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I've been using Pine products since their Kickstarter, and received my 11'' Pinebook about two weeks ago. I currently use it for quick, on-the-go dev work. Min

I've been using Pine products since their Kickstarter, and received my 11'' Pinebook about two weeks ago. I currently use it for quick, on-the-go dev work. Mine is set so that it boots from the internal 16gb eMMC into Ubuntu Xenial w/ i3wm. Then, I can either extend the storage or have it boot into Android, or any other distro, if I have an SD card inserted. The Android build is well-refined with very few issues; just like the Pine64 SoC, Android is best for media-related use. The linux builds were rough at first, but most of the major issues have been fixed already by the community devs. They're also working on getting Linux on the mainline kernel, and to get 3D acceleration working. It'll be a huge step for ARM if this device works out.

rlpb 9y ago
> They're also working on getting Linux on the mainline kernel... This was my first question, and there's no answer in their FAQ. Thank you for answering it. I used a Samsung ARM Chromebook as my main laptop for many years, running Ubuntu. I only stopped two weeks ago when the keyboard finally broke (it did very well for how much it cost). The biggest problem I had was that driver support didn't appear in the mainline kernel for years. When it finally did all work, it regressed regularly. I gave up bisecting the regressions to keep my own laptop running; I seemed to be the only one doing it. Now I won't touch any ARM hardware (or any hardware, for that matter) that apparently supports Linux unless everything I need is already in mainline. Otherwise, by the time it lands (if it lands), it seems to be that there won't be enough of a user community left to keep it from regressing.
- prophesi 9y ago
  Yeah, that's the biggest issue with ARM. It doesn't matter what the specs are if the driver's don't work. The reason Raspberry Pi is so great is because of its huge community support to iron out all of its issues. There are plenty of SoC's out there with a lot of wasted potential because of their lack of support, and the fact that vendors only give you binary blobs for critical system drivers... Thankfully, Pine64 has had a decent community these past two years so I'm not terribly afraid of the Pinebook getting left in the dust. But it's still a gamble.
tiagoespinha 9y ago
What's your experience with i3 on it? Is it lightweight enough to be usable as an Internet device?
- prophesi 9y ago
  Yep! It's a decent web browsing experience with Chromium once you configure some of the settings, and use at least uMatrix to block some of the heftier Javascript. And you can use SMTube to play Youtube videos. I'm currently running Chromium with a few open tabs, SMTube, VS Code, and Hexchat without any problems.

rlpb 9y ago

> They're also working on getting Linux on the mainline kernel... This was my first question, and there's no answer in their FAQ. Thank you for answering it. I used a Samsung ARM Chromebook as my main laptop for many years, running Ubuntu. I only stopped two weeks ago when the keyboard finally broke (it did very well for how much it cost). The biggest problem I had was that driver support didn't appear in the mainline kernel for years. When it finally did all work, it regressed regularly. I gave up bisecting the regressions to keep my own laptop running; I seemed to be the only one doing it. Now I won't touch any ARM hardware (or any hardware, for that matter) that apparently supports Linux unless everything I need is already in mainline. Otherwise, by the time it lands (if it lands), it seems to be that there won't be enough of a user community left to keep it from regressing.

prophesi 9y ago
Yeah, that's the biggest issue with ARM. It doesn't matter what the specs are if the driver's don't work. The reason Raspberry Pi is so great is because of its huge community support to iron out all of its issues. There are plenty of SoC's out there with a lot of wasted potential because of their lack of support, and the fact that vendors only give you binary blobs for critical system drivers... Thankfully, Pine64 has had a decent community these past two years so I'm not terribly afraid of the Pinebook getting left in the dust. But it's still a gamble.

tiagoespinha 9y ago

What's your experience with i3 on it? Is it lightweight enough to be usable as an Internet device?

prophesi 9y ago
Yep! It's a decent web browsing experience with Chromium once you configure some of the settings, and use at least uMatrix to block some of the heftier Javascript. And you can use SMTube to play Youtube videos. I'm currently running Chromium with a few open tabs, SMTube, VS Code, and Hexchat without any problems.