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How did we do this year and what could be done better?
#13
(12-08-2019, 05:23 PM)Der Geist der Maschine Wrote: Sometimes, I wish Pine64 would care more about the quality of their products and strive for perfection. Let's have a look about the Pinebook Pro.

There are at least two hardware defects:

#1 People report whine when playing audio https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=8242. I wish there were an official reaction from Pine64: Can they reproduce the problem and acknowledge that there is a hardware defect? Do their hardware engineers investigate? Did they come up with a solution? Can users implement their solution with enough technical skills? Will the next Pinebook Pros have revised hardware? It seems that Pine64 does not care about this hardware defect and we have to live with it.

#2 People report battery drain when on external power https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=8240. I wish there were an official reaction from Pine64: Can they reproduce the problem and acknowledge that there is a hardware defect? Do their hardware engineers investigate? Can they tell us if that harms the battery? Did they come up with a solution? Can users implement their solution with enough technical skills? Will the next Pinebook Pros have revised hardware? It seems that Pine64 does not care about this hardware defect and we have to live with it.

#3 People report kernel crashes https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=8184 when the system is under load (in the meantime, I moved to Manajaro's kernel which is rock solid). One needs a serial console to debug the kernel crashes. TL Lim seems to live in my neighborhood and so I was asking him to borrow me a serial console cable to debug the kernel crashes. I wanted to have the serial console cable not for my own experiments but for the overall good. I did not get a reply. As it recently turned out, a serial console cable would not have mattered:

#4 People report issues with Pine64's serial console cable https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=8494 frying the Pinebook Pro. How was the serial console cable tested? How was it possible that it's sold in the store? Why is it still sold in the store?

#5 The Pine key can only be used as a privacy switch key, but not together with any other key. This key is used by many people together with the cursor keys to switch virtual screens. Pine64 was only active in discussions about the shape and symbol of the Pine64 key, but don't join discussions on problems with it. Is that a hardware (keyboard) limitation or a firmware limitation? In the latter case, is someone actively looking into improving the firmware? We don't know.


I used to be quite enthusiastic about the Pinebook Pro and provided a few kernel patches. One (or two?) are in Manjaro's kernel and so a lot of people help to improve the Pinebook Pro because the believe Pine64's approach to open hardware is the future but not everything can be outsourced to the community.

As an actual PinebookPro first batch user I don't these things as problems or don't experience them. In my opinion you should only get a PinebookPro at this stage if you are willing to accept that it is not yet completely finished. The provided debian Mate actually works pretty well (for a previous KDE/Windows7/10 user) and the updates work (and fixed for example the firefox crashes). It will take some time for other distros to come with a tuned version (I'm hoping for a KDE neon), and I hope we will get mainline only kernels. I would like to see the main distro updated to debian 10 sometime, but are willing to wait for a mainline kernel there. I'm going to try Manjaro from SD soon (if I have more time/XMas holidays?).


Messages In This Thread
RE: How did we do this year and what could be done better? - by pljanson - 12-09-2019, 01:33 AM

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