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Personally I purchased a PineTab [1]. I hope it doesn't feel as sluggish. I suspect most of the lag is the UI they are running. Apparently it purposely runs at

by bArray 6y ago

Personally I purchased a PineTab [1]. I hope it doesn't feel as sluggish. I suspect most of the lag is the UI they are running. Apparently it purposely runs at a resolution of 720 as not to tax the GPU too much. The plan is to use the tablet mostly with an external keyboard, I suspect the keyboard I purchased with it will not be so useful outside of some odd occasions. I plan to use it for SSH'ing into more powerful machines, vim, a small amount of compiling, LaTeX, a few tabs, etc. Just a machine to take into the office, into meetings, etc. Not a powerhouse photo/video editing, multimedia viewing, number crunching, compiler building beast. As for dev'ing for the device, I'm working on upgrading wm2 [2] to work with touch devices and to remove some of the cruft that didn't age well, whilst trying to maintain the minimalism. I'm aiming for a < 8MB footprint for the window manager and toolbar collectively. [1] https://www.pine64.org/pinetab/ https://www.pine64.org/pinetab/ [2] www.all-day-breakfast.com/wm2/

josteink 6y ago
I think this guy is having issues because he is using Slack, which is known to kill any machine it is launched on (even high-end developer machines) on a lower end, ultra-cheap ARM laptop. The Pinebook Pro itself is probably reasonable (given its price), once you disregard the use of monstrously bloated things, like Slack. That said, the PineTab has half the ram and a measurably slower CPU[1] (See A64 vs RK3399). It’s basically like a PinePhone with a big screen. So don’t get your expectations too high :) [1] https://gist.github.com/ayufan/ce5dc9e501e1b720c2afc31c3ed51f9d https://gist.github.com/ayufan/ce5dc9e501e1b720c2afc31c3ed51...
- bArray 6y ago
  > I think this guy is having issues because he is using > Slack, which is known to kill any machine it is launched on > (even high-end developer machines) on a lower end, ultra- > cheap ARM laptop. Their "apps" are essentially small web browsers, no wonder! > That said, the PineTab has half the ram and a measurably > slower CPU[1] (See A64 vs RK3399). It’s basically like a > PinePhone with a big screen. This is why I'm working on a lightweight X11 window manager, there's no reason why a UI should take up so many of the CPU horsepower and RAM.
aidenn0 6y ago
I'm planning on using PineTab to replace my SurfaceRT for movies on road-trips. A 10" tablet with 16:9 aspect ratio, a USB-A port and can run VLC (or equivalent) is what I need, and it checks all of those boxes. My SurfaceRT served me well, but it needs regular rebooting now so will be retired. I also seriously doubt the PineTab will have a slower UI than my SurfaceRT. 2-3 seconds for a tap to respond is not uncommon on it.
- bArray 6y ago
  > I'm planning on using PineTab to replace my SurfaceRT for > movies on road-trips. First link on DuckDuckGo is somebody really complaining about the SurfaceRT [1]. PineTab should have more than enough power with the Mali GPU at 720. That USB-A port is also _really_ awesome, people seem to forget the importance of commonly used USB ports! > 2-3 seconds for a tap to respond is not uncommon on it. Insane, did it ship like that? Microsoft are really not so great with hardware, although I hear better things about later more powerful Surface models. If they don't care about something they really tend to neglect it. I have an old Kindle Fire that I got the Google Play store running on, after that it was reasonably use-able, but still struggles. A zoom call for example is completely out of the question using the browser (instead of installing their crapware). Still good enough for light browsing, viewing PDFs, writing some notes, emails, etc. [1] https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/forum/all/surface-rt-piece-of-useless/d2aaf77e-746e-4f37-9e6d-3ff2ee286a07 https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/forum/all/surfac...
  - aidenn0 6y ago
    The MS software is more responsive than third party, but I use VLC to play movies because even h264 baseline at 240p is unreliable with HW decoding, and VLC will do software decoding, but the UI is super laggy. Note that the VLC implementation is old because they only released one version for ARM32 in the windows store a long time ago.
    - bArray 6y ago
      Purely out of interest, is there not some possibility to compile code on the device? Of course it would take some time, but you should be able to get at least some % speed up with the right compile settings? I also wonder whether it would be possible to make executables run without the need to come from the Windows store, possibly by adjusting some registry or manually inserting some "trusted" certificates?

by bArray 6y ago

josteink 6y ago

I think this guy is having issues because he is using Slack, which is known to kill any machine it is launched on (even high-end developer machines) on a lower end, ultra-cheap ARM laptop. The Pinebook Pro itself is probably reasonable (given its price), once you disregard the use of monstrously bloated things, like Slack. That said, the PineTab has half the ram and a measurably slower CPU[1] (See A64 vs RK3399). It’s basically like a PinePhone with a big screen. So don’t get your expectations too high :) [1] https://gist.github.com/ayufan/ce5dc9e501e1b720c2afc31c3ed51f9d https://gist.github.com/ayufan/ce5dc9e501e1b720c2afc31c3ed51...

bArray 6y ago
> I think this guy is having issues because he is using > Slack, which is known to kill any machine it is launched on > (even high-end developer machines) on a lower end, ultra- > cheap ARM laptop. Their "apps" are essentially small web browsers, no wonder! > That said, the PineTab has half the ram and a measurably > slower CPU[1] (See A64 vs RK3399). It’s basically like a > PinePhone with a big screen. This is why I'm working on a lightweight X11 window manager, there's no reason why a UI should take up so many of the CPU horsepower and RAM.

aidenn0 6y ago

I'm planning on using PineTab to replace my SurfaceRT for movies on road-trips. A 10" tablet with 16:9 aspect ratio, a USB-A port and can run VLC (or equivalent) is what I need, and it checks all of those boxes. My SurfaceRT served me well, but it needs regular rebooting now so will be retired. I also seriously doubt the PineTab will have a slower UI than my SurfaceRT. 2-3 seconds for a tap to respond is not uncommon on it.

bArray 6y ago
> I'm planning on using PineTab to replace my SurfaceRT for > movies on road-trips. First link on DuckDuckGo is somebody really complaining about the SurfaceRT [1]. PineTab should have more than enough power with the Mali GPU at 720. That USB-A port is also _really_ awesome, people seem to forget the importance of commonly used USB ports! > 2-3 seconds for a tap to respond is not uncommon on it. Insane, did it ship like that? Microsoft are really not so great with hardware, although I hear better things about later more powerful Surface models. If they don't care about something they really tend to neglect it. I have an old Kindle Fire that I got the Google Play store running on, after that it was reasonably use-able, but still struggles. A zoom call for example is completely out of the question using the browser (instead of installing their crapware). Still good enough for light browsing, viewing PDFs, writing some notes, emails, etc. [1] https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/forum/all/surface-rt-piece-of-useless/d2aaf77e-746e-4f37-9e6d-3ff2ee286a07 https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/forum/all/surfac...
- aidenn0 6y ago
  The MS software is more responsive than third party, but I use VLC to play movies because even h264 baseline at 240p is unreliable with HW decoding, and VLC will do software decoding, but the UI is super laggy. Note that the VLC implementation is old because they only released one version for ARM32 in the windows store a long time ago.
  - bArray 6y ago
    Purely out of interest, is there not some possibility to compile code on the device? Of course it would take some time, but you should be able to get at least some % speed up with the right compile settings? I also wonder whether it would be possible to make executables run without the need to come from the Windows store, possibly by adjusting some registry or manually inserting some "trusted" certificates?