Today marks the one month of use milestone for me and after posting in the initial feedback thread I thought that the designers and architects of the Pinebook Pro might like to see a little more in depth review of their creation.
Spoiler - I really like this laptop.
My use:
I think it would be useful to understand my use patters for anyone evaluating my feedback. I have three main uses for this laptop:
Commute - I travel an hour each way every day by train, commuter rail. During that time I like to have a lightweight laptop laptop that is small enough to open while seated in the rows of seats. A 15 inch laptop is too large to open without tilting it one or another that is inconvenient. The 14 inch display is small enough that I can use the laptop on my lap. While on the train I use it as a browser, reader and a video now and again. It has sufficient power to run a 1080p video encoded with H264; I've not tried anything more taxing.
Work - During the day I use this as an additional screen that is mainly used for browsing, reading documentation and writing a few documents. I've also used it to draw up a PCB using Kicad and lately tried it to look over some code using Eclipse. Other than opening up a bunch of tabs in Firefox, which most always causes a crash, I have not had any troubles; this is not a problem in Chromium.
Home - I use this for most home computing needs including using FreeCad to design a project case and Kicad to update a board. I use Syncthing to keep it up to date with my other PCs. Works fine while I stay with Chromium, again Firefox tends to lock up the PBPro.
Updates:
I've made only the following updates (other than to Manjaro) are:
I added a 256Gb SDCard. I purchased the adapter to add an internal SSD, but based on the problems other's have had with compatibility as well as thinking about the potentially significant increase in power draw as well as the fact that the majority of what I need more storage for is documentation and media files that I really don't update that frequently; I decided a nice low power SDCard was a better option - cheaper too.
I resized the drive to add a 4GB swap partition in the hopes of getting sleep to work. Sleep is not working but the partition remains.
Openness:
The concept of a computer that is intended to be handled by the end user is great. Who else publishes all the schematics and a disassembly guide to their laptop? Dell/HP/Lenovo will tell you that your warranty is void if you open the cover to upgrade your drive, here we have the exact opposite.
Linux:
While I have been a Debian devotee for years, I have found I may end up liking Arch better. While I can find no one who has an Arch package repo that is day to day tracking development branches of software I use see that the main Arch repos are very close to latest releases. So if I don't mind being a few weeks behind bleeding edge I don't need all the PPAs and custom repos that are common for Debian / Ubuntu. I know I could try Debian but I usually try to devote as little time as possible working on my Linux laptops and prefer to work on my embedded systems so I like to use mainstream and it looks like Manjaro will be fine. One problem I am having is locating printer drivers; there is less support for Arch and even less for arm64 but there are few starting places so that is my next priority.
General Hardware:
I love the light weight and so far sturdy construction of the laptop. When I first got the laptop the bottom was not properly attached and after removing and reseating it the fit is much better but I believe bottom is a little warped as it still pulls up a little from the lip of the case at the point where it used to stick out. The lack of fans is great and except for dropping it on top of an upholstered seat the cover does an excellent job of getting the heat out. (Dell used to make a clip on bottom for their high end laptops to ensure there was always an air gap, that has allowed me to develop the bad habit of poor placement; this is not a request for a new feature, just an explanation why someone would ever try putting a laptop on top of upholstery.)
Display:
Yes, during boot I can see a few stuck bits on the very edge of the display, this has never been an issue for me. The display is excellent in use, great resolution and brightness range.
Keyboard:
I am fine with the feel and size of the keyboard, though I would prefer a backlit one and would sign up for an upgrade should anyone create one.
Trackpad:
This is the worst part of the laptop. I have tried most suggestion on getting the trackpad to improve to no avail. Fine motion and two finger taps are painful at best and require me to use an external trackball for any CAD work. If there is an upgrade in the future I'd buy that too.
WiFi:
With the old firmware the 5Hgz might be slightly better, but it is still pretty poor. I am of the mind that I will try a few replacement antennas shortly in the hopes of improving things. This is no where near as painful as the track pad.
Power:
I cannot get my PBPro to sleep consistently, frequently when I pull it from my backpack it is quite warm and I can see that the backlight is on. As stated, I added a swap partition in a quest to get sleep to disk but that has not happened yet. Also, it seems like the laptop barely charges at all while in use, it's only when I start it after charging powered down that the battery is back up. All this aside, I've yet to run out of battery, it seems to barely draw that in my use cases.
I hope this more in depth review is helpful to someone at Pine and if it is it might be helpful to have other more thoughtful reviews that extend past the initial unpack and power one.
In conclusion, this is the best laptop I've bought in quite a while, even with the trackpad. If there is a future revision that addressed my issues I'll but it; I may buy one for some of my kids to use as a second commuter PC like it is for me.
So obviously things aren't complete, but I thought I'd post a list of the bugs I'm seeing with PinePhone drivers right now, since I know some PinePhone kernel developers read this forum, and hopefully some people in ModemManager and Librem5's dev team too, since I use their "Calls" app.
This doesn't include stuff like the camera, which just isn't working anymore on recent kernels.
I'm using Fedora 32 with XFCE on a 5.7 megous kernel.
Merely having the bluetooth kernel module loaded cripples wifi speed to an unusable point. I can get wifi working well by either not installing the firmware for the 8723cs bluetooth chip, or blacklisting the btrtl driver. Bluetooth works fine, but wifi drops down to around 30KB/s.
Intermittent audio routing issues with phone calls. Sometimes there's no way to get audio without rebooting the modem entirely, other times the call audio will scream in my ear at distorted, extremely high volume levels. Sometimes it happens multiple times a day, other days it behaves fine.
Being in CRUST sleep frequently eats text messages, not leaving a trace that they ever existed.
Sometimes calls will wake the phone from CRUST sleep, but not actually trigger a ring. When this starts happening, rebooting the modem doesn't help, a full phone reboot is required.
HDMI output over Type C has serious lag, even when the DSI touch panel is disabled. It's enough that the second hand on my digital clock can go slower than realtime.
Touchscreen will occasionally start refusing to act on clicks although the cursor moves, as if there's another finger touching somewhere on the display, but there's
not. I must reboot at that point, usually via ssh.
Modem sends AT CMT message events that seem to trip up ModemManager during some outgoing calls, making ModemManager erroneously think the call failed, although audio will route fine. There is at that point no way to hang up a call short of powering down/rebooting the modem or the whole phone.
GPS reception is very poor, may be fixable with drivers or a device tree change.
Seems impossible to play two audio sources at once, the attempt will frequently crash both programs.
Battery reads 100% as 92%, though this seems specific to the megous kernels.
Battery will fully charge, then slowly discharge itself without charging again until I reconnect the charging cable.
Not sure on how much of this is in userspace (e.g. Xorg, ModemManager) or kernel module related.
Hello!
I've been using manjaro pretty exclusively as a daily driver on my laptop for quite a few years. I love how there is just one install image for all computers, boot it on either a brand new HP or a 10 year old Gateway it makes no difference, almost all the drivers are already there and you're immediately off and running.
My question is, will this ever come to the arm/smartphone space?
When android came out with treble I thought it was the answer, but even phh-treble doesn't work completely on everything and my Xiaomi Mix 2S happens to be one it doesn't even boot on. Lineage is great, but eventually a phone loses support and stops receiving updates.
Will Linux phones be any different? Will there ever be just one Ubuntu Touch image that can boot up just fine on any new or old device just like desktop? When arm laptops eventually become popular, could the same image be bootable on them too? I dream of a world where I can reload my arm laptop and phone from the same flash drive.
Will the next evolution (V1.3) of Pine phone motherboards possibly be available as a replacement without having to wait for next release of the production phones ? ( or when will it be possible to get the v1.3 in a phone or as a part ? )
I want to give my Pinebook 11.6" to a family member and not sure how to reset it completely so they can enter in their own user values (name/password/etc). I have not done anything to the Pinebook beside set it up initially and create my user name and password. No systems have been uploaded. Any help is greatly appreciated. Ideally I would just like to "Reset" it so they can turn it on and start from scratch.
I know the original firmware is closed source, it would be cool however if we could have a binary for the included firmware, so we can safely recover to some working firmware if everything else fails. I don't know if the original author would be willing to provide such a thing though.
I'm able to receive SMS texts, and I can both send and receive phone calls, but I haven't been able to get SMS sending to work. I'm using the correct +1123-4567 number format. I've tried both chatty and modem-manager-gui, but the issue seems to lie somewhere between modem-manager and the actual modem.
Steps to reproduce and debug:
1. Send SMS via chatty
2. Run mmcli -m 0 --messaging-list-sms
4. Explicitly tell mmcli to send the message, by running mmcli -v -m 0 -s 5 --send
Quote:[03 Jul 2020, 13:39:45] [Debug] Assuming '5' is the SMS index
[03 Jul 2020, 13:39:45] [Debug] ModemManager process found at ':1.9'
[03 Jul 2020, 13:39:45] [Debug] SMS found at '/org/freedesktop/ModemManager1/SMS/5'
error: couldn't send the SMS: 'Timeout was reached'
I just finished a 3D model of the PinePhone done in blender you can use freely for your projects, for example for renderings.
Mind that the whole back side should be accurate as the CAD files released by Pine64 were used. However the front side is not perfectly accurate, angles of the screen and the screen glass were estimated so use with caution when using the file to create equipment such as cases or similar (you have been warned!).
There are two glass parts, one is the LCD on the front and one is the protection plate of the camera on the backside. These parts do actually have a glass shader and objects behind them.
please help me. I can't upload files from my PBP (Chromium browser) to some websites (like Discord, Mega, Microsoft Teams). I have this issue for a long time and now I decided post this post. Sometimes this (picture OneDrive) shows up. Thanks for any ideas.
OS: Debian GNU/Linux 9.9 (stretch) aarch64
Model: Pine64 Pinebook Pro
Kernel: 4.4.213
Browser: Chromium Version 72.0.3626.121 (Official Build) Built on Ubuntu , running on Debian 9.9 (32-bit)
Update: Maybe is just problem with Chromium, because Firefox works. But How can I update Chromium on my PBP? Please help.
