I received my PBP this morning (at 7:35am!). These are my first impressions.
TL;DR:
Great initial experience. Perfect for my laptop workloads and use cases. Solid build (both hardware and software).
Packaging and hardware
It arrived in the same packaging as everyone has been reporting. Minimalist but well protected. A foam sleave inside two cardboard boxes, inside a jiffy bag, inside a plastic DHL bag. The power supply cam separate and with a European power plug. Unfortunately for me, not with a UK plug. Probably not an issue in the future because I will charge off USB-C but I had to dig out my travel plug to make it work today.
I noticed that the laptop now has a large label on the back with the model spec, FCCID and CE logos on it. There is no longer a sticker on the palm rest that indicates the size of the eMMC.
Operating System
I powered on the device and it booted into the OS as expected. The device came with 92% battery charge.
After logging in to the rock/rock account, I connected to the WiFI and did a quick update:
This seems to have worked as expected. Completely transparent with any other version of Debian based OS-es that I am familiar with.
I quickly moved on to trying Chromium (haven't gone near Firefox yet) and it worked as expected. No issues firing up YouTube and running some 1080p videos. The system averaged at about 70% CPU usage (I did a quick estimate using htop). All six cores were doing stuff but none of them were particularly busy.
Then, quickly on to creating myself a user. I used adduser. After creating the user I added the user to the sudo group in /etc/group. When logging in to the new user account, I noticed that it booted into the standard MATE desktop. No Pine background and no Pine desktop layout like the rock/rock account. Doesn't really matter. I can do those customisations later. I also had to make sure that the keyboard layout was corrected. It defaulted to English (US). I needed English (UK). That was quickly resolved.
I made sure that the Keyboard and Trackpad firmware were updated with the instructions on the forum. This was effortless. Thank you for the good instructions for this.
I installed the CPU temperature indicator on the panel to give me some idea of how hot it gets. During normal use (whilst I am typing this article) it has not gone above 19°C. CPU clock frequency is set to Ondemand and it seems to happily bounce between 408MHz and 1.51GHz as required. I noticed that on the rock/rock account, the CPU frequency widget showed a 1.99GHz option. On the MATE standard desktop, when using my new user, it tops out at 1.51GHz. I'll need to look into why this might be. I doubt the hardware will not go beyond this and that this is a software limitation.
Applications
I had no issue running any of the included applications. LibreOffice Writer performs as expected, Chromium does its thing. The terminal is just like any other.
I did try to run some other apps because I would like to be able to at least show them in a demo context. So, I tried installing Blender (blender.org) and Reaper (https://reaper.fm).
I pulled Blender (v2.79) from the standard repos by doing sudo apt-get install blender. Installation was without a problem. However, Blender will not run and exits with: "Error! Blender requires OpenGL 2.1 to run. Try updating your drivers.". Something to look into. As a side note: I tried this on the Raspberry Pi 4 over the weekend and Blender installed and ran perfectly. Not sure whether there is some kind of driver issue here or whether this is me not having had enough time to get things working properly.
When installing and running Reaper I get an interesting error message. It exits with: "bash: ./reaper: No such file or directory". Not sure what this is about. The file clearly exists (I just ran it). So I think there may be a permissions thing going wrong here. Haven't worked it out yet.
Peripherals
At first, neither of the USB ports on the laptop appeared to be working. I attached a wired mouse and there was no power to the mouse. After a few minutes use of the laptop, this seemed to correct itself though. At first the USB port on the right hand side started working and then the one on the left hand side worked as well.
I have managed to power the laptop off the USB-C port but my dock (Lenovo Thunderbolt 3 Dock) and dongle (Anker Premium 5-in-1 USB-C Hub) don't seem to be able to provide connectivity for peripherals yet. So I will have to do some more research there. As I mentioned, power from the dock worked fine. I have not tried my Belkin USB-C dock yet.
Conclusion
I love the PBP so far. It's a great build and as a daily driver the experience seems to be very similar to my Lenovo Thinkpad T460s on Ubuntu 19.04. Performance wise it may be a little bit behind but I can cope with that. I use my laptop mainly for document creation (Wikis, Office, Gimp etc.), media (Youtube etc.), terminal work, web apps (Draw.io, Slack, Skype, WhatsApp etc.) and web browsing.
So far I am having a great experience. First impressions of the system after 3 hours are very positive! Thank you Pine64.
<<UPDATE>>
The standard temperature panel app does not appear to be working. The CPU is definitely warmer than 19°C.
I'll have to find a way to read out the temps correctly.
<<UPDATE>>
When trying to install Reaper (https://reaper.fm) yesterday I tried to install the AArch64 binary. It wouldn't work because the correct one to download and use from the Reaper website is the armv71 binary. Reaper now runs fine. I have yet to do any work with it but the fat that it runs is a good start.
TL;DR:
Great initial experience. Perfect for my laptop workloads and use cases. Solid build (both hardware and software).
Packaging and hardware
It arrived in the same packaging as everyone has been reporting. Minimalist but well protected. A foam sleave inside two cardboard boxes, inside a jiffy bag, inside a plastic DHL bag. The power supply cam separate and with a European power plug. Unfortunately for me, not with a UK plug. Probably not an issue in the future because I will charge off USB-C but I had to dig out my travel plug to make it work today.
I noticed that the laptop now has a large label on the back with the model spec, FCCID and CE logos on it. There is no longer a sticker on the palm rest that indicates the size of the eMMC.
Operating System
I powered on the device and it booted into the OS as expected. The device came with 92% battery charge.
After logging in to the rock/rock account, I connected to the WiFI and did a quick update:
Code:
$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt upgradeI quickly moved on to trying Chromium (haven't gone near Firefox yet) and it worked as expected. No issues firing up YouTube and running some 1080p videos. The system averaged at about 70% CPU usage (I did a quick estimate using htop). All six cores were doing stuff but none of them were particularly busy.
Then, quickly on to creating myself a user. I used adduser. After creating the user I added the user to the sudo group in /etc/group. When logging in to the new user account, I noticed that it booted into the standard MATE desktop. No Pine background and no Pine desktop layout like the rock/rock account. Doesn't really matter. I can do those customisations later. I also had to make sure that the keyboard layout was corrected. It defaulted to English (US). I needed English (UK). That was quickly resolved.
I made sure that the Keyboard and Trackpad firmware were updated with the instructions on the forum. This was effortless. Thank you for the good instructions for this.
I installed the CPU temperature indicator on the panel to give me some idea of how hot it gets. During normal use (whilst I am typing this article) it has not gone above 19°C. CPU clock frequency is set to Ondemand and it seems to happily bounce between 408MHz and 1.51GHz as required. I noticed that on the rock/rock account, the CPU frequency widget showed a 1.99GHz option. On the MATE standard desktop, when using my new user, it tops out at 1.51GHz. I'll need to look into why this might be. I doubt the hardware will not go beyond this and that this is a software limitation.
Applications
I had no issue running any of the included applications. LibreOffice Writer performs as expected, Chromium does its thing. The terminal is just like any other.
I did try to run some other apps because I would like to be able to at least show them in a demo context. So, I tried installing Blender (blender.org) and Reaper (https://reaper.fm).
I pulled Blender (v2.79) from the standard repos by doing sudo apt-get install blender. Installation was without a problem. However, Blender will not run and exits with: "Error! Blender requires OpenGL 2.1 to run. Try updating your drivers.". Something to look into. As a side note: I tried this on the Raspberry Pi 4 over the weekend and Blender installed and ran perfectly. Not sure whether there is some kind of driver issue here or whether this is me not having had enough time to get things working properly.
When installing and running Reaper I get an interesting error message. It exits with: "bash: ./reaper: No such file or directory". Not sure what this is about. The file clearly exists (I just ran it). So I think there may be a permissions thing going wrong here. Haven't worked it out yet.
Peripherals
At first, neither of the USB ports on the laptop appeared to be working. I attached a wired mouse and there was no power to the mouse. After a few minutes use of the laptop, this seemed to correct itself though. At first the USB port on the right hand side started working and then the one on the left hand side worked as well.
I have managed to power the laptop off the USB-C port but my dock (Lenovo Thunderbolt 3 Dock) and dongle (Anker Premium 5-in-1 USB-C Hub) don't seem to be able to provide connectivity for peripherals yet. So I will have to do some more research there. As I mentioned, power from the dock worked fine. I have not tried my Belkin USB-C dock yet.
Conclusion
I love the PBP so far. It's a great build and as a daily driver the experience seems to be very similar to my Lenovo Thinkpad T460s on Ubuntu 19.04. Performance wise it may be a little bit behind but I can cope with that. I use my laptop mainly for document creation (Wikis, Office, Gimp etc.), media (Youtube etc.), terminal work, web apps (Draw.io, Slack, Skype, WhatsApp etc.) and web browsing.
So far I am having a great experience. First impressions of the system after 3 hours are very positive! Thank you Pine64.
<<UPDATE>>
The standard temperature panel app does not appear to be working. The CPU is definitely warmer than 19°C.
I'll have to find a way to read out the temps correctly.<<UPDATE>>
When trying to install Reaper (https://reaper.fm) yesterday I tried to install the AArch64 binary. It wouldn't work because the correct one to download and use from the Reaper website is the armv71 binary. Reaper now runs fine. I have yet to do any work with it but the fat that it runs is a good start.
