Pinebook Pro Initial Impressions

[timmes]

My Pinebook Pro arrived last week, so I suppose now is a good time to share my impressions too. I love playing with single-board computers ever since the original Raspberry Pi came out, I have a Pine64+ and I've been working Linux on servers for ages, but I never really tried to use a Linux-based desktop environment before. I've always been a Windows user on that front, and happily so.

Seeing your stand at Fosdem Brussels earlier this year triggered me to order it.

Delivery

• Like others, I also had to pay a hefty EUR 63,75 import fee. If you can find a distributor in the EU, that would make all the difference.
  

Build quality

• Maybe i got lucky here, but mine seems fine. The keyboard flexes a little bit and there's a tiny bit of slack between the display and the webcam, but for the rest it feels solid and smooth. The touchpad is properly snapped in and the display looks great.
  

First impression

• Powering it up for the first time with the preinstalled Manjaro was a breeze, created a user, set a password and localization and off you go. Exactly how it should be.
  
• A sheet of paper with instructions for turning on the Wi-Fi was added, which worked exactly as promised
  
• After a reboot (as mentioned), connected to the Wi-Fi and fired up Firefox, everything worked as expected. Youtube works fine, even 1080P in full screen (although it does drain the battery faster, that's still no different from any other laptop).
  
• Installing a bunch of updates and rebooting, just the same, works like it should.
  
• Manjaro is really user-friendly and everything just works! For everything i did through the UI, nothing broke and not a single error message appeared. I was completely surprised that even WPA-Enterprise (PEAP + TTLS or MSCHAPV2) worked just like that!
  

Hardware

• I have nothing to complain performance-wise, it might not be very high-powered but it doesn't feel slow when browsing and you have to really push it before the 4GB limit becomes a problem (if you disagree and use Chrome, switch to Firefox first).
  
• The EMMC module doesn't seem to be holding it back either. If it ever feels slow, it's more a matter of feedback (changing the pointer to indicate something is happening in the background). Such subtle UX improvements can make a big difference.
  
• The display is just great, especially for the money.
  
• Apart from the slight flexing, the keyboard feels good, I find it pleasant to type on.
  
• The touchpad is perhaps the weakest point, it's quite hard to position the pointer accurately even at low sensitivity and unusable at higher sensitivity, which means it can be hard to select or drag something across more than half a screen's width. This is quite annoying and i would've happily paid EUR 10 more for higher-quality touchpad. Then again, as the firmware is upgradable maybe there is room for improvement as well. The buttons are fine and it's nice to have some gesture support and two-finger scroll.
  
• Sound quality is okay.
  
• Webcam gives an extremely low framerate in Cheese, picture looks okay for a laptop of this class. Haven't used it with a real video chat application yet.
  
• Haven't used the microphone yet.
  
• Haven't used the USB-C, USB3-A ports yet, or the MicroSD reader.
  

Tweaks & Tinkering

• Following the Arch Linux guides seems to work well in general and Arch's documentation is very good.
  
• I use a Yubikey for logging in (via pam_u2f) and this works fine. U2F in Firefox works as well, and so does SSH auth using the pgp certificate in my Yubikey.
  
• I encrypted my homedir with fscript and this works fine too, did have to make a few tweaks as for example putting something in ~/.pam_environment doesn't work.
  
• Enabling OpenGL ES 3.0 and installing mesa-git was easy and works fine.
  
• Installing an NVMe drive was easy enough (but i'm used to tinkering with hardware) and it was recognised immediately.
  I've put /home and /var on it as I didn't want to take the risk of changing the boot device and failing. I know I can fix anything, but I also don't have time for everything.
  
• Created a page file and modified the kernel command line to use it for hibernation. Appears to work. Perhaps this should be done by default?
  
• Even something like Keepass (on Mono) worked out of the box.
  

The future
The Pinebook Pro is already quite usable for me, but I feel the real potential still lies ahead. Panfrost is developing rapidly so I'm hoping that in a not too distant future there will be Wayland, Firefox with Webrender and video acceleration out-of-the-box. If an aarch64 build of widevine-cdm comes out that would even unlock Netflix and the likes, and it should be more than powerful enough to decode that in Full HD.

For me, and I suppose many with me, it would then tick all the boxes for a daily-driver laptop.

The tide is also with the Pinebook. Yesterday Apple basically put the first nail in Intel's and X86'es coffin as far as the consumer market is concerned. Other hardware vendors will follow suit with ARM-powered laptop with long battery life and future historians will point to the Pinebook as the genesis of this revolution.

The real killer
The real killer for me is that the Pinebook Pro charges on 5V. This may seem a bit odd, but it means a lot.

It can draw power from most public USB sockets which are everywhere, in airports, shopping malls, public transport, without having to carry a bulky charger around or having to worry about 110/220V. All you need is a USB-A to USB-C cable that you probably already carry with your phone.
This also means it works with the cheap and ubiquitous power banks. I've tried a bunch of them and all seem to feed power into the PBP. It also works with an iPad charger and other USB chargers with 2A+ capacity. I have wall sockets at home with USB sockets in them, and those work fine too.

I created my own USB-A to 3mm DC barrel plug cable which also works, with the benefit of keeping the USB-C port free.


Issues

• Unfortunately having the NMVe SSD seems to be preventing it from going into standby now, see https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?...7#pid67907
  
  
• When I opened it up to install the NVMe adapter and SSD, the speakers were stuck to the underside. The wiring doesn't have a whole lot of slack so it was difficult to figure out what to do. I was initially searching for a connector to unplug, until i checked some pictures online and noticed that the speakers were supposed to be stuck to the plastic shell rather than the metal underside. I pryed them loose, put them in the plastic shell and now it's fine. I think the adhesive was put on the wrong side of the speaker during assembly (they were facing the right way).
  
  
• I also get the high-pitched noise which indeed seems like it's from a switching power supply. Luckily as I get older my hearing will deteriorate and i will stop hearing high frequencies, so this problem will solve itself eventually . It's not at a level where it is annoying. Additionally i hear a slightly louder noise, a bit like a whine, whenever sound is being played back as well as a couple of seconds afterwards, until it stops the sound device again. This one does seem to come out of the speakers. If i had to guess i would same some high impedance PCB traces between a DAC and an amplifier somewhere are picking up crosstalk from digital traces nearby, or the amplifier's power supply (or analog ground) are noisy.
  

TL;DR
Would I recommend it to my mother? Not yet.
Would I recommend it to tech-savvy people, even if they're Linux novices? Hell yes.