Pinebook Pro Initial Impressions

[mew2020]

Freshly unboxed my PBP today!

Build quality appears fantastic, the keyboard is great, and the quality of the display is far above expected. 

Typing on this thing is a dream.

Unfortunately, that's where my positive impressions had to end.

First (re)boot: I finished the CLI-based onboarding wizard, got to my KDE desktop and... everything froze. I waited 5 minutes to be sure. No mouse pointer movement, no Super response, no sleep response, nothing. Wasn't able to switch TTYs to gracefully shut-down, but instead gave up and held down the power button for 10 seconds.

Second boot: Everything working great. Let's connect to some WiFi! Nope. Attempting to connect to any 5G network (20MHz and 40 MHz channels, no 80 or 160, just to be safe) immediately triggers a "wlan0 could not be found" popup. Okay, strange. I can see all of the SSIDs! After a lot of trial-and-error, I was able to connect to a 2.4G AP and download ~1.2 GB of updates. Rebooted again to be safe (lots of kernel and firmware updates, nice) and try again. No joy. Can't connect to any 5G networks. All of the 2.4G ones in the lab are working great... but nobody really uses those anymore. Can't use this laptop day-to-day.

ap6256 is showing v. 2020.02-5 installed, which appears to be the latest out(?) 
Kernel is 5.11.x, so that's fine.
WiFi and BT hardware is all showing up, SSIDs load, but no 5G will connect!

I'm not sure what to do anymore. Was hoping to daily-drive this for my personal notebook but with 2.4G WiFi only, that pretty much rules that out.

But hey, the keyboard is amazing!  I guess I'll use this as a (wired) lab notebook.

Happy to be a part of this comunity. 

I've had very good luck with Armbian w/ XFCE on my Pinebook Pro; is see that the kernel is 5.10.21-rockchip64.

I also see that I am connected to the 5GHz WiFi network right now, though unless I am transferring large files across the local network I don't notice the difference from 2.4GHz.

The only kind of big issue is that it does not sleep -- neither suspend to RAM nor suspend to disk works.  Not a huge deal; it turns out to be surprisingly easy to shut down and wait 30 seconds when powering back up.