Yeah, ditto. Why can't mainline Linux support come first? Then they could sell a working product.
Crazy, I know. Investing in difficult R&D problems to produce a quality product is not a good business model. It's so much easier to churn out a working devkit and ask for pull requests.
Sorry for the snark and pessimism, but that's what happens when you keep getting burned. This statement does not inspire confidence:
>Finally, to ensure that Pocket P.C. has great software support out of the box, we have requested embedded development help from the community.
Why is software always an afterthought with these projects? Especially a project like this, which has clearly seen an enormous amount of effort put into the hardware design.
> Why is software always an afterthought with these projects? Especially a project like this, which has clearly seen an enormous amount of effort put into the hardware design.
This can go either way, in my experience. I’ve worked with software developers who do a terrible job with hardware, and hardware developers who do a terrible job with software. Best I can tell, it’s a problem that’s existed since we started making computers.
In some ways, I think it’s arrogance. The rockstar software developer believes that software is infinitely more complex than the hardware it runs on. The ninja EE believes that software is trivial. And they both assume that they can effectively do each others’ jobs.
The only example I have is the LibreComputer S905X based board - it took years of work with a small team to get the kernel changes upstreamed. Hell, look at the Raspberry Pi - I think mainline support is pretty recent.
Some Flippers have an i.MX6 running Kali Linux, but they do seem like completely different products.
Many more radios, but many fewer buttons and pixels.
It's nice that we have so many options for tiny computers these days, but sooner or later, someone is going to have to find something useful to do with them.
The UI and developer experience has never gotten quite good enough to drive a market the size of smartphones or laptops, so...what are we doing here? Is it time to acknowledge that the masses don't particularly want general-purpose computing machines? That there isn't much of a market for anything that isn't plug-and-play? That's a depressing thought.
> someone is going to have to find something useful to do with them
Looking at that pocket pc website... If that usb c port could drive a display it might be interesting to dock that thing and get a full desktop experience. Then take your work with you when you are ready to go mobile. On buses and trains or other places where it might be clumsy to use a laptop.
I guess this was a thing many people have fantasized about for a long time but nobody has really made practical. I guess laptops, phones and tablets being separate entities is good enough.
Not sure why you're getting downvoted, you're dead on.
I just finished routing an LPDDR4 bus (high speed + low voltage => worst case signal integrity) between two BGAs with signals routed on only 3 layers. The catch is that you need each high speed bus to be comfortably sandwiched between solid copper planes. Layers dedicated to reference planes start to add up quite quickly when you've got RAM, eMMC, ethernet, wifi, camera input, display output, SD card, etc all crossing over and through each other.
Crazy, I know. Investing in difficult R&D problems to produce a quality product is not a good business model. It's so much easier to churn out a working devkit and ask for pull requests.
Sorry for the snark and pessimism, but that's what happens when you keep getting burned. This statement does not inspire confidence:
>Finally, to ensure that Pocket P.C. has great software support out of the box, we have requested embedded development help from the community.
Why is software always an afterthought with these projects? Especially a project like this, which has clearly seen an enormous amount of effort put into the hardware design.