Pinebook Pro Initial Impressions

[MarshalDan]

Does anyone else get a crash out of Chromium just by selecting "Settings" from the menu? The menu does come up, but the tab crashes almost immediately? It's annoying because you can't change any settings in the browser.

Have you rebooted it since the first start? If not do so. Everything was crashing for me and i was struggling to figure out why. Then eventually it pissed me off enough to put it down. When i came back an hour later and turned it on, everything was fine.

[richfm]

Does anyone else get a crash out of Chromium just by selecting "Settings" from the menu? The menu does come up, but the tab crashes almost immediately? It's annoying because you can't change any settings in the browser.

Have you rebooted it since the first start? If not do so. Everything was crashing for me and i was struggling to figure out why. Then eventually it pissed me off enough to put it down. When i came back an hour later and turned it on, everything was fine.

Same problem here, even after many reboots.

[mspohr]

What's with the Keyring? Every time I start up it asks me for a Keyring password.

[JayM]

Ug. <this keyboard and trackpad! i can't use capitals anymore since the pipe/backslash labeled key (which is actually greater/less than) is where <i normally press shift... the trackpad if even slightly touched stops all my typing and often selects text as well, that then is replaced with the next typing.

<not a laptop for me... maybe with a <us keyboard that <i can actually type on... but the trackpad blocking typing... also too painful. will try another when <i can order with the <us keyboard... keyboard is also mushy... so not my favorite.

wow. case is nice (fingerprint magnet, but many others are too), screen is pretty good.

[binarian]

Some of my initial impressions, in vague chronological order:

- Good lord this thing is a fingerprint magnet.
- For a cheap laptop, it seems pretty well-built.  There's a bit of flex on the keyboard, but overall I feel like I'm using a much better machine than the original Pinebook.  Which I am.
- I really, REALLY like the splash screen as the machine boots.  Like a lot.  Well done to whomever designed that.
- Speaking of the screen, it looks NICE.  It's matte.  It's 1080p.  It has small bezels.  It's....nice.
- I had coil whine on the very first initial startup.  It happened once I logged into the machine the first time, and lasted only a second or two while the CPU was at maximum frequency.  It has not happened since, but I also haven't maxed out the CPU since either.
- No wifi hardware was found at first run.  At first I was concerned, but then I remembered the firmware-based privacy switches.  Enabled the hardware, rebooted, and wifi worked as expected.
- Initial update (button in bottom right) operated without issue
- Saw hexchat on the desktop, and it was preloaded with the pine64 server.  Nice touch.  Found it slightly silly that it didn't default to the pinebook channel, but whatever.
- Trackpad definitely has a sluggish feel to it; this is a known issue and updated firmware is already being developed.
- Uninstalled chromium, installed firefox-esr.  Crashes without ever showing a gui.  Removed firefox-esr and reinstalled chromium.  Crashes without ever showing a gui.  I don't have a browser now.  Oops.
--- Stupidly did that^ before testing YouTube, so I can't comment on either video playback or speaker quality yet.
- Poked the eMMC drive.  It is TINY!  It doesn't sit flush against the board when attached by default, so I can see how some got shaken off during shipping.  It's surprising that it happened, but I can see how it happened.
- Nvme was a bit of an adventure.  To avoid duplicating posts, I'll simply link to my post here.


Next steps for me are to set up a distro (probably debian?) on the nvme drive to use eMMC as /boot and /mnt/data/primary, and the microSD card as /mnt/data/secondary.  Ideally FDE.

Overall impression: This thing is gonna be a cool toy at worst, and a useful tool at best.  There are a few minor issues that have various workarounds, but overall I can see this being a daily driver, or if not, a secondary machine that travels well.

[AndyOfLinux]

Does anyone else get a crash out of Chromium just by selecting "Settings" from the menu? The menu does come up, but the tab crashes almost immediately? It's annoying because you can't change any settings in the browser.

Have you rebooted it since the first start? If not do so. Everything was crashing for me and i was struggling to figure out why. Then eventually it pissed me off enough to put it down. When i came back an hour later and turned it on, everything was fine.

Same problem here, even after many reboots.

Have you updated lately and rebooted? - "sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get upgrade" - I noticed chromium files were updated recently

[embhorn]

What's with the Keyring? Every time I start up it asks me for a Keyring password.

This worked for me:
https://askubuntu.com/questions/31786/ch...490#191490

[MarshalDan]

- Trackpad definitely has a sluggish feel to it; this is a known issue and updated firmware is already being developed.

This is literally my only complaint at this point.
Sure it had some minor issues, but they were quickly dealt with. Overall a very pleasant experience for what it is.

Even with the insane level of taxes i had to pay, its was to me still worth the money.

[zaius]

Does anyone else get a crash out of Chromium just by selecting "Settings" from the menu? The menu does come up, but the tab crashes almost immediately? It's annoying because you can't change any settings in the browser.

Yes, it's a known problem.  Please see here:

https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?...&pid=50940

[mattjb]

I have had problems with the screen though and since I haven't seen anyone else talking about these issues elsewhere on the forum it might be a problem with my specific unit. When I first started the unit it had big problems with flickering that grew when battery drained. It got better when I disabled dimming in the power management but it didn’t go away completely. After some charging cycles I find the problem have diminished but is still present, especially when battery is low and the screen brightness is dimmed.
I have a related problem with the screen in which it emits a high frequency noise which is more apparent when brightness is turned down. Its still present when fully lit though! When there’s a lot of sound in my surroundings this is not a problem but it is quite annoying when alone in a quiet room.

I'm experiencing the exact same issue as Meatball regarding the flickering screen when on battery. When on AC power, it's fine, but as soon as I unplug it, any graphical related activity (even moving the mouse) causes random massive headache-inducing flickering. It seems to get worse as time goes on... It is still present with all dimming options off and happens at any brightness level as far as I can tell. I'm also hearing a high frequency whine when it switches to battery power though I haven't paid attention if it happens at different brightness levels. It's happening on both the default Debian install and on ayufan's rock64pro bionic-mate-pinebookpro-0.9.14-1159-armhf. I'll report back on other observations I make regarding this issue.

An update on the screen flicker:
Played around with the brightness a little to see the effect and here and these are my observations on brightness levels while on battery power only...
0: no coil whine, no flicker, but absolutely too dark to see anything worthwhile
1: bad coil whine, no visible flicker, usable, just a bit dim to liking
2: horrible continuous flicker/strobe - completely unusable
3: flicker but better than 2
4: a little better than 3
5: as bad as 2
6: better than 5
7: same as 6, just brighter
8: random flicker (1-2 per second), not continuous (fractions of a second) like levels 2-7
9: horrible flicker/strobe
10: worse than 9
11: worse than 10
12-22: same as 11, just brighter, completely unusable

The flicker/strobe is also visible in non-GUI applications, like when Ctrl+Alt+F1'd
For tracking purposes, battery level is being reported as 52%. I haven't had a full discharge yet.