Pinebook, (very) first impressions
#1
Hi all.

My Pinebook 11.6" 1080 just arrived and I thought it might be interesting to share my first impressions and maybe other can add theirs.

Unboxing

The Pinebook arrives with some slim but useful packaging. There is the Pinebook, the power adapter and some nice sticker with the Pinebook logo if you want to decorate yours.
The Pinebook arrived charged , in my case about 90% so you can start right away.

The Pinebook is white from the outside with logo or branding which makes it look really nice. My first test was to try a few keys on the keyboard and I actually like it. The layout for some keys is a bit unusual for some keys but in general what you expect. (e.g. the " key requires to press Fn as well as Shift, well..)

The touch-pad is on the smaller side, but I can say already that the later test showed that it is ok.

So that's all good. Let's turn it on.
]

First use
As mentioned, the battery comes charged to a degree so the first good thing is that it turns on in first place. Brownie points.
The display brightness on my device what set to somewhat 50% which made it very dark. So the very first thing was to change that in the Settings in Power management.
Once that's done it turns out that the dispaly is actually really nice. It seems not to reflect at all and my first use was outside in the sun, which was possible.

Given the high resolution of the display the all text is on the small side. There is a pinned thread in this forum that explains a few recommended setup changes. So this was my next step.

The speed of the laptop is ok. It is probably worth to turn of some of the more playful functions of the window manager like fade in/out or translucency, with that the Pnebook gives a more snappy impression. I intend to write up all configuration changes later.

One thing I noticed is that the compositor uses software rendering and not OpenGL in the standard setup. But I will only try at a later stage if OpenGL works as I manged to lock myself out of KDE by playing around with that on a different system.

So far my impression is very positive. The general speed is very usable and the Pinebook has a good feel to it.

The next step seems to be to actually install the system completely. There is an Icon on the desktop to do that. I will try this now.
#2
Regarding  the 'speed' / performance of the Pinebook - it all depends on what OS you use. The KDE Neon that comes pre-installed is a show-case of what is possible. But if you were to try, as an example, Q4OS then you'd find that the performance can be very smooth. KDE is just a demanding DE.
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