5 ms·

> I bought a Pinebook Pro in the first batch, and have been using it on and off for several months now. Me, too. > Some people I know wanted to know if it is

> I bought a Pinebook Pro in the first batch, and have been using it on and off for several months now. Me, too. > Some people I know wanted to know if it is usable as a daily main laptop. I've successfully used it as my only laptop. > I originally wanted to use stock Debian but at some point the Panfrost driver broke and the laptop could not start X. Only in FLOSS world would someone complain about a first-time-out laptop with very early (reverse-engineered) FLOSS driver support not working on the arbitrary, non-default OS the author happened to install on it. The Pinebook Pro ships with some kind of hybrid Debian Stretch-- it appeared to have Chrome specifically compiled for this board, and probably some other custom things (probably keyboard/touchpad driver, etc.). There's an icon in the taskbar to update this "Debianstein" using "MrFixit's repo." This is the official way to update the laptop-- it asks for your root password, downloads stuff from the repo and then runs scripts. Super shady. That aside-- if the Pine devs weren't shipping with stock Debian when author and I bought it, there is probably a very good reason why. And we see one piece of evidence as the author tries to run "stock Debian" on the Pinebook-- shit broke! > Alt-tabbing between Firefox and a terminal takes one second, as does switching between Firefox tabs. Again, on the operating system which Pine ships with the Pinebook Pro, task-switching between Firefox and the terminal (mate terminal?) is immediate. It's weird to feel I have to defend a laptop that has the shittiest touchpad I've used in a decade. But if you're going to do a serious review of a fledgling laptop like this, either use the default software or know what the heck you're doing wrt drivers/firmware. Otherwise it feels like the point is to get me to sympathize with Apple's "stock OS or it's a brick" strategy.

seba_dos1 6y ago
Running various distributions and having mainline support was part of Pinebook Pro's value proposition, so while it's worth pointing out I wouldn't blame the author for it that much. There are plenty of people who got or considered getting Pinebook Pro to run things like "stock Debian" on it and aren't interested much in such "Debiansteins".
- wtallis 6y ago
  When it comes to hardware purchasing decisions, I don't really consider a device to be open-source friendly unless the drivers are upstreamed. Out-of-tree drivers that aren't at least on track for upstreaming in the near future will in the long run be just as much of a hassle as proprietary drivers.
  - jancsika 6y ago
    That's a great philosophy to have and I haven't a clue what it has to do with the Pinebook Pro. AFAICT all the relevant video drivers are upstreamed. Additionally, there has been official support in Debian since April plus an unofficial installer for Debian. Plus a pretty healthy interest in the Manjaro community and a lot of other distros. (I received my PBP in December, btw.) What I'm saying is if you're a hacker and want to go the route of picking your favorite distro for a first-time-out Linux laptop, you really ought to be able to differentiate between borked configuration (esp. where reverse-engineered free drivers for a notoriously unfriendly GPU company) and underpowered hardware. A good way to ensure success is to try out the hardware with the default install the devs shipped. The author didn't bother to do that and his review is misleading for it.
    - wtallis 6y ago
      You're the one who said that it's unreasonable to expect a run of the mill distro shipping an upstream kernel to work on this platform. But now you're trying to talk about underpowered hardware as if that has something to do with being unable to start X in the first place? The author experienced clear signs that this platform's software support is not mature. You seem to want to blame Debian rather than the new platform and its immature drivers.
      - jancsika 6y ago
        > The author experienced clear signs that this platform's software support is not mature. The author claimed that alt-tabbing takes about one second. This was not true on default install using Mate from December. Author claims that merely entering a directory containing a Git repo freezes the terminal. Again, clearly not true using stock Mate terminal. Author goes on to rankly speculate that the problems with this laptop may be "CPU and disk side." Again, completely misleading as to the actual hardware as I stated above. And easily corrected by merely testing with the default OS Pine shipped. Aside from Panfrost I have no idea why the author ran into those problems. But he doesn't either, and he falsely attributed them to hardware limitations when it was facile to check his error by running the laptop for perhaps five minutes in the default install.
- jancsika 6y ago
  Again, I come back to the Apple: imagine someone claiming the original Iphone wasn't ready for primetime because it didn't zoom very well when trying to use a recently merged, reverse-engineered driver with FreeBSD. Plus that same reviewer didn't even bother to check usability on default iOS installed with the system. That's the level of serious we're talking about here. In no way is Pinebook's hardware so underpowered that it takes 1 second to switch tasks. It's an especially egregious oversight because mainline support in the kernel and Debian has happened and continues to be worked on since I purchased the thing. But since I actually took the time to try out the default install, you won't hear me misrepresent the state of the hardware if I happen to flash a newer distro/kernel and run into problems that I don't understand.

seba_dos1 6y ago

Running various distributions and having mainline support was part of Pinebook Pro's value proposition, so while it's worth pointing out I wouldn't blame the author for it that much. There are plenty of people who got or considered getting Pinebook Pro to run things like "stock Debian" on it and aren't interested much in such "Debiansteins".

wtallis 6y ago
When it comes to hardware purchasing decisions, I don't really consider a device to be open-source friendly unless the drivers are upstreamed. Out-of-tree drivers that aren't at least on track for upstreaming in the near future will in the long run be just as much of a hassle as proprietary drivers.
- jancsika 6y ago
  That's a great philosophy to have and I haven't a clue what it has to do with the Pinebook Pro. AFAICT all the relevant video drivers are upstreamed. Additionally, there has been official support in Debian since April plus an unofficial installer for Debian. Plus a pretty healthy interest in the Manjaro community and a lot of other distros. (I received my PBP in December, btw.) What I'm saying is if you're a hacker and want to go the route of picking your favorite distro for a first-time-out Linux laptop, you really ought to be able to differentiate between borked configuration (esp. where reverse-engineered free drivers for a notoriously unfriendly GPU company) and underpowered hardware. A good way to ensure success is to try out the hardware with the default install the devs shipped. The author didn't bother to do that and his review is misleading for it.
  - wtallis 6y ago
    You're the one who said that it's unreasonable to expect a run of the mill distro shipping an upstream kernel to work on this platform. But now you're trying to talk about underpowered hardware as if that has something to do with being unable to start X in the first place? The author experienced clear signs that this platform's software support is not mature. You seem to want to blame Debian rather than the new platform and its immature drivers.
    - jancsika 6y ago
      > The author experienced clear signs that this platform's software support is not mature. The author claimed that alt-tabbing takes about one second. This was not true on default install using Mate from December. Author claims that merely entering a directory containing a Git repo freezes the terminal. Again, clearly not true using stock Mate terminal. Author goes on to rankly speculate that the problems with this laptop may be "CPU and disk side." Again, completely misleading as to the actual hardware as I stated above. And easily corrected by merely testing with the default OS Pine shipped. Aside from Panfrost I have no idea why the author ran into those problems. But he doesn't either, and he falsely attributed them to hardware limitations when it was facile to check his error by running the laptop for perhaps five minutes in the default install.
jancsika 6y ago
Again, I come back to the Apple: imagine someone claiming the original Iphone wasn't ready for primetime because it didn't zoom very well when trying to use a recently merged, reverse-engineered driver with FreeBSD. Plus that same reviewer didn't even bother to check usability on default iOS installed with the system. That's the level of serious we're talking about here. In no way is Pinebook's hardware so underpowered that it takes 1 second to switch tasks. It's an especially egregious oversight because mainline support in the kernel and Debian has happened and continues to be worked on since I purchased the thing. But since I actually took the time to try out the default install, you won't hear me misrepresent the state of the hardware if I happen to flash a newer distro/kernel and run into problems that I don't understand.