I never said they didn't include SPI, it took an incredibly amount of arguing over several weeks to get it there on the PPP, then they again didn't want to ship it on the PBP. In the end the PBP does have SPI but still didn't ship with something flashed to it.
While they did in the end listen and add SPI _after_ manjaro finally agreed. that doesn't mean they listened to the whole community. Ofcourse PINE64 and Manjaro don't have to deal with how the other distributions boot.
Well the issue with this happening in private telegram channels is that this will now turn into a "he said" "they said" situation, none of this happened publicly and neither side can provide sources. At the time the argument was definitely not that the chips weren't available.
Instead of delaying the PPP production by one day to get U-Boot sorted they decided to not ship mainline U-Boot at all. Which was only possible because Manjaro provided them with an image to ship with that.
In the end the only response there is is a blog post that never claims anything is wrong or should happen differently, after acknowledging all that I've done.
I only wrote why I left, that they themselves think they're manjaro focussed because the hardware that can't ship Linux doesn't ship manjaro doesn't change that this whole behind the scenes situation really burned me out, and I left.
You have every right to leave, and obviously if you're feeling burnt out, you made the right call for yourself. But it is frustrating that it seems like a distro preference issue has expanded into what will probably end up selling more proprietary phones at the end of the day.
I never understood why the PinePhone does not ship with Mobian or PostmarketOS instead of Manjaro. Manjaro quickly felt buggy and fragile on the first minutes I tried it, while the two others felt more robust. I'd rather see the PinePhone ship with one of these distributions.
Why does Pine64 favor Manjaro so much? What do they gain by doing so?
They ship devices with a completely broken OS[1], I could never recommend their products to anyone, except maybe someone who is a technical type and comfortable going through the process of installing another distro + happy to spend time doing that.
[1] At least as of a couple of months ago. I'm talking basic functionality being broken, like for example trying to add an icon to the home screen and the phone crashes. I encountered multiple bugs in just the first few minutes of usage.
To be fair, I had a very similar experience on my very first minutes with an iPhone on one of the .0 iOS releases. So many glitches and broken things, even on the onboarding process, many of them reliably reproducible. That said, when I grabbed that iPhone the next time and updated it a few minor releases further, most of them were fixed.
the difference is that there were perfectly good distros for the PinePhone, but then it was decided to start shipping it with a half-baked one. It's as if Apple went back from those later iOS releases to the earlier one.
The original "Why I left Pine64" article adds more info about what went on.
While they did in the end listen and add SPI _after_ manjaro finally agreed. that doesn't mean they listened to the whole community. Ofcourse PINE64 and Manjaro don't have to deal with how the other distributions boot.