Martin Braham, one of the key developers of the distribution postmarketos, announced about leaving Communities pine64 , which creates open devices, due to the concentration of the project on one specific distribution instead of supporting the ecosystem from various distributions working on software glass .
Initially, Pine64 used a strategy for delegating software filling for its devices to the Linux distributions for its devices and formed the Pinephone smartphone, supplied with different distributions. Last year, it was decided to use the default Manjaro distribution and stop the formation of individual editions of the Pinephone Community Edition in favor of the development of Pinephone as a holistic platform that offers the basic reference environment.
According to Martin, such a change in the development strategy violated the balance in the community of developers of software filling for Pinephone. Previously, all its participants performed on equal terms and, as far as their capabilities, jointly developed a general software platform. For example, Ubuntu Touch developers did a lot of work on initial deployment on new equipment, the Mobian project prepared a glass for telephony, and Postmarketos was engaged in a glass for supporting the camera.
Manjaro Linux mainly closed on himself and was engaged in the accompanying existing packages and the use of already created developments for his own assembly, without making a noticeable contribution to the development of a common program stack, which could be useful for other distributions. Manjaro also was criticized for inclusion in the assembly of changes that are not yet recognized as ready for users with the main projects.
Having received the status of the primary assembly of Pinephone, the Manjaro distribution not only remained the only distribution that receives financial support from the Pine64 project, but also began to have a disproportionate large impact on the development of Pine64 products and decisions in the ecosystem associated with them. In particular, technical decisions in Pine64 are often made only taking into account the needs of Manjaro, properly not taking into account the wishes and needs of other distributions. For example, in the Pinebook Pro device, the Pine64 project ignored the needs of the remaining distributions and refused to use the SPI Flash and the Tow-Boot universal bootloader, which are necessary for equivalent support for different distributions and excluding the binding to Manjaro U-boot.