Hey all, I'm Marcus, aged 43, father of three and husband (which means limited tinkering time) from Germany.I do casual computing with Linux with distro hopping in the past, but mainly on Ubuntu flavors these days, since ~15 years.
I do buy my hardware on a rather tight budget, partly because for my needs 5 year old PCs are just good enough for my needs and in terms of "bang for the buck" and for environmental reasons.
My last PC was a Dell XPS I used for almost 10 years.My personal budget has been also very tight in the past. While it's much better now, I still don't dump my money as easily as before.At the moment I am writing with an Acer R11 Chromebook running GalliumOS, 2 years old, upgraded with an external USB Stick.A Pinebook Pro would be my first serious ARM based computer apart from my aging Sailfish phone, but I find myself seriously considering it.It's time for something new because the Pinebook does everything I ever dreamed of in a Linux Laptop, and fills the gaps where the Chromebook fell behind.
I like the idea of a fully free stack. But my Chromebook has too little internal Storage and no option for SSD. The internal keyboard, screen and touchpad are usable, but the PBP outshines it in every aspect. Especially the screen is a real upgrade for me. I highly appreciate the way how Pine64 operates and therefore the 230.-€ are a nobrainer for me. I do hope it's also more durable than my Chromebook. It sure sports more performance which can be a bit of an issue on the Acer R11.
That's also why gaming is of no concern for me. Although Steam runs fine on my Chromebook, most games are out of it's reach. Will do mostly Retrogaming on the PBP, which is fine.Apart from basic browsing I will use it mostly for writing my essays in Markdown and vi or do some Ruby on Rails Development. I expect no roadblocks, there. I plan on switching from an Ubuntu based OS to Manjaro i3 once it's ready and in the long run migrate over to sway.
I'd say, yes! Give it try!!
PS: my name is really Marcus and so on. So I think I can relate. ;-)
I do buy my hardware on a rather tight budget, partly because for my needs 5 year old PCs are just good enough for my needs and in terms of "bang for the buck" and for environmental reasons.
My last PC was a Dell XPS I used for almost 10 years.My personal budget has been also very tight in the past. While it's much better now, I still don't dump my money as easily as before.At the moment I am writing with an Acer R11 Chromebook running GalliumOS, 2 years old, upgraded with an external USB Stick.A Pinebook Pro would be my first serious ARM based computer apart from my aging Sailfish phone, but I find myself seriously considering it.It's time for something new because the Pinebook does everything I ever dreamed of in a Linux Laptop, and fills the gaps where the Chromebook fell behind.
I like the idea of a fully free stack. But my Chromebook has too little internal Storage and no option for SSD. The internal keyboard, screen and touchpad are usable, but the PBP outshines it in every aspect. Especially the screen is a real upgrade for me. I highly appreciate the way how Pine64 operates and therefore the 230.-€ are a nobrainer for me. I do hope it's also more durable than my Chromebook. It sure sports more performance which can be a bit of an issue on the Acer R11.
That's also why gaming is of no concern for me. Although Steam runs fine on my Chromebook, most games are out of it's reach. Will do mostly Retrogaming on the PBP, which is fine.Apart from basic browsing I will use it mostly for writing my essays in Markdown and vi or do some Ruby on Rails Development. I expect no roadblocks, there. I plan on switching from an Ubuntu based OS to Manjaro i3 once it's ready and in the long run migrate over to sway.
I'd say, yes! Give it try!!
PS: my name is really Marcus and so on. So I think I can relate. ;-)
