[cat_plus_plus]

I have no ties to these people, but say after a pandemic and recession, a corner restaurant raises prices, drops your favorite dish and the rest come in smaller portions and don't taste as good. Would you shout that they let community down and demand an apology, or would you just accept that running a small business is hard and many don't make it, or fail to cater to any customer. Non-Android Linux phone is already a niche, your own distro is niche of a niche, like vegan gluten free keto dishes. Maybe they just can't figure out how to pay for such support rather than being malicious jerks? Even tech giants drop features all the time

[mpol]

Sure, the restaurant will change. But suppose the cooks are volunteers. You need them to make anything usable out of the food that was bought from the wholesaler.

What if, like Pine64, the restaurant only supports, communicates and negotiates with a few volunteers who serve the dish but not prepare it. All while not supporting, communicating and negotiating with the cooks in the kitchen. And now the cooks in the kitchen run away, what is there left to serve? Only ready made dishes, but no new dishes. And what will happen to the restaurant?

The Pine64 community makes the software. Manjaro only serves it to the enduser but doesn't help building it. Current devices are somewhat supported, new devices have big question marks hanging above them.

[cat_plus_plus]

Volunteer kitchens also close all the time. But a lot of times an appropriate response is to start your own volunteer kitchen and try to sustain it better long term rather than yelling at founders of the failing one who may simply not have time or resources. Especially if they gave you a lot of free recipes so that you don't have to figure everything out from scratch.

[voakbasda]

This happened with one of our favorite restaurants. Our last meal there (post-pandemic) was half as good and twice the price. They lost our business, because they no longer provide sufficient value.

Given these recent events, I see the same thing happening with Pine64. They have lost their way, and my interest in their products has evaporated.

An “open” hardware platform approaches worthlessness without a viable ecosystem of software that can support it, and their choice to create a monoculture has diminished that possibility too much for me to ignore.