I love that OVOS and NeonOS are so very community driven, committed to privacy, customer service and as you say are relatively stable – if not the code itself then certainly overall as dev platforms with infrastucture and a community of devs. However I have to concede that Mycroft Classic Core itself and therefore OVOS, and NeonOS were simply never designed for the non-technical, non-hobbyist customer, and the way they operate bears that out.
Furthermore if we objectively look at the state of the code itself, I believe we are forced to admit that Classic Core and the related projects are much less reliable and that Dinkum is the more solid, if less elaborate starting point to move into the future from. And this completely makes sense when we look at how and why Dinkum came about – after struggling with unreliability of the Classic Core code base for several years the decision was made to create a more solid robust refactored subset to build off of.
One of the main Dinkum developers, Michael Hansen explained it this way:
I started on Dinkum after half a year of working with the team at Mycroft to get Core 1 (“classic core”) stable enough to ship on the Mark II. This was after they had worked on it for over year by themselves without success.
Every week, we’d fix bugs only to find new ones cropping up elsewhere. This was holding up the shipping of the Mark II, so I took action and created Dinkum. Core 1 serves a lot of people in the Mycroft community well, but it is (in my opinion) a messy codebase that is not suitable for a device that (1) is always on, and (2) must be usable by non-developers.
Michael Lewis characterized Dinkum as a:
“retail” version of the software. This version does not have certain features that we found problematic to get right for the non-technical user."
Gez wrote:
We focused on reliability, which required reworking some of the skill API.
elsewhere he went on to say:
“We built Dinkum because we wanted to show what was possible with heavily refactored code, and provide the best possible direct user experience when people plug their Mark II in for the first time.”
and finally
Dinkum is simply far more stable. So for consumers that aren’t comfortable on the command line it provides the best experience as a voice assistant performing the core functions that we’ve seen people use most.
Although the Dinkum is currently lacking skills, an MSK (Mycroft Skill Kit for devs to more easily develop skills) or perhaps most importantly an MSM (Mycroft skill management kit which provides ability for a non-technical user to install new skills), all of these can be completed and at the base level Dinkum remains a better starting place for a device oriented towards non-technical users than Classic Core is.
Add to this that it is Dinkum that is being integrated with Grokotron (not Classic Core), and self-hosted Selene as well as it’s offline replacement. So when you put it all together it continues to make sense that Mycroft’s future for non-technical / non-hobbyist (ie. the wider market) is still Dinkum-based.
So it comes back to the realization that what we need now is for a free software community group like OVOS or Neon (or some other similar project) to take on Dinkum itself or a Dinkum fork.