You’re right, about not being kind, sort of.
I fully support the efforts of the Umbrel folks. They’re a great team doing hard work, and they deserve to be congratulated. But, at the same time, when they did the transition from 0.5 to 1.0 THEY made a BIG deal about supporting RPi 5 as an awesome feature. But, in fact, their support is partial only.
When RPi 5 came out one of the MAJOR enhancements from RPi 4 was the addition of the PCI connector and support for NVMe. It was a significant reason to move to RPi 5 from RPi 4. Umbrel did not (and still doesn’t) caveat their implementation for RPi 5 at all. If they’d disclosed that their support for RPi 5 did not include support for PCI connected devices then I’d have ZERO complaints. And their support for USB3 based SSDs is a crap shoot right now (hence all the different failing enclosures).
I specifically went out, when they said that 1.0 would support RPi 5 was released, and purchased a RPi 5 with PCI/NVMe hat, a 2 TB SSD, case, etc so that I could install and use their very nice looking UmbrelOS 1.0 on that specific hardware.
And it’s not just that I did that…it’s that when any development team that has been around for awhile, and should therefore know better, is vague and/or misleading, they lose community trust.
I actually want them to succeed! But when you’re trying to expand and build a “product”, which I understand is that they’re doing by releasing 1.0 and stating it’s a “complete redesign from the ground up”, and also introducing a platform “Application store”, then you have to be transparent as to what you’re actually delivering.
I’ll be delighted if Umbrel simply publishes a prerequisites list that shows what they actually support. Easy enough I’d think, and done by most other communities I’ve participated in. I do a lot of work on ESP32/NodeMCU/LORA/Arduino micros and almost every library/package that is pushed has a “here’s what we’ve tested on and here’s what we know doesn’t work” document.
Umbrel currently shows “Run umbrelOS on a Raspberry Pi 4 or Pi 5 in just a few clicks. No technical skills required.”, and “Install anywhere else, Arriving in April 2024.” on their public page.
Do you believe “Install anywhere else, Arriving in April 2024.”? Do you have any idea when 1.1 will be out or if it will support NVMe boot, or just NVMe as a secondary drive?
Sorry to be less than “kind” but it would take 10 minutes to actually document what they support right now, and be transparent about it.
The other thing that is disappointing is that with all the discussions about this particular topic, they won’t post a reply that lays out the issues and what their plan is. There are numerisou other postings on this site that get replies within minutes of being posted, so they are obviously watching (hello guys) what’s happening here, but they are specifically not responding. Why?
