11-02-2019, 10:22 AM
(This post was last modified: 11-02-2019, 10:25 AM by binarian.
Edit Reason: Formatting
)
Some of my initial impressions, in vague chronological order:
- Good lord this thing is a fingerprint magnet.
- For a cheap laptop, it seems pretty well-built. There's a bit of flex on the keyboard, but overall I feel like I'm using a much better machine than the original Pinebook. Which I am.
- I really, REALLY like the splash screen as the machine boots. Like a lot. Well done to whomever designed that.
- Speaking of the screen, it looks NICE. It's matte. It's 1080p. It has small bezels. It's....nice.
- I had coil whine on the very first initial startup. It happened once I logged into the machine the first time, and lasted only a second or two while the CPU was at maximum frequency. It has not happened since, but I also haven't maxed out the CPU since either.
- No wifi hardware was found at first run. At first I was concerned, but then I remembered the firmware-based privacy switches. Enabled the hardware, rebooted, and wifi worked as expected.
- Initial update (button in bottom right) operated without issue
- Saw hexchat on the desktop, and it was preloaded with the pine64 server. Nice touch. Found it slightly silly that it didn't default to the pinebook channel, but whatever.
- Trackpad definitely has a sluggish feel to it; this is a known issue and updated firmware is already being developed.
- Uninstalled chromium, installed firefox-esr. Crashes without ever showing a gui. Removed firefox-esr and reinstalled chromium. Crashes without ever showing a gui. I don't have a browser now. Oops.
--- Stupidly did that^ before testing YouTube, so I can't comment on either video playback or speaker quality yet.
- Poked the eMMC drive. It is TINY! It doesn't sit flush against the board when attached by default, so I can see how some got shaken off during shipping. It's surprising that it happened, but I can see how it happened.
- Nvme was a bit of an adventure. To avoid duplicating posts, I'll simply link to my post here.
Next steps for me are to set up a distro (probably debian?) on the nvme drive to use eMMC as /boot and /mnt/data/primary, and the microSD card as /mnt/data/secondary. Ideally FDE.
Overall impression: This thing is gonna be a cool toy at worst, and a useful tool at best. There are a few minor issues that have various workarounds, but overall I can see this being a daily driver, or if not, a secondary machine that travels well.
- Good lord this thing is a fingerprint magnet.
- For a cheap laptop, it seems pretty well-built. There's a bit of flex on the keyboard, but overall I feel like I'm using a much better machine than the original Pinebook. Which I am.
- I really, REALLY like the splash screen as the machine boots. Like a lot. Well done to whomever designed that.
- Speaking of the screen, it looks NICE. It's matte. It's 1080p. It has small bezels. It's....nice.
- I had coil whine on the very first initial startup. It happened once I logged into the machine the first time, and lasted only a second or two while the CPU was at maximum frequency. It has not happened since, but I also haven't maxed out the CPU since either.
- No wifi hardware was found at first run. At first I was concerned, but then I remembered the firmware-based privacy switches. Enabled the hardware, rebooted, and wifi worked as expected.
- Initial update (button in bottom right) operated without issue
- Saw hexchat on the desktop, and it was preloaded with the pine64 server. Nice touch. Found it slightly silly that it didn't default to the pinebook channel, but whatever.
- Trackpad definitely has a sluggish feel to it; this is a known issue and updated firmware is already being developed.
- Uninstalled chromium, installed firefox-esr. Crashes without ever showing a gui. Removed firefox-esr and reinstalled chromium. Crashes without ever showing a gui. I don't have a browser now. Oops.
--- Stupidly did that^ before testing YouTube, so I can't comment on either video playback or speaker quality yet.
- Poked the eMMC drive. It is TINY! It doesn't sit flush against the board when attached by default, so I can see how some got shaken off during shipping. It's surprising that it happened, but I can see how it happened.
- Nvme was a bit of an adventure. To avoid duplicating posts, I'll simply link to my post here.
Next steps for me are to set up a distro (probably debian?) on the nvme drive to use eMMC as /boot and /mnt/data/primary, and the microSD card as /mnt/data/secondary. Ideally FDE.
Overall impression: This thing is gonna be a cool toy at worst, and a useful tool at best. There are a few minor issues that have various workarounds, but overall I can see this being a daily driver, or if not, a secondary machine that travels well.
