I was downvoted before for suggesting the Pinetab is not a viable Android or iPad replacement. That thing doesn’t even have a working wifi driver yet, you have to plug in a dongle just to connect to wifi. I’d love to have good smart devices running Linux one day, but we’re not there yet.
Good to know that there is now a testing branch for a wifi driver. That wasn’t the case when I wrote the original comment I was talking about. Still, this took almost a year of selling a tablet with no working wifi. There is inconvenience and then there is a product just being in an unfinished, effectively unusable state. I don’t really see how having no wifi driver is “freedom”. The freedom to code my own driver? I guess, but that doesn’t make for an actually usable device.
Still many people bought the thing, because they wanted the freedom of GNU/Linux. They were willing to sacrifice something to get it. Sometimes that’s what you have to do. Pine64 makes the hardware and does not contribute to the software development. That sucks, but there is nothing we can do about it, since they don’t have a lot of competition.
I was downvoted before for suggesting the Pinetab is not a viable Android or iPad replacement. That thing doesn’t even have a working wifi driver yet, you have to plug in a dongle just to connect to wifi. I’d love to have good smart devices running Linux one day, but we’re not there yet.
I think you are talking about the recent Pinetab 2 and it seems that the situation has changed: https://www.reddit.com/r/PINE64official/comments/1akjlwu/tutorial_wifi_and_bluetooth_on_pinetab_2/?rdt=46684
The goal of GNU/Linux has never been convenience, but freedom.
Good to know that there is now a testing branch for a wifi driver. That wasn’t the case when I wrote the original comment I was talking about. Still, this took almost a year of selling a tablet with no working wifi. There is inconvenience and then there is a product just being in an unfinished, effectively unusable state. I don’t really see how having no wifi driver is “freedom”. The freedom to code my own driver? I guess, but that doesn’t make for an actually usable device.
Still many people bought the thing, because they wanted the freedom of GNU/Linux. They were willing to sacrifice something to get it. Sometimes that’s what you have to do. Pine64 makes the hardware and does not contribute to the software development. That sucks, but there is nothing we can do about it, since they don’t have a lot of competition.