I've been using my PBP regularly since January. It's a great hobby machine. Structurally, everything has held up well. No cracks or breaks in the casing. The whole thing travels well in a backpack, it's so light weight. No keyboard issues and the screen is probably my favorite feature. So much real estate.
A few things worth noting. The power charger that came with the machine never worked, but powering and charging through USB-C has been flawless. I experienced a noticeable performance increase across the board when switching from the default Linux install to Manjaro. I was really surprised at the difference. I've been using the ARM port of Microsoft Visual Studio Code and the difference was night and day. On the default install there was a noticeable lag in typing before characters would appear on the screen. It was just about unusable. That type of lag was common across a lot of apps before switching to Manjaro.
The only real issue I've had with the PBP is the trackpad. It's an incredibly frustrating experience. Trying to drag cells in spreadsheets and resize windows takes 3-4 times as long as any other pointing device. It's quite painful and slows my work down tremendously. I'd be curious how modular that component is. I'd love to get something else in there. Even a simple old school pad that only does x and y position, no gestures, would be better.
Other than the trackpad, I really like this machine. It's great for general web use and light coding. I've been keeping an eye on the Gentoo thread and looking forward to getting that going once the install process is a little more manageable.
Got my PB Pro in late January. Stuck with the default image for most of February while I was on the learning curve, but managed to coax Cura, Stellarium, Freecad to work.
It was only at the beginning of April with the Manjaro 20.04 release that things got a lot easier & faster. Manjaro Desktop is so much faster & snappy than the previous desktop. The switch to Manjaro (which included lastest Panfrost) also resulted in no manual building to get Cura, Freecad and Stellarium to work. Early April, the Minetest folks also issued work-around/fix so Minetest would work in armv8 cpus. I'm happy with just about every aspect on the software side since switching to Manjaro.
Hardware, I look the screen size, weight, metal chassis. I find the USB-C a bit finicky, such as video will only work if the USB-C is plugged in the "right way". ie: Sometimes I need to flip the plug over and re-insert to get video working. Also, I can not charge through USB-C with one of my chargers. And finally, while running all CPUs hard + screen for an extended period, it will actually discharge. (ie: CPUs maxed out for an hour.)
For the typical user, what we get for this laptop, it's awesome.
For the tinkerers, the fact the hardware is similarly based on the RockPro, it brings sense of familiarity to do stuff with other Pine64 platforms. In fact, I liked the hardware performance and setup in the PB Pro so much, it inspired me to replace my Asus NAS with RockPro64 based system.
Tim
The new, to me, Pinebook Pro arrived today. Finally. First impression is very favorable. I am having a little trouble configuring the connection to my Internet Provider. I entered the same information that works (and is normal) for a desktop computer, but still no joy. Even after a reboot. Also, can't seem to find the Bluetooth or WiFi adapter. I am hoping to be able to use this computer on road trips at hotels, but even that requires WiFi for the connection. Also, a quick reading of the Wiki failed to fully identify or explain any of the security switches. What might the key strokes be for them?
Thank you,
James Good
(06-04-2020, 08:12 PM)James Good Wrote: Also, a quick reading of the Wiki failed to fully identify or explain any of the security switches. What might the key strokes be for them?
See here:
https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php/Pinebo...y_Switches
Just got my Pinebook pro. Other than the confusing pressing ESC on boot issue, it seems very nice.
One question though: does it have a plastic protective film on the screen like on the touchpad? It is hard to tell, but I got some slight issues on two corners of the screen that look like something got stuck behind a plastic foil. But I don't want to try prying it off if it is not ment to be removed 
(06-04-2020, 08:42 PM)Dendrocalamus64 Wrote: (06-04-2020, 08:12 PM)James Good Wrote: Also, a quick reading of the Wiki failed to fully identify or explain any of the security switches. What might the key strokes be for them?
See here:
https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php/Pinebo...y_Switches
Thank you for the information. This morning, after several hours of rest, I turned the PBP back on and (on another computer) opened the Wiki for the Pinebook Pro. Reading the information there, I was able to get the Wifi reset to 'On' and get the PBP connected to the Internet. All installed software has been upgraded as required. Right now, it seems like there will be several days of learning to find how to activate some of the other features on this laptop.
Just got my Pinebook Pro. Even if I've had to pay customs duty/taxes for shipping to Ireland (~ EUR 77!), really glad I made the decision to buy.
I immediately cloned the default Manjaro installation from the 64gb emmc to the 128gb emmc I ordered along with the pbp; opened it up and made the swap. Working nice and smoothly
Also, the unit I got booted properly from the get go and wifi was enabled out of the box. I didn't experience any of these known issues with some units.
Btw, I tried to boot up an SD card with Manjaro XFCE for Pinebook Pro https://manjaro.org/downloads/official/xfce/ but it was not booting up or either taking an extraordinarily long time. I tried the Debian default build and it booted from SD card without any issue. Might be Manjaro XFCE related.
Anyway, just dropped by to say that this is one solid machine and well-built and thanks so much for bringing this product
I got my pinebook pro (called fjord for pythonesque reasons) last week.
It's been nice, but with some hickups, some solved and some unresolved.
I tried a KDE-widget for cpu/net/disk monitoring, which blocked my desktop, but managed to fix it (getting rid of it after hard rebooting by removing the widget before it would suck up all cpu cycles).
Ok, don't do that, gkrellm to the rescue. Sweet, didn't realise it's got a six core engine until that point!
I charged with a usb-c charger, in series with a usb power "doctor", to see how much energy it would take. Next morning, all fine, just over 10.000 mAh.
Next time I left it overnight, it was very hot in the morning, checked and found it was empty?!?
Next time I made sure to put it to sleep before closing it and connecting it.
Again it was hot the next morning, and it was also not working (dead/empty battery) when I took it on my commute.
Not cool.
The next serious nag I have, is the state of the touchpad. It's actually working fine, including the left and right buttons at the left and right bottom corners. I configured Manjaro to have the middle button at the right and left top corners, which doesn't work about half the time. Now about the state of the thing, the right bottom corner is actually higher than the framing plastic. I took a picture, will attach it... as soon as I'm allowed.
I'm not sure if this is regular "made in China" or just badly assembled and I could open/reseat/fix it...
Oh and I've not managed to have it detect a three finger tap - more and more I wonder if this device is of the 2019 batch - can it be, if I ordered it less than 3 weeks ago...?
Some of the other nags or question marks I have:
the wiki and other places mention depressing the pine key plus F11 for three seconds to disable wifi, whereas I just press them together (like the 3-key windows salute) and the triple flash comes immediately.
More than half the time I hit Fn-Esc to put it to sleep, it won't. Just goes straight to the lockscreen.
Not cool, I would like to be able to use it on my commute.
Any hints for a way to put it in suspend to disk? Would be helpful...
The speakers are thin, slightly better when using the device on a table (I use it as a true lap top), but they do for me. When I wanted to show my wife a youtube clip, she kept saying louder, even when I already put it to eleven... She's more used to the Huawei M5 Lite which has superb sound.
On the plus side, it does do all I need it to, and lots that I want it to.
Video playback: has trouble with 1080p x265 (fully expected), other 1080p stuff it played without issue.
VPN: I needed to figure out how to set it up, have used my android phone for ages as my portable device, never used my linux laptop out of the house...
Works fine, yay me.
Mounting my server nfs drives: walk in the park, needed to install the mount.nfs packages.
VNC-viewer: tigervnc does the job.
My home computing has been on a headless server since ages, I use the tablet (M5 Lite), my phone, my wife's desktop or whatever I have (well, those are it, really), to connect, and now I use the pbp.
Which beats all others in screen size and writing abilty. Except the desktop, but that one is not as available.
Web browsing and youtube: Firefox fits the bill and does the job.
I may have to get a BT speaker for better audio though, but it's usable as is for now.
Battery life: except for the current state not being dependable - going into suspend to ram and not having any battery left afterwards - is actually very good. I do try to pay attention to screen brightness and stupid scripts on the web draining stuff (hence the gkrellm and noscript), I seem to get more than 8 hours out of it.
My impressions of the PBP's hardware:
Keyboard: great
Display: good despite pale colors due to low gamut - would be nice if there was a way to get color profiles to work...
Touchpad: absolutely terrible
Speakers: hollow and tinny sound, but gets the job done - the audio quality of the SoC itself is however excellent, so plug your headphones in!
Wi-Fi: poor - Broadcom is as bad as Wi-Fi gets, Ralink and Realtek costs less but perform far better
eMMC performance: great, writes at just over 100 mb/s and reads at around 200 mb/s
Assembly work: sort of poor - my display is mounted a little bit off, has a couple of scratches, and the polarizing film (or whatever it is covering the display) is not firmly attached so i have ugly "air bubbles" along the entire left side of it......
06-09-2020, 04:24 PM
(This post was last modified: 06-09-2020, 04:33 PM by pjsf.)
(06-09-2020, 11:40 AM)Tiny Pudding Wrote: My impressions of the PBP's hardware:
Keyboard: great
Display: good despite pale colors due to low gamut - would be nice if there was a way to get color profiles to work...
Touchpad: absolutely terrible
Speakers: hollow and tinny sound, but gets the job done - the audio quality of the SoC itself is however excellent, so plug your headphones in!
Wi-Fi: poor - Broadcom is as bad as Wi-Fi gets, Ralink and Realtek costs less but perform far better
eMMC performance: great, writes at just over 100 mb/s and reads at around 200 mb/s
Assembly work: sort of poor - my display is mounted a little bit off, has a couple of scratches, and the polarizing film (or whatever it is covering the display) is not firmly attached so i have ugly "air bubbles" along the entire left side of it......
The last point sounds like the factory forgot to remove the protective film from the panel. this happened a few times with the first batch. there's a thread somewhere about the best way to remove it.
edit: here we go: https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?...ove+screen
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