Is there a useable distrobution for the pbp -- without wayland?

[RandB]

My wants are simple. A stable pbp computer that runs Xorg, one that hibernates, or at least sleeps when I fold the computer. Virtually all the software that I need and want to use are old and stable programs that have worked on unix systems for years. I am happy to use Xfce with a drop-down terminal, or a better yet tiling window manager such as dwm.

Is it necessary that I use wayland with the pbp? Yes, wayland has all these great advantages, but from what I have seen I can easily and happily exist without all of those great advantages, and so I do not see a good reason to deal with the current wayland headaches, and I can accept having a slightly lower battery life on this pbp.

What would be the simplest way to set up the pbp to be a system running Xorg that reliably hibernates? Which distros would work best? For me this would make the pbp a daily driver. I am not adverse to using a *bsd distribution if that would be easier. I prefer a LTS system over one with constant updates.

[wdt]

Search the forum for STR (sleep to ram) or suspend, that is if you want LONG suspend

[KC9UDX]

NetBSD will certainly run with X and without Wayland. In fact, it sounds like the perfect fit for you, except.... S3 Sleep (to RAM) does not yet work in NetBSD on the PBP. And suspend to disk doesn't work in NetBSD at all.

I expect there should be Linux distrus that work without Wayland. But I don't know how many of them support sleep or suspend, either. I have never gotten either to work in any operating system I've tried on the PBP. Some will do one or the other but none I've tried will wake or resume.

Frankly NetBSD cold boots on the PBP in about the same amount of time that it takes my Thinkpad to wake from sleep.

[jpalus]

While it's not necessary to use Wayland compositor on PBP, the performance difference is significant compared to X. Hardware architecture of GPU found on PBP (and other devices with Mali GPU) makes it really hard to perform well under X and that's unlikely to ever change. Note that it equally affects performance of X applications under Wayland (run with XWayland) -- they too perform poorly. So if your primary focus are X applications, there's not much of a benefit to go Wayland.

[RandB]

NetBSD will certainly run with X and without Wayland. In fact, it sounds like the perfect fit for you, except.... S3 Sleep (to RAM) does not yet work in NetBSD on the PBP. And suspend to disk doesn't work in NetBSD at all.

Thank you. I have downloaded NetBSD and will give it a go, probably on the weekend. I will try to get either sleep or suspend working. Also will need to get working hgmi output from the machine.

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Search the forum for STR (sleep to ram) or suspend, that is if you want LONG suspend

Thank you for the hints. What surprised me when I began reading the results of the searches is how soon after the problem gets solved this functionality seems to become flakey and mostly breaking again on the pbp after every upgrade. Why, after two years has reliably obtaining this basic functionality not been properly solved? I need to do more reading. (My pbp may yet be repurposed as a headless server with no need for sleep or hgmi output).

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While it's not necessary to use Wayland compositor on PBP, the performance difference is significant compared to X. Hardware architecture of GPU found on PBP (and other devices with Mali GPU) makes it really hard to perform well under X and that's unlikely to ever change. Note that it equally affects performance of X applications under Wayland (run with XWayland) -- they too perform poorly. So if your primary focus are X applications, there's not much of a benefit to go Wayland.

Agreed. While the performance difference with Wayland is significant, the performance with X is more than adequate for my purposes, which is mostly vim, latex, inscape, text browsers, zathura, plus qutebrowser and firefox.

[RandB]

I looked at distrowatch. Deepin is an Xorg system, I will check to see how well it works and if sleep & hdmi work with it running on the pbp.

[Install deepin OS on pinebook pro](https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=18334)