New pinebook owner - first impressions
#1
Today I received my Pinebook. Here are my first impressions, not ranked by seriousness or whatever, just how I remember them:

- DHL charged almost 15 euro ON TOP of the import taxes, as a fee for lending me the import tax for a day or two. If a bank would charge this as interest, it would be illegal. As fraction of the purchace price, 15% is rather much. Please use another shipper next time.

- The keyboard feels very nice! The size and weight are great. I have a macbook from work, and its screen is hardly larger, and I like the pine keyboard feel better.

- However, there is no key with ' and " on it, which is usually left of the Enter key. That is a very important key for programming... Using the Fn+-_ key is not really a good substitute.

- The key labeled \ and | does not produce these characters (in US keyboard layout), but < and > . That is also annying.

- Lots of graphics glitches. Menus, or letters in Konsole, have random horizontal lines in them. Graphics are also very slow. Several of the desktop effects such as a cube when switching workspaces do not work.

- My pinebook hang a few times while doing something graphical.

- The video players seem to use the wrong stride for the display. The image is unwatchable but it seems every next lower line is offset many pixels to the right. At first I thought it might have been because I had set a screen magnification factor as recommended, but when I undid this, the effect remained.

- The clickpad is weird, in the sense that it clicks only near the bottom corners. I have not found a way to click the middle button, which is very important for X pasting.

Hopefully I will f]find out somewhere in the forum what to do about these things :-) I typed this on the Pinebook :)
#2
The installed KDE Neon is lagging behind some of the other OS options at this point. Work on different distros come and go with user interest and effort to make them work.

I would recommend switching to the Manjaro LXQt distro for more developed experience.

You mention programming so maybe arnasouls mainlline Arch would be something of interest.

If you have a some raspberry pi s maybe try out the armbian and keep things similar.

I use a mouse with mine as I have never ever been a trackpad fan and this one did not change my mind!

Good Luck!
#3
Personally, my recommendation is Manjaro KDE. Its already very usable and Strit from really does wonders maintaining his images. The kernel will also be upgradable with the last missing bits-and-pieces in the next few months using a simple pacman -Syu. What more could you want?
You can find me on IRC, Discord and Twitter


#4
Many alternative/newer Linux versions solve most of the niggles.
However you can find some tips in the wiki to fix things yourself.

https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php/1080P_...and_tricks

I agree that Manjaro is really very usable.


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