06-10-2020, 10:20 AM
First - very happy with the PBP over all, I expect to use it a lot as my travel laptop, and thanks to the team that developed it. That said, here are the issues I've encountered:
1) I cannot get my track pad to recognize a two finger tap as a right click, or I should say very rarely get it to work, if I try ten or so times in a row it seems to eventually like one attempt. I have tried messing with the timing settings but with no success. Two finger scrolling works, it can tell when one or two fingers are used.
2) Occasionally, probably once every two hours, a key sticks and starts filling the application until I press another key. I do not have to physically move a stuck key, and pressing any other key ends the process so this is clearly a firmware or software issue.
3) Manjaro keeps swapping back to the UK keyboard mapping after I set the US mapping. Again a software issue.
4) The very bottom, screw on, plate of the laptop is not even, some edges are below the lip of the base top portion and some are above it. As soon as I get the good screwdriver out of the lab I'll see if this is just a sloppy assembly issue.
5) Turning off the WiFi with the netmanager panel applet will make the wifi interface invisible if you don't enable it before you reboot. I had to use a bash shell and rfkill to get the controls back into netmanager, after the next reboot of course.
6) Manjaro lost the program group that contains settings, like for the keyboard mapping. I can get to the settings by searching for them, but the access via the menu system is gone.
Charging seems wonky, sometime is seems to charge much faster than other times, but I've got nothing specific on this I can quantify. The temperature is also a little wonky, the bottom gets hotter than is comfortable when sitting on my legs but it does not seem to be related to doing what I would consider high load activities, though I can't say how compute intensive just having LibreOffice or GIMP open are. The processor is refreshingly fast, I like that I can play a 1080p video and the display, though there are a few messed pixel on the very edge, is very very good.
I am probably more familiar with Debian systems so I'm still adjusting to Arch; but the software in their repo is refreshingly recent. I am far to accustomed to having to build software to get anything less than two years out of date, I definitely like that about Arch. But given the issues I've encountered with the keyboard mapping and the menu loss it looks like Manjaro still has little way to go before it is up for mainstream use.
So I'd give the PineBook Pro a solid B with a few issues that hopefully can get cleaned up to get to an A.
1) I cannot get my track pad to recognize a two finger tap as a right click, or I should say very rarely get it to work, if I try ten or so times in a row it seems to eventually like one attempt. I have tried messing with the timing settings but with no success. Two finger scrolling works, it can tell when one or two fingers are used.
2) Occasionally, probably once every two hours, a key sticks and starts filling the application until I press another key. I do not have to physically move a stuck key, and pressing any other key ends the process so this is clearly a firmware or software issue.
3) Manjaro keeps swapping back to the UK keyboard mapping after I set the US mapping. Again a software issue.
4) The very bottom, screw on, plate of the laptop is not even, some edges are below the lip of the base top portion and some are above it. As soon as I get the good screwdriver out of the lab I'll see if this is just a sloppy assembly issue.
5) Turning off the WiFi with the netmanager panel applet will make the wifi interface invisible if you don't enable it before you reboot. I had to use a bash shell and rfkill to get the controls back into netmanager, after the next reboot of course.
6) Manjaro lost the program group that contains settings, like for the keyboard mapping. I can get to the settings by searching for them, but the access via the menu system is gone.
Charging seems wonky, sometime is seems to charge much faster than other times, but I've got nothing specific on this I can quantify. The temperature is also a little wonky, the bottom gets hotter than is comfortable when sitting on my legs but it does not seem to be related to doing what I would consider high load activities, though I can't say how compute intensive just having LibreOffice or GIMP open are. The processor is refreshingly fast, I like that I can play a 1080p video and the display, though there are a few messed pixel on the very edge, is very very good.
I am probably more familiar with Debian systems so I'm still adjusting to Arch; but the software in their repo is refreshingly recent. I am far to accustomed to having to build software to get anything less than two years out of date, I definitely like that about Arch. But given the issues I've encountered with the keyboard mapping and the menu loss it looks like Manjaro still has little way to go before it is up for mainstream use.
So I'd give the PineBook Pro a solid B with a few issues that hopefully can get cleaned up to get to an A.
