I received the PBP on November 1st and had the whole weekend to play with it and had a good initial feel for it.
- The case is great, I stuck a vinyl Tux penguin in the middle of the top cover because I will be using Linux on this system
- LCD display is good, better than I expected. It is matte and bright. Good resolution and no dead pixels. Looks much more expensive than it really is. Hinges feel sturdy. The lower left part of the LCD front bezel seems to have a broken clip or something, but you could not tell unless you actually squeeze it, at which point you can feel some play and hear a faint click. I don't expect it to be a problem, there is no force applied to this area.
- Keyboard: good. Good mechanical feel, maybe a bit on the noisy side. Engraving is for UK layout but I use US. No big deal, I touch-type.
- Sound: OK. Don't expect deep bass. Don't expect bass at all. But I would say it is adequate. There is a faint hissing noise when the OS activates sound, but it stops when sound has finished playing. It can be heard when using the laptop in a quiet environment, because since there is no fan there is no white noise to cover it. No problem with BT audio. I have set the 3.5 mm jack to UART mode, so I haven't tested wired headphones.
- Touchpad: nice size and texture. Click switches on bottom left and right are a bit loud but I usually tap to click. I set acceleration to the max, otherwise it feels a bit unresponsive. Two annoyances: 1. if your palm is in contact with the touchpad, the keyboard doesn't register key presses, which can lead to missed keystrokes depending on how you hold your hands while typing. 2. there seems to be some strange delay when trying to make fine pointer movements. You can disable the touchpad with Fn-7 and use an external mouse (which works perfectly) to fully enjoy the good keyboard
- Battery: after 3 cycles of full charge-discharge, I can confidently say that the battery will last for a full work day. 8 hours for sure. 10 hours maybe, depending on load
- Video playback in Full 1080p: nothing to complain about, it plays well. Transition between windowed and fullscreen has a 2-second delay but nothing horrible. Tried Youtube and Netflix. The bottom of the chassis feels warm when playing videos, but nothing alarming.
- I installed the NVMe adapter in the case. I have a feeling I don't have the newest version as the ribbon cables requires some twisting to connect, but it connects. No issues with touchpad clicking, but I don't have an SSD drive installed yet. I will probably grab a cheap one today to test further. Hopefully it won't affect battery life too much
- I was able to test the serial console to troubleshoot a boot issue when I flashed a non-working image. Had to set connection parameters to 1500000 8N1 (what got me initially was the unusual 1500000 speed). Serial connection is unstable if only on battery. It is fine when power is plugged in
OS: I tried the Debian Stretch with MATE that comes pre-installed. The desktop environment feels a bit sluggish and Firefox keeps crashing. Other than that it works fine. I had issues establishing an OpenVPN tunnel with NetworkManager. Not sure if it is my config file or an OS issue, but I didn't investigate.
I switched to Ayufan's Bionic Mate 0.9.16 (yes, I know, it is a pre-release, but at this point I consider everything pre-release on the PBP
). It is glorious.
After a bit of tweaking the environment, which I always do no matter the hardware I am on, I have a working desktop environment that I could use as a daily driver.
It feels weird to go back to a classic Gnome look and feel, but it looks good and functional. This OS image feels much more responsive than the stock one. I could definitely use for a whole work day when no heavy tasks are required.
- OpenVPN tunnels worked without a problem
- I found a build of VSCode for armhf that works (Code-OSS 1.29.0-1539702)
- remmina RDP works great if I use a freerdp video mode that doesn't require h.264
- couldn't get the SPICE console to work through virt-manager; I haven't investigated why, I don't have an immediate need for it
- Aisleriot works out of the box. No issues whatsoever (I tested it because I read it could be a problem)
- Firefox is solid. Never crashed on me. Did some bookkeeping and invoicing using Quickbooks Online, email with Zimbra web, general web surfing: no issues.
- Netflix requires extracting widevine module from a Chromium-OS image (there are scripts available for that). Will only work with Chromium browser
- I have to launch Chromium binary (not the shell script) from terminal if I want to access the settings menu
it as my main desktop
- Connecting to Matrix using pidgin and purple-matrix
- LibreOffice works. Looks ugly until you install the package libreoffice-gtk2.
This being an Ubuntu distro, I expect to find most of the packages I need. I will hit the occasional third-party software that does not have armhf binaries, but nothing I cannot live without.
My initial impression is that I can use this machine as my main work machine when on the go.
For a USD $199 laptop, I am impressed.
