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Reviews here to save people doing what I just did: https://www.techradar.com/reviews/pinebook-14-inch https://www.techradar.com/reviews/pinebook-14-inch https

by sien 9y ago

Reviews here to save people doing what I just did: https://www.techradar.com/reviews/pinebook-14-inch https://www.techradar.com/reviews/pinebook-14-inch https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/pinebook-64-review/ https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/pinebook-64-review/ It looks like it might be worth the price. Anyone have one here? Any idea on delivery times?

roryisok 9y ago
Did we read the same review? Terrible keyboard and trackpad, 2gb ram?
- tedmiston 9y ago
  For $100 I think the expectation is set that there will be some rough edges. At that price point, I'd consider picking one up as a toy… even if it is giving me flashbacks of the netbook era.
  - overkalix 9y ago
    I still work with my eight year old notebook and its glorious Intel Atom and 1GB of RAM... It was gifted to me during my second year of college and now that I'm on my PhD I still have a use for it. The original Windows distribution lasted around one month. Since then it's been running a number of lightweight distributions, currently Lubuntu. It works noticeably better than laptops running Windows with twice the memory. Even compared to more powerful machines I manage to keep it competitive by avoiding bloated crap. Of course the battery doesn't last like it used to, and I had to replace the keyboard a few years ago.
    - terminalcommand 9y ago
      When my thinkpad x201 broke down, I lived with an atom 1.6 Ghz eeePC (1000HE). It was certainly doable and tweaking the laptop to run on limited resources was fun. My only real issue was that I couldn't browse with javascript, because the cpu load was crushing the netbook. Other than that a recent OpenBSD installation used only 128MiB of RAM, with ram usage occasionaly rising to around 280 MiB when I opened firefox. I still use the netbook as my primary mobile machine. But I think getting a second hand thinkpad again would be a reasonable thing to do. Although the netbook is perfectly usable, it is really heavy compared to today's standards. That is the only complaint I have for my machine.
pizza234 9y ago
I'm think those reviews are more or less fluff pieces. First, they intentionally gloss over the performance aspect; as a owner of multiple ARM boards, I can tell you that the A53 performance is terrible for desktop usage; it's not even good for headless servers (although "terrible" is relative). Second, I'm very skeptical about the 64-bit claim, which they haven't investigated. While ARM CPUs are 64-bit themselves, ARM Linux distros are typically 32-bit. And finally, don't underestimate the lack of support for ARM builds. While of course, the full Ubuntu repositories are available, for software outside them, the "compiling from source" can be troublesome for ARM architectures. I think that a high-power ARM laptop (ie. A15 or more) would be interesting; but not a low-power one.
- ulzeraj 9y ago
  I’m curious about Aarch64. Is it like x86 where you can just install a generic Aarch64 kernel and operating system and just make it works or do I have to build a very specific system for that board like images that are specifically aimed at the pi? To be clear I’m really interested on the Rock64 boards but I don’t like any of their OS options. It would be great to be able to use the Aarch64 port of Alpine Linux on those.
  - pizza234 9y ago
    In general, SBC SOCs require customizations due to (at least) bootloader and blobs. On top of those, there are typically other patches to expose various functionalities (eg. cooling). There's surprising little information about 64-bit SBC O/S. It's possible that 64 bits don't give so much performance improvement, or that they increase the power consumption - not sure. It seems that nobody really took the time (and distro...) to do an accurate comparison. Having said that, curiously, SUSE actually produced a 64-bit distro (https://www.suse.com/c/suse-linux-enterprise-server-raspberry-pi https://www.suse.com/c/suse-linux-enterprise-server-raspberr...), due to them already having an ARM distribution. I'll actually try it at some point - I'm very curious. More direct download link: https://www.suse.com/de-de/products/arm/raspberry-pi/ https://www.suse.com/de-de/products/arm/raspberry-pi/
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]

by sien 9y ago

roryisok 9y ago

Did we read the same review? Terrible keyboard and trackpad, 2gb ram?

tedmiston 9y ago
For $100 I think the expectation is set that there will be some rough edges. At that price point, I'd consider picking one up as a toy… even if it is giving me flashbacks of the netbook era.
- overkalix 9y ago
  I still work with my eight year old notebook and its glorious Intel Atom and 1GB of RAM... It was gifted to me during my second year of college and now that I'm on my PhD I still have a use for it. The original Windows distribution lasted around one month. Since then it's been running a number of lightweight distributions, currently Lubuntu. It works noticeably better than laptops running Windows with twice the memory. Even compared to more powerful machines I manage to keep it competitive by avoiding bloated crap. Of course the battery doesn't last like it used to, and I had to replace the keyboard a few years ago.
  - terminalcommand 9y ago
    When my thinkpad x201 broke down, I lived with an atom 1.6 Ghz eeePC (1000HE). It was certainly doable and tweaking the laptop to run on limited resources was fun. My only real issue was that I couldn't browse with javascript, because the cpu load was crushing the netbook. Other than that a recent OpenBSD installation used only 128MiB of RAM, with ram usage occasionaly rising to around 280 MiB when I opened firefox. I still use the netbook as my primary mobile machine. But I think getting a second hand thinkpad again would be a reasonable thing to do. Although the netbook is perfectly usable, it is really heavy compared to today's standards. That is the only complaint I have for my machine.

pizza234 9y ago

I'm think those reviews are more or less fluff pieces. First, they intentionally gloss over the performance aspect; as a owner of multiple ARM boards, I can tell you that the A53 performance is terrible for desktop usage; it's not even good for headless servers (although "terrible" is relative). Second, I'm very skeptical about the 64-bit claim, which they haven't investigated. While ARM CPUs are 64-bit themselves, ARM Linux distros are typically 32-bit. And finally, don't underestimate the lack of support for ARM builds. While of course, the full Ubuntu repositories are available, for software outside them, the "compiling from source" can be troublesome for ARM architectures. I think that a high-power ARM laptop (ie. A15 or more) would be interesting; but not a low-power one.

ulzeraj 9y ago
I’m curious about Aarch64. Is it like x86 where you can just install a generic Aarch64 kernel and operating system and just make it works or do I have to build a very specific system for that board like images that are specifically aimed at the pi? To be clear I’m really interested on the Rock64 boards but I don’t like any of their OS options. It would be great to be able to use the Aarch64 port of Alpine Linux on those.
- pizza234 9y ago
  In general, SBC SOCs require customizations due to (at least) bootloader and blobs. On top of those, there are typically other patches to expose various functionalities (eg. cooling). There's surprising little information about 64-bit SBC O/S. It's possible that 64 bits don't give so much performance improvement, or that they increase the power consumption - not sure. It seems that nobody really took the time (and distro...) to do an accurate comparison. Having said that, curiously, SUSE actually produced a 64-bit distro (https://www.suse.com/c/suse-linux-enterprise-server-raspberry-pi https://www.suse.com/c/suse-linux-enterprise-server-raspberr...), due to them already having an ARM distribution. I'll actually try it at some point - I'm very curious. More direct download link: https://www.suse.com/de-de/products/arm/raspberry-pi/ https://www.suse.com/de-de/products/arm/raspberry-pi/
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]