Best OS...

[damosan]

...is a subjective thing of course.

I got my Pinebook late last week and got to play with it quite a bit over the weekend.  I did some light tweaking here and there (disabled autoload of Firefox for one) and got some basic tools (compilers and editors) up and running.  All in all the performance is about what I expected but the experience can probably be improved with a more lightweight windowing environment.

Thankfully there are a number of options available.  For those of you who tried these other OS offerings what would you suggest I look into first?

Thanks.

D.

[jschall]

@damosan - That's an excellent thread starter!

What are YOU running just now? The original KDE Neon?

In my case I quickly switched to Q4OS. The main reason is the excellent community support for a newbie like me.

I am running Q4OS with the Trinity desktop, and there are a lot of things that don't work right now - for example, no screen brightness control, no way to autostart apps, ...

[damosan]

What are YOU running just now? The original KDE Neon?

Yeah I'm running the default - my question is based on how much memory is consumed with "nothing" running.  I should probably just look to swap out Plasma for a lighter weight graphical environment - if that's even possible with Neon.  Dunno.

Q4OS looked interesting.  Armbian looks really good as well.  If the NetBSD folks got their stuff running well on the platform I'd probably jump to that.

At present I'm using the Pinebook for light web surfing and running cc65 to build stuff for my 8-bit Atari machines.

D.

[Surehand53]

For a lightweight environment you could look at the Q4OS version with LXQt Desktop

[sundog]

...is a subjective thing of course.

I got my Pinebook late last week and got to play with it quite a bit over the weekend.  I did some light tweaking here and there (disabled autoload of Firefox for one) and got some basic tools (compilers and editors) up and running.  All in all the performance is about what I expected but the experience can probably be improved with a more lightweight windowing environment.

Thankfully there are a number of options available.  For those of you who tried these other OS offerings what would you suggest I look into first?

Thanks.

D.

The wireless is a bit funky at first, and I haven't tried to get the sound working yet, but the Preview 2 build of Manjaro ARM LXQT is a nice balance between performance and presentation in my book.

I'm currently running it off the microsd card (I think my eMMC module is bad). Connected to wifi with htop and chromium running for the last four hours and sitting at 52% battery remaining, and less than 600 megs of RAM in use.

I'm mostly a Debian guy, so I'm hoping the Armbian builds catch up for my convenience, but this is a solid showing from the Manjaro team in my estimation. Might have to hone my pacman skills...

[damosan]

The wireless is a bit funky at first, and I haven't tried to get the sound working yet, but the Preview 2 build of Manjaro ARM LXQT is a nice balance between performance and presentation in my book.

So when you say "wireless is funky" what exactly do you mean?  Does it work?

D.

[sundog]

The wireless is a bit funky at first, and I haven't tried to get the sound working yet, but the Preview 2 build of Manjaro ARM LXQT is a nice balance between performance and presentation in my book.

So when you say "wireless is funky" what exactly do you mean?  Does it work?

D.

It works, and it's been solid for me, but getting it to connect initially took some time - I had to try to connect and re-connect for about 10 minutes on and off before it stayed connected to my access point. Since then, it's connected quickly and remained stable.

[ImmortanJoe]

So far I've tried KDE Neon on eMMC and MicroSD on my "1080". Both worked of course. Issues with broken sunxi_drm, and GL / SDL applications being semitansparent are maddening for me.

The rest on MicroSD:
*Anarsoul's Arch: Boots a session manager. Can't seem to go beyond that. Set up wifi via terminal. Had a play around. Seems promising.
*Armbian Bionic BSP: Didn't work.
*Armbian StretchMainline: Black screen. Partition had been resized so I guess it was working.
*NetBSD: Black sceen. Why does the Pinebook version have broadcom stuff in it's root directory? Side effect of using fdt builds?

That's just what I've tried so far. Looking forward to being able to use other things on my Pinebook. KDE is nice but it's not for me. I even use LXDE on my desktop PC.

[Surehand53]

I have also tried the Manjaro (currently version preview2) archlinux with LXQt.

It works well after the Wifi is set up. The Wifi required a bit of persistence doing and trying a few things with the desktop network widget. Once set up it was fine though.
There is a report that wifi is less stable when on battery and I have not tested that yet.

Also Sound is said not to work, however I don't use that much.

All in all a very promising experience.

[Luke]

So far I've tried KDE Neon on eMMC and MicroSD on my "1080". Both worked of course. Issues with broken sunxi_drm, and GL / SDL applications being semitansparent are maddening for me.

The rest on MicroSD:
*Anarsoul's Arch: Boots a session manager. Can't seem to go beyond that. Set up wifi via terminal. Had a play around. Seems promising.
*Armbian Bionic BSP: Didn't work.
*Armbian StretchMainline: Black screen. Partition had been resized so I guess it was working.
*NetBSD: Black sceen. Why does the Pinebook version have broadcom stuff in it's root directory? Side effect of using fdt builds?

That's just what I've tried so far. Looking forward to being able to use other things on my Pinebook. KDE is nice but it's not for me. I even use LXDE on my desktop PC.

In anarsoul's arch you need to select xfce from de drop-down menu. Then it will enter the session.
Armbian doesn't have an image for the 1080p Pinebook... yet.
Don't know about NetBSD - heard a similar report. Perhaps it got fixed yesterday...