Pinebook Pro Initial Impressions

[Tim-oh]

Got my PB Pro in late January.   Stuck with the default image for most of February while I was on the learning curve, but managed to coax Cura, Stellarium, Freecad to work.
It was only at the beginning of April with the Manjaro 20.04 release that things got a lot easier & faster.  Manjaro Desktop is so much faster & snappy than the previous desktop.  The switch to Manjaro (which included lastest Panfrost) also resulted in no manual building to get Cura, Freecad and Stellarium to work.  Early April, the Minetest folks also issued work-around/fix so Minetest would work in armv8 cpus.  I'm happy with just about every aspect on the software side since switching to Manjaro.

Hardware, I look the screen size, weight, metal chassis.  I find the USB-C a bit finicky, such as video will only work if the USB-C is plugged in the "right way".  ie:  Sometimes I need to flip the plug over and re-insert to get video working.  Also, I can not charge through USB-C with one of my chargers.  And finally, while running all CPUs hard + screen for an extended period, it will actually discharge.  (ie:  CPUs maxed out for an hour.)

For the typical user, what we get for this laptop, it's awesome. 

For the tinkerers, the fact the hardware is similarly based on the RockPro, it brings sense of familiarity to do stuff with other Pine64 platforms.  In fact, I liked the hardware performance and setup in the PB Pro so much, it inspired me to replace my Asus NAS with RockPro64 based system.


Tim