06-13-2020, 11:51 AM
If you're expecting something to compete with the last few generations of Intel chips, you'll be sorely disappointed. It's not fast by modern laptop standards.
It is, however, quite capable of doing most things, as long as you're patient. It'll do most things on the internet, development, etc. Perhaps not all at once, but well enough to be useful.
What it's not, however, is particularly polished. There are a LOT of rough edges still being worked on (which is the whole point of cheap community open hardware - to get the quirks resolved and hammered out), and if you want everything to work, there's still a blend of binary blobs needed. Again, work in progress, and great headway is being made, but right now, it's still a work in progress.
If you're looking for something that "just works," and/or you're not terribly comfortable in the Linux shell doing OS level tasks, you should probably consider something else.
They're great hardware, wonderful for hacking on, and absolutely usable as a light daily driver if you don't mind the pain points, but you have to go in knowing that, and expecting that there will be weird issues at times.
Those only get worse if you run in aarch64 mode. Random bits of software don't build right on aarch64.
It is, however, quite capable of doing most things, as long as you're patient. It'll do most things on the internet, development, etc. Perhaps not all at once, but well enough to be useful.
What it's not, however, is particularly polished. There are a LOT of rough edges still being worked on (which is the whole point of cheap community open hardware - to get the quirks resolved and hammered out), and if you want everything to work, there's still a blend of binary blobs needed. Again, work in progress, and great headway is being made, but right now, it's still a work in progress.
If you're looking for something that "just works," and/or you're not terribly comfortable in the Linux shell doing OS level tasks, you should probably consider something else.
They're great hardware, wonderful for hacking on, and absolutely usable as a light daily driver if you don't mind the pain points, but you have to go in knowing that, and expecting that there will be weird issues at times.
Those only get worse if you run in aarch64 mode. Random bits of software don't build right on aarch64.