Pbpro is sluggish

[flatulent_piney]

I recently purchased a 2nd pbpro as a gift and need some help with issues that I have been patient with my own device.  The gift in question was to replace a lackluster institution issued piece of hardware.  This hardware needs to be able to be able to have zoom meetings and surf the web (chromebook-ish).  I tested zoom in a web browser with the pbpro and it worked better than what was offered (so far so good), but the web browsing is a bit slower and therefore a problem (to them).  I have noticed lag in application launch as well on my own device with launch of ..everything. Terminal, web browser (all of them) email and chat applications... all basic stuff.  Before this second person with a pbpro I would have just considered these problems due to working from an sdcard instead of emmc.  I have proven that this is not the case through testing both my machine and theirs.

That was all background, here is the foreground question:  what can be doneto make the pbpro more "snappy" for a non saavy user (the gift recipient mainly but myself aslo). Ive tried manjaro in a few DE flavors and chromium from ayufan but haven't ventured too much further. I do not have gentoo skill and ubuntu (on x86) is too "easy" for the recipient of my gift pbpro (currently manjaro kde and manjaro budgie on sdcard) . Suggestions are appreciated and welcome

For myself, I have an sdcard that has my os tweaked how I like (minus the performance debuff) and I would like to move it to my emmc rather than reinstalling and reconfiguration.  Is there an option to move an existing install from an sd to emmc?  When I search the forums I get nothing but horror stories and no sure path to success. TIA

edit: grammar and words

[gabeeg]

All I can comment on is that I am using the PBP with the latest Manjaro KDE Plasma Arm 20.12 with latest 1.29.21 stable update (booting off EMMC) and I find it snappy for what I use it for (I use the OpenGL compositor by the way).
I think it really depends on what you use it for, or what you expect of the PBP and also your personal tolerances. I use my PBP at work for note taking (SimpleNote) at meetings, company web apps, Internet (music and YouTube mostly), web based email (Outlook), LibreOffice and VSCode (Python). I do not play games on it or much that is heavy CPU or Graphics. Some people are more tolerant in what they consider snappy enough to not notice slowness or delay in getting work done. My primary machine at home is a ThinkPad P72 that is a much more powerful laptop...but I still do not find my PBP slow or frustrating...for what I do.

As for moving your current SD Card install to EMMC...I am sure that there is a way, but I have not tried. Rsync...DD...or if you have the EMMC USB adapter you can use another machine and your favorite cloning tool... I am sure someone will chime in with an easier way that I am just not thinking of. Moving to EMMC alone will be a definite performance change for the better.

[ImmyChan]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but can you make an image of your SD card using Gnome Disks and then write that to the EMMC?

[User 17828]

I would consider booting from the SD card and then using the Manjaro installer script found on the Wiki page.  From what I have read, copying an OS that is "mounted"  (actively being utilized ) may not be the best way.  My personal experience was to put an image on the SD card, boot from it, run the script to install Manjaro onto the eMMC.  Worked perfectly the first time.  Then I could tweak it to my needs.
There are several tutorials available for this.
When I booted from the SD card, it was slower that when installed to eMMC.
Ed