Well, I've had my Pinebook Pro for about a week. I have to say that I'm impressed. I ordered it because I wanted a little laptop that could do basic computing, and this one offered the openness and linux-friendliness that is not so common. I feel like I got more than that.
It's been a few years since I've purchased a new laptop, so I may be easily impressed, but I won't let that dampen my enthusiasm for this great machine!
Performance is adequate, which is what I hope for, but I really like the long battery life and lack of moving parts. Little to no heat, no buzz, and no whines that people here have mentioned. So I happily putter around the web, write articles, videos. I used the USB-c HDMI out as well, and ended up having some challenges, but it is one of a few wrinkles I'll mention later in the software.
The build quality is both far above what I expected, and very "user-friendly". The metal feels great and there are no little creaks or anything. It feels very solid, but light. It's user friendly in the sense that the bottom pops off with the removal of just 10 tiny screws, and then the (relative) lack of internals is then exposed. Wonderful!
I put an NVMe SSD in, and symlinked my home folders to it. Weee!
I also love the "faux-hardware" privacy switches for turning off the webcam and microphone that are in the keyboard firmware.
Anyway, I love the fact that I just removed 10 screws, didn't invalidate any warranties, break any rules or anything, and it just came off, I didn't need to pry it like I was breaking and entering.
I was planning on installing Manjaro, but the default software is very solid, so I haven't had much motivation to, yet.
Some challenges: I had to update the keyboard variant to US. Not too bad.
There have been some issues with audio devices. At first I had to go in to the GUI and choose the right output devices. Then I paired some bluetooth headphones, never got sound to come out of them, removed them...then I had to do some more toggling of devices for a few minutes to get the sound back on. Not a big issue.
Similarly, I had great results mirroring my display to a TV the first attempt. Then, I tried again, and it doesn't seem to detect the monitor. I'll keep you posted, because I will try again soon.
Finally, I want to enabled APSTe on my SSD, which I think is possible, but I've gotten a bunch of different results when I poke around about how to mess about with uboot in order to do this in Debian. Some Debian 9 instructions were referencing uboot files that do not exist on my computer. I think I'm supposed to directly edit this /boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf file, but that doesn't seem clear to me, and the entire boot partition is mounted readonly. I think I'm going to do a more complete forum post on this.
And I got to figure out how to turn off the track pad while I'm typing. Haha!
Anyway, great job! Thanks to the devs and folks who designed the machine.
Edit: I feel like I should mention the screen, keyboard and trackpad. The keyboard and trackpad are perfectly adequate once I tweaked the trackpad settings. No real surprises there. The screen is quite nice for such a low-end device. Between the screen and the exterior metal finish, this laptop has no right to look as high-end as it does!
It's been a few years since I've purchased a new laptop, so I may be easily impressed, but I won't let that dampen my enthusiasm for this great machine!
Performance is adequate, which is what I hope for, but I really like the long battery life and lack of moving parts. Little to no heat, no buzz, and no whines that people here have mentioned. So I happily putter around the web, write articles, videos. I used the USB-c HDMI out as well, and ended up having some challenges, but it is one of a few wrinkles I'll mention later in the software.
The build quality is both far above what I expected, and very "user-friendly". The metal feels great and there are no little creaks or anything. It feels very solid, but light. It's user friendly in the sense that the bottom pops off with the removal of just 10 tiny screws, and then the (relative) lack of internals is then exposed. Wonderful!
I put an NVMe SSD in, and symlinked my home folders to it. Weee!
I also love the "faux-hardware" privacy switches for turning off the webcam and microphone that are in the keyboard firmware.
Anyway, I love the fact that I just removed 10 screws, didn't invalidate any warranties, break any rules or anything, and it just came off, I didn't need to pry it like I was breaking and entering.
I was planning on installing Manjaro, but the default software is very solid, so I haven't had much motivation to, yet.
Some challenges: I had to update the keyboard variant to US. Not too bad.
There have been some issues with audio devices. At first I had to go in to the GUI and choose the right output devices. Then I paired some bluetooth headphones, never got sound to come out of them, removed them...then I had to do some more toggling of devices for a few minutes to get the sound back on. Not a big issue.
Similarly, I had great results mirroring my display to a TV the first attempt. Then, I tried again, and it doesn't seem to detect the monitor. I'll keep you posted, because I will try again soon.
Finally, I want to enabled APSTe on my SSD, which I think is possible, but I've gotten a bunch of different results when I poke around about how to mess about with uboot in order to do this in Debian. Some Debian 9 instructions were referencing uboot files that do not exist on my computer. I think I'm supposed to directly edit this /boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf file, but that doesn't seem clear to me, and the entire boot partition is mounted readonly. I think I'm going to do a more complete forum post on this.
And I got to figure out how to turn off the track pad while I'm typing. Haha!
Anyway, great job! Thanks to the devs and folks who designed the machine.
Edit: I feel like I should mention the screen, keyboard and trackpad. The keyboard and trackpad are perfectly adequate once I tweaked the trackpad settings. No real surprises there. The screen is quite nice for such a low-end device. Between the screen and the exterior metal finish, this laptop has no right to look as high-end as it does!
