Embrace PowerVR or not?

When looking at PowerVR devices in the community category,

• the N900 is on the way out (back to testing)
• the samsung-espresso3g was recently added

With the samsung-espresso3g, proprietary userspace blobs are needed for 3D acceleration. In fact, the power vr blobs are the only non-free userspace packages we have in pmaports. The rest of non-free packages is firmware. (Alpine is currently having a related discussion about non-free in tsc#23).

In order to use the samsung-espresso3g, a patched mesa and patched wlroots are needed. The patched mesa is currently packaged, the patched wlroots is not (the team decided against it). It doesn't make a good user experience of course, that besides the regular installation, you would need to figure out how to build the patched wlroots package, where to build it from, and then "sideload" it.

So I think we should make up our mind...

• was it a mistake to put samsung-espresso3g in community and should we put it back in testing? should we remove the powervr blobs from the repo?

• or should we possibly embrace more hacks like the patched wlroots and try to get at least the user experience on par with other community devices? Who will maintain these hacks?

The latter is of course an unpopular opinion from free software standpoint, the argument I'm making for that in my head is the environmental one; at least you can then use the device with postmarketOS and get software updates for most components. But it also means more maintenance effort, it's a decision we should make carefully, as we have put the N900 back to testing and didn't have the samsung-espresso3g in a release yet, we might also want to use this chance to drop support for PowerVR in the community device category.

Right now I'm focusing on the upcoming v21.12 release and mostly because the above is unclear, I've decided to not put samsung-espresso3g in v21.12 for now. Writing down my thoughts here, I think this is something to figure out in the coming months.

Binary images for samsung-espresso3g are currently also not built, since bpo doesn't enable the proprietary userspace components while building images. We should probably figure this out first.

@MightyM17: thank you very much for the samsung-espresso3g port, even with this GPU mess it's great to have it running on a close to mainline kernel. This is probably very frustrating for you after all the work you've put into the port, and I'm sorry that I didn't bring this up earlier, I should have thought about this before it was accepted into community.

CC: @tmlind, @xc-racer99, @MartijnBraam, @Minecrell, @minlexx, @craftyguy, @PureTryOut, @z3ntu, @dylanvanassche