alt Hacker NewsIt's always better than a link in the sticky post on the manufacturer's phpbb forum. I bought some audio equipment directly from a Chinese company, and everything look like a hobbies/student project.
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Is it? A google drive link to an OS image is worse IMO
I bought a MiniPC directly from a Chinese company (an AOOSTAR G37) and the driver downloads on their website are MEGA links. I thought only piracy and child porn sites used those..
I am somewhat amazed how you can manufacture such expensive high tech equipment yet are too cheap to setup a proper download service for the software, which would be very simple and cheap compared to making the hardware itself.
Maybe it is a Chinese mentality thing where the first question is always "What is the absolutely cheapest way to do this?" and all other concerns are secondary at best.
..which does not inspire confidence in the hardware either.
Maybe Chinese customers are different, see this, and think "These people are smart! Why pay more if you don't have to!".
Keep in mind that for a lot of Chinese companies, it's difficult to (legally) access some outside resources.
My company hosts our docker images on quay.io and docker hub, but we also have a tarball of images that we post to our Github releases. Recently our release tooling had a glitch and didn't upload the tarballs, and we very quickly got Github issues opened about it from a user who isn't able to access either docker registry and has to download the tarball from Github instead.
It doesn't surprise me that a lot of these companies have the same "release process" as Wii U homebrew utilities, since I can imagine there's not a lot of options unless you're pretty big and well-experienced (and fluent in English).