| Ok, I'll respond point by point: 1. No it isn't. AFAICT The on-board Mali chipset needs a binary driver for full functionality. Lima's not there yet. I had a quick look at the mali package for 4.4 and it's shipping a binary, not source as part of the debian source package. There are also still issues with crypto acceleration and other areas that aren't accessible through F/LOSS. 2. Full fat Debian is heavy because it uses a full libc instead of uclibc. If you want to see what non-full-fat looks like check out LEDE or Angstrom. Running uclibc will result in lower memory usage and higher speeds. If I had the time I'd port LEDE as a target, but I don't. 4. Browsers browse the web. Firmware update tools update firmware. The two do not need to and should not mix. A secure way to get an OS on my device is to have a tool (for which I can download, verify and compile the source) that connects over a secure protocol to a site where I can download the OS and relevant signatures, verify these signatures, install the OS and verify the installation. Please don't conflate network crypto with hardware. The two are completely different things. 5. It's great that you don't have problems with completely different boards running packages on completely different Operating System implementations, but I'm talking about the CHIP, which runs it's own build of Debian and Debian packages. As for your comments about software support and whether it'll be wiped out, I feel like you're at least partially missing my point - the Pi ecosystem is a monoculture. It works extremely well from a community support perspective because of that monoculture but (as you highlighted) it's not without it's problems. For long term success, the CHIP needs to puncture that monoculture. I don't believe that it will reach that point. |
2. You've got space to work with, you are not limited in terms of space. Feature wise I and many others don't want to make the sacrifices [1] to use a smaller libc, I did it when developing an application on Angstrom using a BBB and I never ever want to do it again.
4. How would you get secure, verifiable images to people by default across every major platform? We all know 99% of the people who both the C.H.I.P. are NOT going to be bothered to verify the signatures by hand, and even then how do you ensure the signatures are from Next Thing Co? A Chrome Extension solves this.
[1] - http://www.etalabs.net/compare_libcs.html