Joshua Riek Appreciation Thread

#1

So if you don’t know him. He is maintaining ubuntu-rockchip project. He has done a lot to make rockchip platform usable.

This forum is full of my x is not working so this is the end of the world because i am the most important person in the world type of topics.

So let’s appreciate 1 thing that it made your life better.

I start.

  1. I used the kernel he was maintaining, it was super awesome, i did not need to maintain wonky things.
  2. He is also maintaining one of the few rockchip-kernel repo that does not make you feel like you owe him something. That’s why i was comfortable sending him patches.

PS: sorry about the pronouns if i misuse them…

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#2

Yes, we know Joshua, We appreciate what he’s doing, he’s doing a great job, and we alse sending him patches.

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#3

I found that the SBC vendors always sent Joshua new boards, but ignored what his actual needs were in development. Especially the Rockchip’s Redmine issue board he mentioned. Without it, you can’t know the issues that Rockchip has logged and how to mitigate them, forcing Joshua to deal with some problems that he can’t handle on his own, especially about hardware details. Only Rockchip engineers and customers who have access to Redmine can know those.

Is there nothing Radxa can do about this situation either?

I’ve been trying to get in contact with Rockchip for a very long time now, all of the vendors I have talked to have not been able to assist me. I need access to the latest SDKs directly from Rockchip and access to their Redmine issue board as 75% of all reported issues on GitHub are problems with the Rockchip SDK. It’s very hard for me to maintain this project and support new hardware when I do not have the support or tools that I need.

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#4

While Joshua’s work is really incredible and deserves utmost appreciation and recognition, I just wanted to make a comment about this part.

These SBCs are still Radxa’s commercial product. You can’t really blame paying customers for expecting advertised features to work. Had they at least been officially marked as: “work-in-progress” or “limited support”, or had a disclaimer that “some features are SoC manufacturer dependent” on the main website and product pages in stores, then such complaints would indeed be baseless. But that’s an if. There’s no such disclaimers anywhere and not everybody is fully aware of how things work in this field. I don’t think you realize how small of a minority developers, Linux experts and embedded experts are (it’s easy to miscalculate since they tend to concentrate in such forums). It’s not the matter of egocentrism or narcissism, it’s the matter of managing expectations, and I think you’re gonna agree that Linux-related communities do a really bad job in that department.

Besides, if something is “community maintained”, then it’s most likely lacking and unreliable - with the rare exception of what Joshua has achieved. With all due respect for the knowledge and skills of the community, if there’s no financial incentive and structural support for the efforts, and the efforts are not properly organized, then there’s no reason for anybody to do more work than they simply feel like doing (talking about developers and maintainers).

Now, I’m no expert either, but I do believe that more clarity and transparency about these things is crucial for the future.

In any case, I’m proud I was one of Joshua’s GitHub supporters for a few months. Though, it’s a shame that there are things that no amounts of money can buy or fix.

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#5

I just know this. Joshua did a great job and he did not contact us for his trouble. We will contact him to check if he is willing to receive our help.

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#6

Hopefully it’s not too late. In the long run, this will benefit the Radxa brand and all Rockchip-based SBC ecosystems.

Linux experts may not care about what distro to use, because they can build their own kernel and image. But the Ubuntu image is the first choice for many novice users, and the out-of-the-box experience it provides is better than the Debian image provided by the vendor to some extent.

This experience is exactly what the competitor Raspberry Pi is proud of, although their RPi OS also uses BSP and contains a lot of non-upstream code.

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#7

Exactly! And I know that a lot of people here hate Raspberry Pi, but - like it or not - the market is not an isolated environment and there will always be comparisons. And the end result matters just as much - if not more - than the way it was achieved.

In the end, things will only get better once both sides of the coin are acknowledged.

By the way - what do you guys believe?

Will the RK3588 become supported in mainline? If so, will that make building distros for it easier and provide reliability and good out-of-the-box experience?

#8

guys, lets focus, we are ruthlessly appreciating Joshua here :slight_smile: that’s the focus

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#9

Will the RK3588 become supported in mainline? If so, will that make building distros for it easier and provide reliability and good out-of-the-box experience?

If RK3588 in the upstream is fully supported in the future, it will also requires individuals or teams like Joshua to maintain an Ubuntu image builder and the corresponding APT repo (for maintaining hotfixes and things specific to the Rockchip platforms).

Otherwise you have to negotiate with Canonical and possibly pay a maintenance fee to get your SBC certified and be able to download the image directly from the Ubuntu official website.


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#11

I think Joshua is a grown man and can decide however to help or just to contribute for himself or others in the proccess. The level of hypocrisy in the idea of him avoiding to help us just because of vendors is retarded.
If it wasnt for vendors we woudnt even get this nice adventure that lead joshuas to contribute for the communities.

I appreciate his work but I dont see how quitting it and blaming rockchip is anything relevant.

If linux is this then no wonder Windows is better…
Fuck me… one down everyone is bitching about the end of the world by the way ? Where is Igor specky to claim a burguer donation for the help of the devs ? @igorp I summon u ! Shazam this thing just say armbian aint dying with our help $

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#12

Hi There,
I want to use this opportunity to thank Joshua Riek again for his nice work and want to wish him all the best for the future. :slight_smile:

The current status of the project is here: https://github.com/Joshua-Riek/ubuntu-rockchip/discussions/1104

I also want to thank all other contributers and great minds! It’s hard to maintain a complex software / hardware-project and the social side of things won’t make it easier these days…

For me Rock5b replaced my x86 server and I have learned a lot working with the boards :slight_smile: I only use them for my personal enjoyment but I can understand that people not familiar with the board will have a mixed experience. (for now). The #1 reason for choosing the board was and still is that it’s open source and I can do whatever I want with it with a comparable performance.

Have a good day all!

#14

That’s… terrible… I guess I can see now why almost nobody does that.

Of course the most arrogant guy across all SBC forums had to come here… I think you should re-join your kin in the Armbian forum and stay there…

Agreed.

Only thanks to him I replaced my desktop with a 5B+, reducing power consumption. After I figured out how to get Widevine going in Chromium, I also made a 5C into a media player for my TV. I’m also working on a futuristic-style control panel for IoT and next I’ll be getting into robotics projects.

Sure, the final result - which is Ubuntu Rockchip - is a collective work of many, many individuals, but Joshua enabled the hardware to be used to its max potential by putting the pieces together and fixing all that was wrong or missing, and that’s really amazing. I don’t know how much low level development on the elements like the kernel or drivers he’s done individually, but supposedly a lot.

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#15

Take a look at Parol6! It was nice building it. Cartesian jog can’t handle singularities currently in vendor software but it’s still working great and looks good. And it can be controlled with rock5b, too.

#16

@darkevilpt nobody asked you for your judgmental drivel.

I appreciate Joshua as he tried to make Rockchip boards actually broadly usable and showed that it can be done. Thanks to him, we know that it’s a conscious decision by Rockchip not to make it happen, as they surely have resources for at least a few “Joshuas”.

Fighting such a battle requires a lot of dedication. It requires skills, which he could use for his own profit but decided not to. And yeah armbian exists but Ubuntu is what a less experienced user may be most familiar with.

#17

Again? No I dont use armbian no I dont use other vendor forums apart from Khadas. U dont have any clue of what ure saying. If u were active on Discord since the launch of Rock 5B u would know that much and Yes I made a post about armbian just because I know that deep down its the only kernel everyone will use even Joshuas by the way. I do like armbian what I dont like is their cockyness about saying ’ Yous are just using our code therefore should support us or not use third party software but use our own only’ as if open source is a thing just for some. Plus other stupid stuff Ive read the fact they dont approve arch linux because… for some reason they dont… where they could be much more interesting and be ‘open’ but instead its just business as usual with them.

His adventure. As I read correctly him diving deep into the Ubuntu port for our boards was of his own where closed friends advised him to forget about it. I do recognise his work and respect him for it… about the other stuff I still don’t think its fair…

You said burnout we both know what is underneath that but… meh… Joshuas… wake up bro… seek help and come back to us.

Its not armbian fault… its just how the world works… same as for - for example the steam deck… theres this one… a few years they will be a next version… same as playstation xbox etc…
Sucks? yep… life goes on…

I should even judge more if U ask me. yeah lets open fire on the gang.

Joshuas is a great dev. He knows his stuff and made things possible. Kudos to you ma friend.
However you gotta sort your life first. Seek help come back later. Maybe when mainline gets out things will become easier.
Its shit you’re leaving… but… ubuntu is there on many platforms many systems and ported by so many that the fact that only one person was able to carry out this burden alone is indeed amazing and you did great for the community.

I said hypocrisy because there are more developers doing this. Its not just Joshua doing this amazing job and If anything Joshua… I think u should not give up at least not like this.

Keep at bay this is not the end of this game… Rad-A-xa will be making more boards and if like many here we do like the architecture in question then it would only make sense things prosper.

#18

This is supposed to be a Nice™ Thread, please stop…

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#19

Make love not Warcraft ( :fire: ) ( :fire: ) Life goes on. Enough of pettiness.

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#20

appreciate the post and bringing the issue to light. I will also say out of all the vendors that supply the rkchip. radxa is one of the most easiest to communicate with and open for feedback. I don’t think most of the concerns are issued directly to a particular vendor but the rock chip maker as a whole.

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#21

Why we need to go over this yet again? :frowning:

All of us know the reality about ARM linux support, kernel problems and all attempts to get things to work. It’s obvious that real money are needed to get all things to work and to do that correctly. I can’t realize how Joshua was able to support so many boards and was able to produce good releases. If You have job, family, kids - this is almost impossible to get involved that much. We all know about this.

Every big project will sooner or later grab trolls and frustrated individuals, this is thing that every open team need to address. Probably @geerlingguy mentioned about this in his video about Joshua. For sure toxic people needs to be thrown out from project, sometimes they helped a lot earlier, but they destroy other things. Sadly I can see here very similar comments, please calm down, and let’s focus how to help Joshua with his troubles.

For Rockchip forums, SDK etc. This is something that many users are not aware. I don’t track Joshua project and don’t know such details, hopefully there is something that can be done about that. On the other hand I’m sure that Rockchip don’t want to deal with random developers all over the world who can be toxic on their env. For sure Joshua made huge work for Rockchop and such people should be granted such access. Hopefully @jack will help here somehow.

Lastly - I hope for the best for Joshua - @Spooky , while I’m not using his releases I still hope for such good alternatives. If he can come back and maybe all this can trigger him to change several things - it would be awesome. Maybe he can build community around his project, ask for help regarding simple things or maybe change several things regarding project to get some help.

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#22

This is the most accurate statement in this thread and somehow has the least likes. Thank you for stating it. The more and more variants that come out for what is essential the same thing, the more this holds true and infact worsens. Its like selling a car and expecting the driver’s to manufacture the fuel, image of the ad for the car stated that.

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