Pinebook Pro Initial Impressions

[Braillynn]

Just received my Pinebook Pro this morning and have been enjoying it a lot for the amount of time I've been using it. Running Fedora 33 off of a Micro SD card and have it configured very similarly to my desktop. This is going to be a great tool for me. Especially when I can put in a NVME drive and a carbon fiber skin on it.

[SpaceLord]

Happy to report i received my P.B.P. about a week ago without any issues. It was ordered from amazon at a price point of $349.99CAD. The listing stated that it is a US/CA Keyboard and a Oct./2020 Model. ( https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B0844WN...UTF8&psc=1 )

Starting with the unboxing,
Was indeed a pleasant and lacklustre unboxing, All brown boxes, nicely packed into one another. The machine was in 100% mint condition, Not a single speck of dust anywhere. I've seen other posts that describe a very different experience, but luckily for me, this was not the case!

Boot up,
Everything booted up great, no issues whatsoever. THis is my first time using Manjaro, and ill be danmed, i love it. Normally i am not the biggest fan of KDE, but im really digging this distro!. A+ manjaro P.B.P team, hats off too you!

Known Issues,
I have tested almost every known issue i could find, and not a single one has been present in my P.B.P. I havent a clue why mine came so perfect, im thinking that after the covid/factory ordeal, they started bringing the systems into the states and quality checking them here before being shipped out on amazon, or i got mine from an amazon re-seller. No idea tho.
Even the battery charging issue has not been a problem at all, I mean, it charges really slowly when your using it, but thats to be expected with such a tiny little guy. Knock on wood it maintains the ability to charge and run when i install the SSD upgrade.

Will post updates over the next two months of how its going, But for now! I love it, and it works great! Sooo happy i made the purchase, and recommend it to anyone with the wanting to learn linux bug <3
*****5 Stars!

[vatin]

Just received my pinebook pro. The shipping only took 2 days to Thailand.
Overall, I'm very impress with the laptop. I've heard someone said the trackpad used to be awful. But I find it to be quite ok. It might possibly be fixed. I'm very satisfied.

[ab1jx]

Both the keyboard and trackpad firmware have been through at least 1 revision since the earliest models.  Mine came Jan 13, 2020 and I think I have a fixed version.  I've done the update anyway.

Except some keys don't work.  I have the ANSI keyboard and a few of the Fn-shifted top row keys, like F1-F6 and F10/NumLk don't work.  And NumLk is actually on both Print Screen and Pause.  I have a thread at https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=13576  I'm happy with it the way it is but some people might not be.  Some chips can only be updated 8 times as well.

[Fairly-Purple]

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. 

[User 22018]

Mine arrived this morning. Trackpad was initially terrible, but after running updates it's been a lot better.

Tried to get the hang of KDE, but I've taken the plunge and gone with Manjaro i3 this afternoon and it's pretty brilliant, very quick and everything just works. Getting used to i3 & how to configure it is a bit of a pain but it's fun.

Hardware looks excellent, I'm really happy with it

[walterbe]

Hallo,

First impressions;

Like the good and basic packaging. Looks like the packaging of my Unicomp keyboard came in.

The metal case feels good. Basically the whole look is way above the price.  And to me the thinness still makes an impression on me. I like it a lot. Large nice screen.

The only negative until now I can say is;

• the length of the cable of the charger; really?  Would love to pay X cents more for some more cable. My old Chromebooks charger cable is a bit more then 2  times so long and that is very useful.
  
• audio expectations are low on something like this. But why is the volume so remarkably low? Even at 150%.
  
• the brightness does not go down until to screen is off. And I do not like that. (*)
  

I know the 3th point is defiantly OS dependent so can that can be fixt. The 2th maybe also. But this is about first impressions.

I am not used to a qwerty. Not a negative, I knew that. Going to see of I can rearrange the keys and edit the keymap.

(*) Clarification:  brightness control buttons do work. At the lowest setting the screen is still on barely. I can imagine some people do not see the use of the lowest setting as being 'screen off'. I use that to play Youtube for the audio in the dark.

[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.

[moonwalkers]

Low volume is an ALSA thing - I had to mess with state file (/var/lib/alsa/asound.state) to make sure all the relevant sound mixer levels are set to the values I want. Run `sudo alsamixer` and see the first two levels - likely one of them is set pretty much to the minimum.

Brightness - I'm not sure what exactly you're trying to describe, I know out of the box some distros don't have brightness keys on the keyboard working properly. There is udev fix for that, though for some reason it doesn't seem to work for me, but the brightness is still adjustable by the slider in my power management applet.

Deep sleep - that AFAIK depends primarily on the interaction of u-boot/ATF with kernel, and it works beautifully on my machine with latest BSP u-boot and xmixahx's 5.8.5 kernel (I've been too lazy to build a newer one). You may be losing sound after waking up, for that see the sound reset script and systemd unit I posted in one of the topics on these forums.

[ab1jx]

Low volume is an ALSA thing - I had to mess with state file (/var/lib/alsa/asound.state) to make sure all the relevant sound mixer levels are set to the values I want. Run `sudo alsamixer` and see the first two levels - likely one of them is set pretty much to the minimum.

Brightness - I'm not sure what exactly you're trying to describe, I know out of the box some distros don't have brightness keys on the keyboard working properly. There is udev fix for that, though for some reason it doesn't seem to work for me, but the brightness is still adjustable by the slider in my power management applet.

Deep sleep - that AFAIK depends primarily on the interaction of u-boot/ATF with kernel, and it works beautifully on my machine with latest BSP u-boot and xmixahx's 5.8.5 kernel (I've been too lazy to build a newer one). You may be losing sound after waking up, for that see the sound reset script and systemd unit I posted in one of the topics on these forums.

The simple alsa fix is to download this asound.state file https://gitlab.manjaro.org/manjaro-arm/p...ound.state  Copy it to /var/lib/alsa/asound.state Then type "alsactl restore".  The headphone and speaker both require manipulating 2 controls, one works like coarse and the other fine.  The left 2 controls in alsamixer work together.

Wifi has nothing to do with 5G I don't think.  There was a 5 GHz wifi band before 5G came along.  Hefty amount of bandwidth by making all the signals really wide probably.  802.n is wide, 5G may work like that. 5G is 5th generation, after 2G, 3G, LTE, but it's strictly a telephone standard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G