I wish for years that this would some day come at least close.
I was donating to Joshua more then we get from this source.
We work on a side, cooperate with some vendors, invest our private time, savings to pay for your fun. Which you see as suffering for which we are guilty. So you don’t donate. Why would you - support is crap, unfinished, constantly breaking …
I am sure most of ordinary users have no clue how much time and money is lost for each release, example. And when we make a release, there is zero impact on donations. Donations does not pay anything, and still, nothing. It is deeply frustrating.
All armbian images up to whatever versions or recent boards yous adopt still only recognizes usb wifi N pen drives… its the 21 century… wifi AC isnt still a firmware/driver known to armbian… wifi N only… because some devs still think plugged ethernet cables and cobalt banking systems is the ‘wey’ of… the devil…
I mean… couldnt armbian at least do a bit better since support for most wifi usb pen drives is out there ? it had to be joshuas to implement them but then armbian does nothing to adopt them and keep them for every new version/board yatta yatta yatta…
I mean… its these little things of which… leave us pretty much behind a good ‘Thank you Armbian here ! Take my money your software is Sharp!’ instead its a… ‘you do us a favour grab our software port it yourself then we claim we did on our blog news and thats it’.
This hyprocrisy sometimes… its what I fear armbian specially you Igor should overcome.
I cant complain too much about things not working with Armbian that wasnt my total issue. It was indeed some of those ports that armbian makes or adopts from their non certified collaborators that do some images on the side but then dont mantain much where said images bricks the system after an sudo apt update… I mean… people can report that happens… what will armbian do in that regard? expect donations? Hell nah.
Regarding to @dominik
If said toxic people includes myself all I have to say is… what I probably have said before… I hate changes of heart… all of sudden everyone hates rockchip and radxa and claims rk3588 is a pain in the ass… right when they were getting those toys for free and for ‘developing purposes’ plus the early birds and pre released lucky roulletes nobody ever said anything bad about this and everyone was hyped and everyone was happy. Everyone found ways of tweaking it / hacking it and making it work on what nobody knew possible… steam android kodi codecs widevine netflix yatta yatta yatta now… that to me most of that has been done and… suffice to say the hardware is good and works despite whatever changes of heart people are all having.
I would keep this argument… if to kill my vibe rockchip werent going rogue on the ‘closing the open sourced’ chips to third party vendors due to War we all know about …
Yes. But in that case we need to drop supporting entire vendor or some kernel, like Rockchip. One vendor we dropped about a year ago and we could significantly improve userspace, mainly this. There is still a lot of work, but remember that financing is 99% from our pockets … Users obviously don’t care or need any of this.
But you (users) killed him in the process, didn’t you?
I don’t understand what you mean by that. Armbian has the best support for wireless drivers since early days. Many 3rd party USB dongles are build into the kernel directly, without the need of manual driver compilation.
Yes. This is one of the defense mechanisms to preserve sanity. Apologize, but there is no other way to survive constant seek for attention and problem solving requests from users side. You might have a slight feeling what I am talking about, 90% of people doesn’t. Or they don’t care. And this has to manifest somehow / somewhere.
I dont think you understood what I meant by ‘doing a bit better’. U think u should drop rockchip support for not doing things right because of their fault into supporting your devs such as Joshua that wasnt what I was thinking and the fact u can just almost ‘trigger’ a scary move of… ‘we could and we wouldnt care about yous’ as if ‘yous would be the ones crying later on’ because ‘we are possibly the best option for yous’ means nothing to me.
If you cant do it dont. But since u do it and keep doing it at least learn from mistakes. Not even all these devs works for you mister Igor. They do contribute and some see armbian as the best framework for sure. But not all do it for the love of the armbian arms.
Some do fall into your pockets for sure. But…
What I mean was regarding the wifi firmware/drivers which by the way to answer your other reply saying yous support them since early days well… If we take the khadas edge 2 approach for instance… when released it took ages for armbian to get that soldered wifi to work didnt it ? and not even monka got the bt working only joshua did if im not mistaken later on… So in order to pass by I had to buy a set of usbs from wifi n to bg ac ax and from wifi 4 5 6 6e usbs to test about which one worked… to find out that only wifi N worked… which has really low reach luckily I had the router beside my monitor to help those updates from happening…
I said khadas edge 2… radxa cm5 is the same and many others even the orange pi zero 3w and so long…
Most of those boards running their latest armbian software the system dont even recognizes the more classic wifi 5 usb driver free pen drives.
To say usb wifi pen drives I mean… its just an example. Other stuff probably is in failure too but I find internet the most important one specially with the raise on these sbc technologies these days being them done mostly with soldered chips and what not… I think we can agree that this is the tech we like and we want to see thrive so its my criticism to the fact that armbian ‘wants all the new’ vendor products to be supported yet each fork comes out with the lack of support that was added for some other boards… if the wifi from khadas edge 2 is now supported why the same ‘driver/firmware’ isnt available for future boards? even from other vendors ? why reconstructing the wheel from scratch each time? Why only wifi N is still the base of the framework and not everything else that was achieved so far?
Then there is the mainline paid collabora of fun that serves as an excuse for all.
But again… armbian could be a bit better.
Me ? us ? or is that your excuse to leave things in this lame way we find ourselfs in?
I will reinforce my statement on how I find this thread a massive lack of respect for Joshua.
He did a good job yet you blame it on us users for him giving up. He is a grown up and can return at any time he doesnt own us nothing and he wasnt forced to do anything by us he did it because perharps u paid him remember ? U just wrote it down u ‘donated’ him a cash load more than what ure given by everyone else who pays your armbian so think twice and perharps contemple the fact ure included into that self auto destruction of the devs.
From his statements he made clear he did all these accomplishments with the help of the current tech specially as we know Ai which helped multiplying the saved good current state of the kernels to more boards and finding and fixing issues was something he was endorsing on doing from what I understood on his own. Just to read now u paid him for it… and blaming me for his burnt out is a joke right ?
Fair. Guess ure not 100% evil just… ‘human’ like everyone else… admiting that sometimes isnt bad. Again I want armbian to get better and go easy on everyone. If anything I cant complain about is being ‘rejected’ Ive always found someone with an answer even if one I couldnt handle the task myself. Im not an hypocrit to go blind on things here. I know people have families and the thing is … ARM boards depends on armbian we like it or not. Its just the lack of better quality or some patterns… and not being specific complicates things but also everyone has their personal lifes to handle and I get it.
Money wise people cant all act up like they will be rich over open source tech specially from linux. Because this is the permise of how things got bad and We have never seen Joshua speaking openly about it till ‘now’. I think if that was the case he could have done so way before all this big massive developments he did so far.
To just talk when money was needed beyond chance for repair isnt the true reason imo.
The way linux works is:
‘Look at me im smart I can make copies of debian arch ubuntu alpine etc etc now im gonna make the bananaOS’.
Which will get released with 1 more feature all others dont have. But then all others adopt that feature and bananaOS goes into the void receiving no more updates feature and dying completly forgotten… I remember news saying EndeauvorOS had stopped ARM support not long ago… then came back for the rpi5… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ linux of convenience. Luckily we cant complain about this from armbian.
My point being is that: Other that work-about things theres those ‘evil corps’ that like to use this in their advantage to profit… donate or we die / donate or we do / donate or wont happen. To make it worst if you donate it neither happens or gets done…
The real advantage of Joshua was that he done it because it was easy and he liked it and he used the ubuntu approach right because he knows the feelings armbian puts on people for being not as ‘good corp’ that we know about.
Now I get it… armbian fixed rockchip kernel for the boards. While rochchip fake kernel is still that cliche of the asians… half way brokenish pretty lazyishly done good ribbon good luck yatta yatta yatta requiring an guru to rewritte all the coding having that guru to have time to do so… free time he is spending unpaid… and to put it in the company perspective and having his family to second we all are wild young and free but… we all need food and well deserved respect for our work.
Its the base ground for all programmers …
I still remember bosses expecting you to turn their shitty retail web pages into amazon pages to make better sales than bezos paying you minimum wages to do so and shouting at you for deadlines…
Just hold my beer on that… because… we all adquired an sbc because we like computers and we were learning with it… we never forced anyone to do development like a slave did we? So why put this idea all the time on us ? Things go and they have to go. People do it because they love it.
They do more if theres money for it. Joshua did it because maybe he benefitted from it. Then he gave up and gave us a reason and thats it. Blaming others for it… its just the reason this should stop.
Work we do with resources we have is generating emotional and financial black hole. This hole is not getting smaller, respect and donations are just a small patch.
One can not expand operations if there is complete lack of funding from people that use those services. If we want to start project X, we have to kill project Y. In order to support board X, we need to kill support for board Y. But this is not unique to Armbian but to entire open source community. There is common illusion of endless resources, endless time and that this is our technical depth we must work on. There is very little people that can afford and are willing to sacrifice their private time / life for common good. Those people, when exposed, are quickly pushed to the very edge. It is not possible to do it better and nobody should expect anything from them. But people does. And they never stops. I keep getting emails round the clock with all sorts of technical questions. I and the project is dead in two months if we allow you to control our private time and tell us what and when we should do …
Ain’t personal. This goes beyond. Hope, but also greed and illusion … is in human nature. Marketing is using this to drive you into software perfection (even you don’t need it). This is analyse of what happened. I am only sad that I couldn’t prevent this. Our project lost important contributor and I can’t express this sadness as I am aware of how rare such people are.
It is, but all others are the same. Popularity is danger and costly in our world. Industry will abuse us / them, users will abuse them … and respect itself does not pay any bills, while they are keep coming. Emotional and financial. Most people have no clue and will never understand the sacrifice open source developers does. If they don’t understand, its is impossible to expect respect. Lack of understanding lead to humiliation. Imagine doing good for people but they will still spit on you. I have seen this too many times. Others won’t change.
You need to step into his (our) shoes in order to understand this.
Constant pressure and constant stress was not self inflicted problem. I don’t blame anyone. This is how people function and I don’t expect that community will take responsibility for that. It was his decision as a grown man … yeah, right.
When you are over the head with technical problems, there is no time for any interaction, sometimes not even to satisfy basic human needs such as sleeping and eating. Many engineers experienced something like that several times in their life. Its a great joy developing things and make people happy, but this can’t take forever. People will always asks for more. And more. And more … and they will not understand how a person can’t anymore.
Don’t worry about that. You are 99.5% away from covering what you get now. Donations does not pay for the work, ever. We do Armbian as its fun. If you want that we develop something … this is open source, do it, make a PR, finance it, hire people that will do something for everyone. And Armbian is not any exception in this. If you want that this is done by EndavourARM team, finance them.
Just to be clear those afirmations are yours not his I doubt he had done it to please everyones requests the same way I believe he was happily colaborating with the devs who were making their own versions of linux having him as a good teacher for some insights.
In my defence I havent done such thing apart from one particular request of which he denied. Everything he has done was always in colaboration with other skilled linux users.
While everything on the Microsoft Windows spins properly due to the full support and aplication options out there…
Users here still struggle to find the best arm linux alternative to have that sweat spot on sbcrs.
We use it because we like it yet it doesnt work as we want it. More over it does to some with lots of shortcuts. Our only hope of ever enjoying a system with no hassle is collabora at some point in time for sure.
Absolutely, they are mine. But I have experienced something very similar as he did.
Absolutely. He was maintaining Rockchip kernel with us as this is the only public Rockchip kernel fork that is maintained and includes all vendors. Our support was always identical on kernel level, while our desktop, which people judge, is just vanilla, waiting for someone to focus doing just that. We would do more, if we could …
They are doing this for money (Rockchip is not involved) and they are gone the day contract ends. When this happens, it features will work until next major kernel bump, then its again down to community to keep this operational … which will again be supported by nobody.
This is Linux. Hassle free does not exists even in Intel world. There is always something …
Honestly, it’s a bit surprising you’re constantly nagging about this. Open source means noone has to pay you but they can’t expect anything from you either. Whatever you put in is your decision and usually you have an advantage in your main job’s pay by working on a prestigious open source project on the side. If you feel burned out by it too, maybe you should step back a little? It’s your health and well being after all and you don’t owe us anything (and neither do we owe you). Have a good evening and thanks for Armbian.
I am repeating common shame, and most direct answer to this thread. That we don’t forget the most obvious reason:
People that does the coding, pay. With their time, expertise, patience, family relations, connections, kindness, health, …
Yes, a few % of people people certainly have such motives / advantages. And still prestigious open source projects can not rely just on CV boost seeking people. And project does not run only with developers.
Regardless of contributors motives, the burned and frustrated users will always produce (mass) blackmailing, emotional blackmailing and similar. This hit very hard if you reach star status. As in this case. And our case.
Don’t worry, I am fine. Our services will remain on the same level. Thank you for your support or lack of it and thank you for asking.
@igorp Let’s be honest. Almost no open-soruce is user-oriented.
Sorry to sound harsh, but you should stop lying to yourselves.
You can’t talk about a lack of user donations if what you actually do isn’t user-oriented at all.
Be honest and acknowledge that Armbian is entirely developer-oriented. It’s a set of development tools with experimental testing enviornments. It’s a software development initiative, not a distro, and not something that can or should be used.
Not only that, but it’s also a very closed and unfriendly social circle with main contributors guarding every shred of knowledge and information, except for the source code itself.
If it’s so hard and expensive to continue working, why not just close the project? Move everything completely over to GitHub, call it what it really is, and focus purely on kernel/driver/etc. -related contributions. No users to deal with, many times less money to lose, better results for everyone?
As for my own experiences, I haven’t been able to boot 95% of the available images. The last 5% either do not give any video output at all, or they give broken output, which makes it impossible to go past the initial configurations. I’ve kept coming back to check and it’s been like that for the past 3 years. The forum being filled with “fix it yourself” responses. So what even is the point?
As he put it… it leads to depression burn outs and other misleading problems in life… attending to everyones problems in particular those who dont pay a big mac to them teams of individuals who spend their personal open source lifes developing cough copy pasting cough the working mainframe to newer devices.
Now… without kidding… We get it… Its what it is… If it was me on thst position I would probably prefer for someone with said board to find whats broken and PR it to ‘us’ armbian myself other than cutting that ramification entirely… ‘knowing’ that armbian is doing it for free so no strings attached. Its just the… whinning over donations and contributions that should be avoidable. Armbian cant cry over no returns since their project is sitting on open source linux.
But anyways… The post is indeed to let Spookey Hoookey know that we feel him… He did so much for these vendors Radxa mostly and rockchip turning us all down is just bad news.
I love my niche little Rad-Axa CM5 with the waveshare cm4-nano-C wished radxa built a cm5 nano board themselves with upgraded hdmi ports etc … but they seem not interested atm and now we are loosing joshuas and some other devs who suddenly had a change of heart regarding rockchips… I would criticise that untill rockchip made ‘almost’ clear that they are closing its chips to some vendors.
Joshua u did good mate… just… fuck it… give it sometime.
Stop giving Igor shit, if you were in his place, you would have the same emotions. I learned the hard way on my own and his frustrations are completely valid as I share them myself.
@Spooky First of all - glad to see you back again, even if for a short moment. I hope you’re doing well.
I don’t know how much of your work is based on Armbian contributions, but there’s one major difference between your work and theirs, when it comes to the final result.
Ubuntu Rockchip is amazing and works perfectly. Armbian doesn’t even work at the bare minimum level.
And that’s why I would never, ever get involved in anything that’s community based and for free. And at the same time it’s also the reason why I supported your work as much as I could.
Believe me, I understand your frustrations. Of course they are valid. I’m just saying the whole thing is multidimensional.
I’m not trying to give anyone shit. But I think open-source communities must acknowledge one thing. There are only two states of being that could exist here. There should either be full support for an initiative or no support at all. Before you misunderstand me and get angry - I only mean that in-between states only hurt the ones, who are the most involved. So either the “business model” of Armbian should be overhauled, or the whole thing should be dropped (or reduced from a larger scale project into something smaller), because it puts unnecessary strain on the contributors. And that strain also translates to the final result. Nobody is obligated to keep going if it only hurts them in the end.
I don’t know how this thread went past me but I’m just here to show appreciation to everything Joshua has done for the community and not argue if his approach or armbians is better etc.
Thanks to Joshua’s work I was able to get my Rock5B running stable when other images struggled with USB-C PD issues in the first place else who knows when I would’ve given up on RK3588. Since then I learnt a lot (to the point I maintain the Rock5B+ on Armbian) and appreciate everybody that contributes in any form be it source code or knowledge etc.
and I can’t express this sadness as I am aware of how rare such people are.
Hope ure better. Dont give up.
Ubuntu Rockchip is amazing and works perfectly.
Armbian doesn’t even work at the bare minimum level.