so they're not really supposed to be open but since nobody has done anything malicious yet with this firmware it's okay

sure that's how I see it you know what fair enough fair enough I mean they haven't done anything it's been like how many years since that firmware has like come out they have done nothing they don't care unless someone actually you know starts like

mass sending packets everywhere. Sure. To the bloody towers. Don't do that. Bad idea. Don't do that. Don't get any kind of tears from that. So you sort of briefly touched in it earlier. What are the sort of like range of devices that Pine is currently selling?

The Pine Store is currently selling. Because it's kind of like a bit of everything right now from my understanding. Yeah. So they're selling the Pintzill smart soldering iron. They're selling the Pine Time. That's the Smartwatch. Yeah, Smartwatches. The Pine Voice, which is the smart home speaker, home assistant.

Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah. So those are like the embedded devices. Then you've got stuff like the Pine Phone, Pine Tab, Pine Note, which are all like mobile devices, mobile Linux devices. And then you've got the single. board computers and like, you know, the compute modules and the cluster board and the blade.

But you've got all those like boards, like single board computers, like the rock, the quartz and all of that kind of thing. So they do a plethora of embedded and, you know, Linux hardware. So as community manager, like what is your sort of. goal here. Like, what are you, what are you trying to do? I'm trying to make sure that silly things don't happen again. That's basically what I want to do. I'll just be real. I want to make sure that the community is, like, all good. That they are, um, that there is a voice, um, that I will stick up for them, you know,

because I talk to TL and I do get whacked in the face sometimes. The founder of Pine Store. Okay. Yeah. So I do get whacked in the face sometimes because I get a bit like, you know, like, but there are a lot of things that they, you know, they can't do. Yeah. So, I guess the main thing you want to talk about here was you, when you said me in the matter,

you're like, hey, you want to talk about the. Menjaro fiasco. I wasn't sure what you were specifically referring to because when I hear Manjaro fiasco, I think of ten different things. Oh yeah, there's all of them. This was like the first one. Actually, yeah. Well, no, I don't even think of necessarily Pine stuff, right? I think of, like the first thing that came to my mind. No, I know. I know. Yeah. The first thing. It's their cell certificates. Well, no, it's not even that. More recently there was the, um, the split between the company side of things and the community side of things. They wanted to go in two different directions and people were forking the pro so i wasn't even sure specifically what you're referring to

so for anyone who might hear mangero fiasco and be like i don't know what we're talking about what happened here in relation to pine so what happened with manjaro is that um just trying to get all the information in my head at the same time totally if you need to like jump around or you want to start an earlier point like whatever you need to do Yeah, no, I'm just giving it a like a quick thing because I want a good, good part to start at. Well, I guess a good part to start at would be, well, I want to introduce the idea, right? Yeah, yeah, I think the best place starts. That's a good idea.

Okay, let's start there. How Pine initially was doing things. Yeah, okay, so there are a lot of projects working on the Pine phone. So every project contributed something like EG-25 manager, Mobian, did. that. And then Postmarket OS did a lot of like work and and I think Dan CT12 did a lot of work. So it was a like combination of work from a lot of different parties. So Mobian and Postmarket OS, those were different Linux distros for these devices. So, you know, Mobian is Debian. Dan Ct. Nix is Arch Linux. Postmarket OS is like a bit, you know,

a platform for like arm and just mobile devices in general based on Alpine and there was a lot of other projects. Oh Yes.

Ubuntu Touch did a lot on the modem stack as well. So as you can tell there is a lot of work that has been done by multiple projects. This this came basically turned into

community additions for the Pinefoam. So that meant that $10 of each device would go to a project. Okay. So you would buy the device and it basically acted as a donation because you bought the post-market OS version or the Ubuntu Touch version. Correct. So you would basically donate to the project itself and they would get them, you know, the funds to, you know, keep working.

maybe pay your developer, maybe, you know, get hardware, that kind of thing. Right. And this matters a lot because the mobile space, even now, is a very small part of the Linux space. There's not, like, it's not as bad as it has been at certain points in time, but it is still like, you know, when people think of Linux, they think of the desktop, they think of servers, they think of, like, all of these other things. And then somewhere way down the bottom here is sort of like where mobile is. yeah it's very like it's not very mature yet I'd say there's a lot of problems especially I've had with audio

like get audio routing from the air piece and all that kind of thing but yeah so what I was getting into from that is eventually we had the Manjara Community Edition that was basically

I think that was the last one and then Pine decided that they wanted Manjaro to be the distro that would, you know, be shipped with a pine phone. Now, the problem that people had... And this was back in 2020, yes? By the looks like that. I think that was, um, 2022? Uh, I'm seeing a announcement from Lou.

Pinephone August 31st 2020 Is that for the community edition? Yeah, that's for the community edition that was like the

announcement of the device for the Menjaro one or the Ubuntu Touch one? No, the Armenta device. Oh, okay. That has been a while.

I just want to get dates clear. The dates aren't the most important part here but for anyone who's kind of curious. Of course. And so this was a big problem because Manjaro didn't actually contribute much

so they didn't contribute the modem stack they didn't contribute you know all of the kernel changes they didn't contribute basically anything and they just you know shipped what other people had worked on and so people felt wronged because they were just taking all the work and they were now the you know the distro that was shipping on the

fine phone. So the concern was that it was that it was the one thing that was shipping. People didn't really have concerns when it was just one of the community additions. Exactly, yeah. But that's not what tipped everything over, I don't think. Like, that was really annoying, but you know, what actually tip people off is the whole SPI thing. Okay. SPI being So an SPI is basically an external flash chip And this is basically used on the

Pinephone Pro and Pine Book Pro as a chip to store U-Boot on. So it's a chip that that gets read before the SD card and before the internal storage. So you can put a bootloader on there and no matter what,

you'll always have a bootloader. Okay. The problem is that Manjaro wanted their U-boot version shipping on the Pine Book Pro. Uh-huh. Instead of Talboot, which is basically a distribution of U-boot that, you know, it's got quality of life changes and stuff like that. So people thought, felt like... Pine Store wasn't listening to the community at that point. They were following the project, so to say.

You know, the project versus the individual, forget what I mean. Could you expand upon that? So, Pine Store feel that it is better to, basically, like, support a project rather than, you know, individuals, right? Sure, sure. Because a project has a group of individuals working on the same thing.

While individuals themselves can do a lot of great work, they, you know, they are like contributors to, like individual contributors to a main goal, if you get what I mean. Mm-hmm. I think I understand. Yeah. So it's easier for applying to support a project rather than a group. of like individual individuals working on something. Well, also makes sense that there is more of a, like, legal entity to deal with as well.

Exactly. But, you know, I'm, I don't like that idea. Like, I want to support individuals as well. But, you know, there's a, there is something that I will get into later on that I want to talk about, like, concerning individuals and projects. But, yeah. And so they ended up making a lot of people angry because it felt like the individuals weren't getting their voice heard.

Yeah, there was a... So in 2022, there was a big blog post that came out from one of the members, why I left Pine 64. And that was sort of the... I think that's what really set off in motion, like a lot of this I guess this distrust I guess

Yeah I feel like it was You know A linear thing It was just like There are problems just You know Kept happening

Why did we have Why did they have to keep having These discussions about You know The same argument over and over again About the SPI chip I would get angry too Because it's

Like, the community wants this, and it makes sense to put the communities, basically what the community wants. So the community wants a bootloader that works for every distro. So everybody is happy, rather than one U-Boot for Manjaro. So with that U-Bit for Manjaro, would that, would you still be now to put other distros on there or is like is it just always going to try to to default to being Manjaro?

It was it just a bootloader that was on there? Like nothing else? Yeah, it was a bootloader. I think it's just like a certain version of the bootloader. Okay, okay. Without all of the like niceties that Cal Boot gives you because with Talbot, you can, you know, press the home button down.

No, no, no, the volume button down and it will boot to the SD card. Okay, okay, cool. Just want to be on the same page there. So it was just the bootloader that was that Manjaro wanted to have on every device. Yeah, and obviously the distro. Sure, sure.

Yeah, okay, that, that, yeah, but the... So that made everyone angry, you know? Sure, okay, okay. So it was both the bootloader being on the SPI chip, rather than Tal Boot, and then Manjaro being the only version, so that now, now something that was previously funding other projects,

was that, So when you're saying that like $10 went to the projects When it just became only Manjaro Was that money still going to Manjaro Or did that whole like You buy the device, there's a donation thing Stop happening

I think when it went to the You know the clear back cover I don't think that was happening anymore Okay okay I don't actually know that was before me Okay either way If that was a community additions then it is possible that it was.

Okay. Either way, though, money that would have been funding other projects like Moby and a post-market OS and Ubuntu touch who were doing a lot of this actual important work, that money was no longer being sent to them because there was no longer community additions. Exactly. So that's why people were mad. Yeah. And, like, we, I think...

there was an apology that came out from Pine as well so I'm going to bring that up on my screen as well because I don't remember the entire thing I was reading it before but it felt quite you know combative rather than like

it's not an apology to the community it's more of a response to what Martijin said what was the title of that post a response to Mardagin's blog Okay Cool Just so I'm going to bring on my side

To Okay sweet Yeah I found it Yeah And so it's You know There's a few things

That they went through Like We were convinced to flash the SPI with Talbu on the most recent batch Of the Pinephone Pro That kind of thing You know

They were pressured eventually into doing certain things. But eventually, the Pine Book Pro just didn't ship with anything on the SPI due to all of that. Uh-huh. And Marajin

obviously, you know, fed up with the whole situation, wanted to, you know, just leave, get that stress off, which is fair. And I think he's doing like some audio hardware stuff now. I met up with him at Fosdom this year.

He's doing some really cool audio stuff. If I understand correctly, he was a post-market OS guy? Yeah. Yeah, okay. So he's doing a lot of the camera stuff. He made megapixels.

Megapixel. So megapixels is the camera program that ran on the original Pinephone, Pinephone, and then I believe Purism forked it to make millip pixels

that kind of thing so it's an important piece of the story you know so postmarket OS had the camera stack the Mobian had the um I think

like parts of the modem and then Ubuntu touch other parts of the modem all of that kind of thing yeah that's what I was missing okay so So what happened with this situation then?

Where did you want to go from here? So I wanted to basically talk a little bit about, you know, and the importance of the community issues, because a lot of people have, you know, ask when are they coming back? And even the, like, Drew DeVolt post. So that's, like, a response to Pine 64's response. The response to the response.

to the response, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. And, um, you know, since, like, nobody actually apologized, may I just point out, interestingly, I don't think that this response, to Martagin's blog, so by, like,

on the Pine blog, was actually written by my mate. I don't know, that wasn't him. I had this discussion last year that it wasn't actually Marik, like, Gamey. That wasn't him who wrote it. Uh-huh. That was something that I found interesting, and I'm like, I'm not going to go much into that, but my mate didn't write that. So, I understand if you don't want to go into it, but like, basically what you're saying

is there was a corporate response made through the community manager's name. Yes. Okay. I'm not happy about that, but, you know, I'm not going to go into that. too much. But, um, so I want to talk about the community issues now. And why pines, you know, we've already gone into why pine store chooses to fund projects over individuals. But we and you've also gone into why it's a challenge. It's because you need an organization to put all of this money under. So I've got like an example, right. Um, with the pine phone community additions

you had like you needed an organization to send to but you also lose money from that because of tax reasons so you don't actually get the full amount all of that kind of thing so that's really frustrating you can't just drop it into someone's PayPal account I wish you could but like it's got to be official it's donations on all that

not going to encourage tax evasion. Neither am I, but you got to do it the official way. And, you know, that annoys people that, you know, you don't get the full amount anymore. Right, right. And with the pine note, how far do you go back? Like, you've got a project who has got, like, a couple of individuals on it. Actually, no, this is just an individual. Jill's projects. So

HRDL's Archilinix firmware they did a lot of the display driver and all of that. Kernel optimization and all of that kind of thing. So they made it actually usable. But then

Max Maximilian made the like factory firmware so he's gone off. He's doing life stuff now. But he did a lot of work too to actually get the second pine node batch to, you know,

to the, to the masses to actually sell again. And if you, and if you want to like, like, then you've got like a usable thing because the Archilinix image is,

you know, using sway and all of that, a custom sway, like, interface and all that config and all of that. Then you've got Quill which is like a non- nice to use, interface, easy to use, all set up. That is something that Pine would want to do, right? Because it's got everything set up, but it's lying on all of the people's hard work. And then you even go back even further.

The developer editions before any of the community edition pine note batches, all of that work, all of that bring up work. So how far do you actually go back? back on who to send the money to. And when it's done by a bunch of individuals, all of that work, this is like, you know, going back to Manjara, this is a bunch of people's work. If you, you know, like, QuillOS people did a bunch of work. Like, they've done a dollar of work.

But so of the people have done to bring up. And the bring up before that. And the people who actually got. the device to, you know, to manufacturing again. So it's just like, how do you do that? Right. So you're trying to think of like, how do you actually support the people who did the work when it was something put together by a ton of different volunteers across a bunch of different

projects? And nobody, well, nobody's really keeping track of that. Like, obviously there's the Git history. But nobody keeping track of, okay, this person did this specific thing. thing, this person did this specific thing, you sort of have to, if you wanted to go back and compensate people for the work they've done in the past, you would need to sort of reverse engineer that from the very few artifacts that do exist, and then how you decide what each of those changes is actually worth, there's like no real good way to sort of do that compensation

as like a retrospective thing. Yeah, it's actually horrible. It's, it's the worst thing ever. Like, like, it's easier when there's a project behind it. All of, all of the people that worked on the device are in one place. Okay, there's an organization you can send that money.

That never happens. Because there's so many people. They're just working on their own. And they just happen to benefit everyone else. How do you get that person that money? Yeah, and you've talked quite a bit about like Quilloass and Mobian and Ubuntu touch.

There are going to be these. random little projects that are unaffiliated with any of these projects that are all of them. If we want to talk about the desktop space, right, talk about something like open printing. Open printing isn't associated with any individual project, but is used by all of them. So there are going to be these components sort of outside of all of that as well. Yeah, exactly. So it's a really difficult issue. How do you solve that?

Like, do you just add everyone into an organization? There's like money, like, you have to pay money to create something like that. And what if everyone is in different countries? This is why Pine Stores accountant had a nightmare of a time with the Pine Phone community editions. Like, Bro, never wanted to ever do that again. And I want it to happen, but it's, you know, I'm, like, I had these discussions, like last year with a bunch of the Pine 64 community members

like insiders and all of that like how would this actually work? And I don't know if it can because there's so many people that you want to get you know predated and all of that. One thing you did briefly touch on earlier which I do want to jump back to

is you mentioned developer additions in there and I have seen some confusion over the years of oh well what are these developer editions what are these community additions like how like because people see them they see the same device and think

what is like what is the difference here so the developer additions are usually versions of first versions of the hardware that aren't given to you know just like insiders so those are ones

that are actually able to be purchased by developers Now, there are people who aren't developers who end up buying them, but you know, you'll get one if you are a developer. These are the initial bring-up hardware versions, basically. The first versions available to the public. Okay, okay. And then the community editions are, well, the idea there was it's somewhere for, they're along that line and they ship with these different gestures that are on them. Yes.

So, you know, your Mobian addition, all of that kind of thing. But curiously, the Pineau Community Edition wasn't really, you know, a community addition. It was, you know, it shipped with community firmware. But we never managed to get max that, you know, funding or anything like that. The problem, the reason why that was, this is another interesting piece of information is that if we want a community addition to happen it has to be before the final price of the device is set

because you've got a skew right you know a code for a device we have to you know ask the community are you willing to pay $10, $5 more for a device if it's a positive reception Pine Store would be happy to, you know, put that price up and fund it

as long as there's like, you know, an organisation is that, and that it's like feasible to do. But in this case, I do not think we were quick enough. I don't think I even like knew much about it, like what they were doing with the Pineau beforehand. None of got added to the telegram group and I reckon that that money, you know, that price had already been set at that stage by Pine Store. So one of the things you mentioned in DMs was

the whole idea of these community additions is logistically very difficult. And I assume that's part of it, but I'm assuming there's other things that were a challenge here as well. There's so many challenges. It's like, you know, accounting, like, how do you get their money to projects. Do the projects have an organization? How do

you get that funding to individuals and all of that? It's just a massive mess that Pine Store frankly does not want to deal with because in the end that's not even our decision. As a community we kind of

just have to hope that Pine Store is on board with our ideas. Yeah, that basically like the logistical nightmare that I'm thinking that I'm talking about is you know the the like monetary logistical problem and the contributor problem the projects over individuals problem that I've been trying to figure out for a while and it's not

something that I can really do because you know you need that project to actually send the money to their organization. So if you could just change the, like, snap of a finger, change things overnight. What, I can't, I can't click my fingers. If you could just change things overnight, what would you like to see happen? I want to see more repairable devices,

because sometimes Pine Store will use, like, go to a different manufacturer's, like, shell the factory that makes the shell for devices that aren't theirs and they're like hey can we buy some of these shelves yes

that saves money because they don't need to you know create a new production line right but that means that it's not as repairable the pine fund though pine tab to pine you know all of that kind of thing those are in-house design

but the pine tab two isn't, I wouldn't, I wouldn't take that apart. I'd probably break mine. Pine phone is easy though. Actually, recently they, Pine Store just released a 3D files, like the full 3D file, not just a back case. So you can actually 3D print your own, like, maybe, maybe the frame. I want to see that happen.

I want to see if I can do that on my 3D printer, but I haven't, Ender 3 Pro so that sucks. Yeah, I did see that. That is cool. I want to see more repairability. Pardon me, repairability in devices. Like, you're being able to

possibly, like someone mentioned on MasterDon a while ago, make your own device. Like, buy the parts, print your own parts. Like frame and all of that. Right, right, right. I think that would be an interesting concept, but I don't know if the

feasibility is up there. Mm-hmm. Yeah, phones especially are difficult. Any sort of... Any sort of small-scale device is just naturally going to be pretty difficult. Yes. Like... And I guess there is the idea where you can sell the parts and you can then save

cost on... Like, you can sell it to someone cheaper because you don't have to pay for the... like, what do you call it? The actual construction of the device. But, I don't know. I do think that's cool as an idea from a repairability front

because if you obviously can put the parts in it yourself, then you can probably buy repair parts for it and you can have repair parts for it. But at the same time, I didn't hear the dog in the back of... I wouldn't trust my PLA filament to hold my pine phone together. got you've got better filament but I wouldn't trust mine.

You need a good printer and all that kind of thing. There's like a couple more things as well. Sorry? Sorry, there was just a couple more things I wanted to touch on. Oh yeah, yeah, go ahead. Before we go as well. One thing about Pine is that they don't take any external funding. so to, you know, avoid any conflict of interest.

So I think that's a good thing that they do. Because, you know, some, you know, single board computer manufacturers do that. They will take external funding and all of that kind of thing. And then those people who give them money have, you know, or projects give them, give pine money. and they can't get any, you know, view on what they do. Say on what they do,

you get what I mean. So they're kind of a holden to these other companies would give them money. Yeah, so they won't do that. They have slim, pardon me, slim margins and all of that. So that the, you know, the devices are relatively cheap.

They're not, cheap as you know is Samsung because of you know economy of scale and all of that but they try and make them

as cheap as possible like as I said by using shells from different companies sometimes and using you know getting the community to make the software

and then all of that and you know then sending devices to developers and all of that kind of thing. You mentioned Samsung... They don't... Go on.

Yeah, and they don't take any kinds of contracts for, like, developers or anything like that. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. You mentioned Samsung there. It's not just economies of scale with a company like that.

They also have vertical integration. You have Samsung display who provides the display tech to Samsung electronics and there's like all of this in-house it's technically different companies for legal purposes but

all of this in-house production as well also manages to reduce costs in a way that just would not be possible unless you're at the same kind of scale as them. Yeah it's difficult so the pine phone you know ends up being quite a lot

more than a secondhand one plus six or whatever like that or a Samsung even like the cheapest Samsung phone, like brand new is cheap. Yeah, that's one of the things that I have always kind of heard confusion about from people. It's like, why would I, you know, why would I buy this when it has this level of performance, it's this price when you can buy, like, you know,

if you want to have mobile Linux, you can buy a secondhand Android device that is known to be supported well. And I think, like, trying to see sort of explain that value to people is difficult. Because if they don't see the value in a device that is trying to be fully open, like how do you show them and convince them that that is something which is worth even considering as a value? Yeah, exactly.

You just bother the better, cheaper, secondhand option. So, I guess when you've talked to, about funding projects over individuals and this sort of like funding of different projects is sending out devices. I guess how do you approach deciding what, what or who needs to be given a device here? So sometimes TL, like the founder, will want, you know, a project, like like me to go out and say, hey, would you, you know,

would you be interested, you know, no incentive to do anything with it, we'll just send you one. Right, right. Like a device kind of thing. Um, if it,

if a project is, you know, doing, doing really good work around pine and all of that, we'll send, we'll send them devices and all of that. So, um,

there's, there's just a bunch of, like, like, if, if, if, if,

If there is a project and they're doing stuff related to pine products, we will send them a device, you know. We know they're doing work and all of that kind of thing, obviously. We'll send them a device kind of thing. If they're working on a pie note, we'll give them, you know, if there is another pie note, we'll give them one. Yeah, that kind of thing. And if they need a new board revision or something, they're doing important work, we'll give them, you know, prototypes. you know like the pine time pro prototype we were given them out to a couple of people so obviously jf from the infinitime project is i think gary from um wasp OS and all of that kind of thing

is that one is it like a OS for the oh firmware for this device i see i see yeah yeah so that's the default firmware and um gamey also has one game laster has one too Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Okay. Okay. Um, yeah, the, especially the, the wearable space is a space I've just never really, I have very, very little knowledge of the wearable, like, open space. I have a smart watch from like 10 years ago here. This is what I wear daily. That's pretty much it. I mean, it works, right? Is it a battery fine? Yeah. Yeah, it's totally fine. It lasts a week. Oh, that's good. Yeah, it's a little, it's a slow device, it was never a fast device anyway. I do have a, I do have a, um, a new pebble here that I should use more. But, um, you know, as I said, I, I, I kind of just wear a watch for heart rate tracking and that's about it. Um, nothing else. So I don't really need to really delve into this space. It's just something I'm not really, um, normally spent much time, not really spent much time dealing with. I, I, I'm too focused on desktop stuff to, to, to, to, to, to, to, get involved in other parts of the open space.

Yeah, that's fair. I think Pine is going into, you know, more and better devices again because of the DRAM shortage. They're not producing any more Linux devices at this point. So whatever a stock is left is that that's what the Pine Stores are selling.

I hadn't even considered that for a small-scale company like Pine, Like the D-R-R-R-R- like, it's bad for a company like Valve, right? Like, you've probably seen all of the issues with getting steam machines out of the pricing of the steam machine. I hadn't even considered that from an even smaller company. It's like a company like a pine. I know... I know...

I know... System 76 has been having a lot of issues with that as well. Yeah, I can imagine. Their laptops are really expensive. I wanted to buy one while I was in high school and then I realized, oh! Yeah, yeah, no, I get it, I get it. They're really cool, though. They look cool.

I've never seen a device with Corboot. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Are you, okay, well, a new device, because you can, you know, if you go on eBay, you'll find plenty of core-booted think pads from 15 years ago. You know, I think we're off track again. I think we're off track, but it's fine. That happens. We're at the end, aren't we, though.

I don't know. I don't know how long you wanted to go for. Sorry, I did have to, like, head off at some point to pick up, you know, my brother. Oh, okay, no, that's all good. That's good. Was there anything else you wanted to touch on then? Um, I'm not really sure. I think I've, you know, done a pretty, like, bored discussion of, um, why, why it's quite a difficult problem and all of that.

and how Manjaro is a good example of what not to do, again. Don't do that. That quote can be taken to talk about so many different things, but wouldn't... Feel free. We don't need to get into that right now. I'll get it into next time, the Manjaro episode, I don't know. It is the entire time, the entire time just talking about Manjaro. um yeah talking about the many many many such cases of things happening with that project um that restructuring

or something yes yeah that was a big drama recently as well um yeah i like the way you say philip muller i saw the last time film film miller i saw the last time uh that you mentioned him in the video you did a video on the drama oh yeah and i like the way that you pronounce his name. What did I say? Um... Did I say something weird? Did I pronounce quickly? No, I just, I, no, I just liked it.

Okay. That, that's it. That's as deep as it goes. Fair enough, okay. Um, I guess, uh, do you want to, yeah, if you want to, if you just want to end here, we can do that, unless there was it. Okay, let's, let's end it super awkwardly, like we started it super awkwardly. Sure, yeah. I guess there's a shorter one. but um hey yeah i've got limited time no no it's a good sewer unfortunately yeah um if you want to

direct people to links they can go to to check things out uh feel free to tell people where they can find things uh i like postmarket o s that's cool um go to postmarket ores open your device today or something uh go to pine sixty four dot org for the community website got all that documentation good stuff. Pine 64.com if you want to buy the devices that's Pine Store's website.

I forgot what Mobian's is. Mobian.org, I think. Just search Mobian, you'll find it pretty quickly. You'll find it. No, you'll get the Sonic characters. That's what they're called. Okay.

First, in the Google search is the Wikipedia page for the Mobian project. Second... Oh, that's good. Second is the Sonic stuff. And all the images are Sonic. And yeah, mainly just projects that are awesome.

And Dan CT-Nicks, he's been making a bunch of demo scene intros for his software releases. Those are pretty cool. Okay. I think that's it Sweet, nothing else Not that I can think of Okay I guess I do matcher and we'll sign off

Cool So my main channel is Brodyropton I do Linux video is there six each day's week Sometimes I stream as well I've got the gaming channel Broodion games Right now I'm playing through Like a Dragon And Metal Gear Solid 3

If you're watching the video version of this You can find the audio version Obviously every podcast platform at Tech Over T The video is YouTube at Tech of a Tea. We have video on Spotify as well. How do you want to sign us off? What do you want to say? Shaka! Perfect.