I've been running the "stock" Debian/MATE Linux and it has been improving but it still randomly crashes and has odd problems with video, audio and printers.
Another issue is that many of the packages in this distro are out of date and many versions behind current releases.
(Most recently Kdenlive, Firefox)
Can anyone recommend a more functional and up to date distro?
Sure, I prefer auyfan's Ubuntu and Armbian Bionic.
Just these distros does not boot when I am using modified SPI flash uboot, but they work great with default uboot.
The most up to date distro is Manjaro.
Everything i need is working. (I think [emoji4])
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manjaro and mainline kernel is the way to go for an out of the box experience.
just use their kernel sources for any system you want. for me that is debian sid arm64.
Of course what OS you like depends a great deal on what you expect of it and what it is you expect to do with the Pinebook Pro.
For my use I have found Q4OS to work best for me. It is stable and reliable. By and large power management works like I expect it to work on a laptop. Applications I have installed all work as expected out of the box. Printing and scanning work. Email/PIM work well. Office applications work well as does photo management tools. Music and video play back work well with sound levels being at a good level.
The OS comes with a built in screen scaling utility, which makes it easy to set the UI elements to easy to see sizes. And you can decide at first run how much software you wish to be included by default.
Personally for an easy to work with daily laptop Q4OS is shaping up very nicely and I look forward to their stable release.
bill
I, too, like q4os, the retro look
But cups, like in all stretch distros is too old for airprint AND
power saving in sleep was not so good
How is your power saving? I assume S3 sleep?
What changes?
I am not familiar with AirPrint. I have an OfficeJet Pro 8710 and an Epson printer and Q4OS connects with them out of the box for both printing and for scanning. Places I have visited where I need to print (library etc.) with network printers have also been useable with little effort.
The Pinebook Pro lasts me all day off the mains. With Q4OS it goes to sleep when I close the lid and when I press fn+esc. It comes back to life when I tap the power button. At the end of the day I charge it back up and it is ready for another day. I have not investigated how long it will stay in sleep or what the battery consumption is during that state.
It is my understanding that S3 is a state defined by the ACPI specification which is part of the X86 architecture. I assume that Linux tries to emulate this state on ARM. I would guess that over the long haul it would be more profitable to sort out power usage characteristics of ARM and work with those rather that try and emulate the power management of a different architecture.
In any event my comments are just meant to say that Q4OS meets my needs as is. Q4OS is still under heavy development for the Pinebook Pro as are most of the other distributions. Overall Q4OS has made a big commitment to the ARM desktop and I am looking forward to more polished results of their work.
bill
