This project tries to both be open source and accessible to regular people. And it kinda succeeds :)
For the end users, there's a telegram group where people can share standardised PCBs for rooting common robots sold in Europe. And the project's main developer is even in there actively helping out. But discussion about forks or custom PCBs is frowned upon, as that would only confuse the non-devs.
On the developer side, thought, making things easy and standardised required some trade-offs like not supporting any robot-specific functionality. That means if you're a power user, you'll probably run your own fork.
So in a way, installing Valetudo moves you from a Chinese closed-source walled garden into a European source-available walled garden. That said, I'm extremely happy with my (private, unsupported) fork running on 2x Dreame W10.
I wouldn't say that soldering a pcb [0][1] yourself is beginner-friendly but I understand your argument. Some robots are unfortunately still very difficult to root (which is not valetudos fault), which makes getting started with the project very cumbersome.
I think beginner-friendly is kind of relative. Considering the end goal, you're tying to achieve (hack the robot to run your custom software), requiring a user to solder a relatively simple board is a very accessible requirement.
I might be fine with soldering. But it's a completely different skill than running the software to flash something, I can see how it would put people off.
Indeed, valetudo is open source. The parent comment seems to prefer a different approach but valetudo project took a different path and is forcing the commenter to maintain their own fork (which is a feature of *all open source approved licenses*, not of all source available licenses)
I got my Dreame because it had good Valetudo support. But when it arrived i did a doubletake and saw destructive hardware mods were involved I decided to not mod yet. I never set the thing up with a Chinese account, never told it about my WiFi, and everything works fine. Just use the buttons on the device.
For the end users, there's a telegram group where people can share standardised PCBs for rooting common robots sold in Europe. And the project's main developer is even in there actively helping out. But discussion about forks or custom PCBs is frowned upon, as that would only confuse the non-devs.
On the developer side, thought, making things easy and standardised required some trade-offs like not supporting any robot-specific functionality. That means if you're a power user, you'll probably run your own fork.
So in a way, installing Valetudo moves you from a Chinese closed-source walled garden into a European source-available walled garden. That said, I'm extremely happy with my (private, unsupported) fork running on 2x Dreame W10.