Big thanks to Armbian!

[soupbowl]

I still love my Pinebook. It doesn't get as much love as it should since it's slower than my phone, but I've been trying various different operating systems out again to see what I think. However since the Pinebook Pro came out, this model has been treated as legacy. Quite sad since it's still up for sale, but there you go.

I've tried and got the following:

• KDE Neon - Nice enough, but all of a sudden stopped updating and working for me. Was support dropped?
  
• Manjaro - Not for me. Works well enough but I'm not a fan of Arch (personal preference) and I found it to be slower than Neon.
  
• Q4OS - Omg, they have an XP theme that's super close! My leading choice at this point and really easy and comfortable to use.
  

And then I tried Armbian Hirsuite... I love my Pinebook all over again!

Hisuite is based on 21.04, so is surprisingly bleeding-edge for a laptop branch others consider legacy. But powered with XFCE4, it suddenly feels super speedy like it did when it first came out!

To give a familiar look and feel refresh, I installed the Chicago95 theme. The theme dev has worked really hard on this and it definitely shows as it feels like I'm running some kind of Plus! pack on Windows 95!

The only thing I've come across so far is the sound doesn't work? But at this rate I'm usng the Pinebook for productivity not entertainment purposes. It also boots via a UEFI solution so I think it also suffers from the Manjaro charging issue too sadly, so I'm planning on installng aufan ubuntu to the emmc if that becomes a problem (charging while using seems to work well).

Now don't get me wrong, you open an Electron app or Chromium and you can see the system visibly slow down, however I was able to run Visual Studio Code at a bearably slow speed! Impressive considering how chonky of an app VS Code is. And I mean with lots of extensions (I write PHP, Python and Java).

So a big thanks to the Armbian devs for keeping up support for this fantastic little cheap laptop. You guys really made me fall in love with it all over again.

[heatfanjohn]

Yes, I just booted Armbian Hirsute on my Pinebook and it runs very well.

I hadn't used the Pinebook in some time and I was looking for a newer OS to run over the Ubuntu 14 that came with the Pinebook.  Armbian Hirsute (Ubuntu 21) seams to fit that bill.

As noted on the Armbian website, suspend doesn't work.

I need to research how to load Armbian to the eMMC.

[rookieone]

Thanks for pointing out that new Armbian was there for the pinebook, I hadn't looked for a while |-) 

Now sitting on the couch, pinebook on my lap since long time 

rookieone@pinebook-a64
----------------------
OS: Armbian hirsute (21.08.6) aarch64
Host: Pinebook
Kernel: 5.15.4-sunxi64
Uptime: 56 mins
Packages: 1601 (dpkg)
Shell: bash 5.1.4
Resolution: 1366x768
DE: Xfce 4.16
Theme: Numix Daily [GTK2/3]
Icons: Numix [GTK2], Adwaita [GTK3]
Terminal: x-terminal-emul
CPU: sun50iw1p1 (4) @ 1.152GHz
Memory: 821MiB / 1957MiB

Yay!

And thank you Armbian of course!

BTW, the audio from the speakers seems to work just fine (after cranking up the volume via alsamixer), but to me it looks like the 3.5mm jack not working for sound, need to check again..