Got my unit today and took it for a spin. So far so good. I thought getting used to an ISO keyboard would be easy, but it's going to take some more time than I thought. Beyond that I was pretty impressed how things seemed to work out of the box. After taking it for a spin, I shut down and took off the cover and attempted to install the NVME adapter and drive (as well as flip the UART switch). Installation went well but after re-assembling the unit I realized that one side of the touchpad was now barely usable and required quite a bit more force than the other side. I tried all kinds of things with the NVME adapter to try and make this better and eventually just gave up and removed it altogether as the trackpad being usable is absolutely critical for me.
For reference this is the NVME drive I used: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07J2Q4SWZ/
FWIW: It's power consumption is perfect for the PBP based on the measurements I found in a Toms Hardware review on the device. It's shame the case can't seem to handle it without rendering the touchpad much more difficult to use.
Other quirks I noticed during my initial exploration of the system:
1. Tried to use xrandr to add a new 1600x900 resolution using a modeline I generated using cvt. I was able to add the resolution to the eDP-1 adapter but attempting to switch it produces a black screen. 1080p is just a bit too small for my tastes on a 14" screen. In addition there weren't any other 16x9 resolutions available by default other than 1080p.
2. The default config for lightdm should probably have the session selector configured to display somewhere on the top bar. While it's relatively easy to add this if you know what you are doing, this could be problematic for newbies who install another desktop environment and want to switch to that environment using the display manager (though maybe there is a better way to do it for newbies... if there is I don't know it).
3. I installed cinnamon using the included repos after running "apt update && apt dist-upgrade" and while it installed without issue, it immediately crashes on startup when trying to log in with it. Truthfully based on what I read, these were the results I was expecting as I know that Gnome 3 isn't supposed to work and these DEs share a lineage.
4. Tested YouTube with Firefox and it worked great. Got full screen video playback running without issue.
5. The default MATE installation had a software compositor enabled that doesn't support transparency as I quickly discovered. I was able to work around this by disabling the built-in compositor altogether and adding compton to the "Startup Applications" list. Transparent terminals FTW.
6. During the brief period of time that I had the NVME adapter installed I was able to see my NVME drive and interact with it using gdisk (which I had to install using apt of course). So that's good. I was wondering however, is it currently possible or will it be possible in the future to boot directly off the NVME drive?
All in all I'm impressed. Though the NVME / Trackpad issue was a definite setback. Beyond that I am very impressed with the general level of quality and polish of the hardware itself. So kudos on that. Sadly I won't have any more time to work with it until early next week as I'm going to be traveling over the weekend but I am definitely looking forward to it.
For reference this is the NVME drive I used: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07J2Q4SWZ/
FWIW: It's power consumption is perfect for the PBP based on the measurements I found in a Toms Hardware review on the device. It's shame the case can't seem to handle it without rendering the touchpad much more difficult to use.
Other quirks I noticed during my initial exploration of the system:
1. Tried to use xrandr to add a new 1600x900 resolution using a modeline I generated using cvt. I was able to add the resolution to the eDP-1 adapter but attempting to switch it produces a black screen. 1080p is just a bit too small for my tastes on a 14" screen. In addition there weren't any other 16x9 resolutions available by default other than 1080p.
2. The default config for lightdm should probably have the session selector configured to display somewhere on the top bar. While it's relatively easy to add this if you know what you are doing, this could be problematic for newbies who install another desktop environment and want to switch to that environment using the display manager (though maybe there is a better way to do it for newbies... if there is I don't know it).
3. I installed cinnamon using the included repos after running "apt update && apt dist-upgrade" and while it installed without issue, it immediately crashes on startup when trying to log in with it. Truthfully based on what I read, these were the results I was expecting as I know that Gnome 3 isn't supposed to work and these DEs share a lineage.
4. Tested YouTube with Firefox and it worked great. Got full screen video playback running without issue.
5. The default MATE installation had a software compositor enabled that doesn't support transparency as I quickly discovered. I was able to work around this by disabling the built-in compositor altogether and adding compton to the "Startup Applications" list. Transparent terminals FTW.
6. During the brief period of time that I had the NVME adapter installed I was able to see my NVME drive and interact with it using gdisk (which I had to install using apt of course). So that's good. I was wondering however, is it currently possible or will it be possible in the future to boot directly off the NVME drive?
All in all I'm impressed. Though the NVME / Trackpad issue was a definite setback. Beyond that I am very impressed with the general level of quality and polish of the hardware itself. So kudos on that. Sadly I won't have any more time to work with it until early next week as I'm going to be traveling over the weekend but I am definitely looking forward to it.