> It's quite a shame how much better their hardware could be if they hired someone to do the in-house work for stable OS support on any of their devices.
Perhaps, but is there any company doing that for aarch64 devices?
The Pine64 development community are making cross-distro improvements to aarch64 support, e.g. Tow-Boot.
I like it because it's dev hardware. They publish schematics, and their stuff is cheap enough to buy on a whim.
There's an active community to get involved with on hardware hacking.
> And they even sell dead and irrecoverable (without soldering/hacking) on devices like the pinephone keyboard/battery. Or how dare you use the phone usb-c port when on the keyboard - if you do, you fry the charging chip and possibly the battery.
Yes, this was bad.
> Or that the rockpro64 is said to be able to boot with eMMC rather than microSD. But when you try to, it doesn't work. Back to microSD. Weirdly enough Ive heard some users whose boards DO work with eMMC. None of mine did. Again, since docu is terrible, I copied the command that works and didn't for me. Seems like bad hardware versions or something?
eMMC and NVMe booting is supported by the hardware. The firmware might not, but the firmware is writable, and the developer community is working on unifying this.
State of the art for Linux distros is to install Tow-Boot on your SPI flash, and then a UEFI OS.