A few months ago, while testing ChatGPT, it occurred to me to say "I am selling you a PineTab Early adopter", also known as 1 or original. He gave me the roll of "Like artificial intelligence...» and I told him that it was not worth much if all the developers of operating systems were abandoning it. But he insisted that no, that there are still people who will value that pinetab… Well, I can only disagree, and more after one of the latest posts from postmarketOS on Mastodon.
The problem, which I have already read on different forums, was that the original PineTab did not sell very well. The people who bought it back in the day are not enough for someone to waste time developing for it. In the Manjaro ARM forums they even said that they were releasing images without even having one to test, long before they stopped supporting it. The one who seemed to be holding on was postmarket OS, but they have surrendered to the evidence and are also going to abandon the maintenance of the first pineapple tablet.
Ubuntu Touch would be the only option for the original PineTab
Months ago we could test Mobian and Arch Linux, but both a (over a year ago) as the other (mid 2022) they gave up long ago. There was a project that could give some hope, that of GloDroid, which would at least allow us to turn the PineTab into an Android device, but You can't work for such a small group of users, and even less if they do not have any device on which to test.
So the theory says that the only option left is Ubuntu Touch, the system it came with. It will be difficult, since they have the same problem as the rest of the developers: why bother if hardly anyone uses it? I would have an answer: because they decided to launch the product. It never got past anything in beta, and it doesn't speak highly of either UBports or PINE64.
Soon they will release the PineTab 2, with much better hardware and at a higher price. And from here I can only say that it is worth watching the development from the sidelines. Having a tablet with Linux that allows us to use a distribution in a small size sounds great, but acting as a guinea pig is not so good. For my part, I am going to offer mine to ChatGPT again…
It's one of the problems of "Startup culture" The concept of minimum viable product sounds great on paper and is very useful if you are the company, but early adapters are often hurt.
Anyway, Pablinux Are you a free software user or what? Why don't you follow in Linus' footsteps and make your own operating system?
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