Pinebook Pro Initial Impressions

[tsago]

Haiyoooo,
Typing this from my new Pinebook Pro and all that jazz...

Impressions

The good

•  - Looks and feels super sexy!
  
•  - Pretty chirpy fast boot up, I like it!
  
•  - Love the workflow for testing new OS images: Write to SD, plug it in, reboot, done!
  
•  - Battery speed seems pretty good. I picked it up on Tuesday, let it livestream a youtube video for a few hours, and I'm only just recharging for the first time
  
•  - I like the physical feel of the touchpad. Delicious!
  

The nitpicky/neutral

•  - I feel like I have to ram micro-SD cards uncomfortably deep before the locking mechanism "bites" into the card (glad to have some nails!)
  
•  - The bottom panel is ass to place back in after opening it. Especially the sides around the ports are a very tight fit. It's not sitting 100% flush with the side corners of the chassis in there (maybe I need to screw in the mid-side screw in harder?). I also see a bit of a denting around that place on one side, makes me wonder if perhaps the assembly people are having a hard time putting it in as well? (disclaimer: I only noticed this after looking inside, so there's a chance this might be my own doing)
  
•  - There are also two completely loose tiny stand-off plastic pieces for the top/right left corner (near the screen) screws. I almost lost them when opening the back. We should probably put a warning about this in the disassembly guide. edit: ignore, already documented here
  
•  - I was a bit surprised by the "shallowness" of the path the screen can take before it hits the end when opening. It will take some getting used to, coming from a Dell which can extend its screen to the point of being perfectly horizontal with the main-body part.
  
•  - The screen when closed doesn't firmly stick to the main body. Makes me worry a bit that I'll be more likely to jam stuff in-between (probably irrational). It would be nice if the next iteration included some magnets, or some other way to "fasten" the screen to the body a bit more. 
  
•  - Using a newly created user account drops you into into a fugly default theme. Would be nice if rock's theme was the system default. (or maybe let's collect guidelines on how to recreate rock's profile for arbitrary new users? I don't like using default accounts   )
  
•  - The touchpad is drunk. When I'm trying to snipe a few pixels aside (or a few letters in a text), there seems to be an initial "dead zone" where the touchpad ignores my finger. Similarly when I stop from a slow movement, there seems to be a bit of leftover momentum before the mouse stops moving. This makes it feel like the mouse is trailing/lagging behind me.
  

The bad

•  - Left-CTRL+left-SHIFT+TAB key combination does not work (used e.g. to jump to the previous tab in browser). This is driving me absolutely insane. Note that if either of the left CTRL or SHIFT is replaced by its right-side version, this combination works. right-CTRL+right-SHIFT+TAB also work. I have also tested this with the Chromium OS buid linked in the wiki; same behaviour, so not limited to the factory-provided Debian.
  

edit2: bonus head-scratcher - In Chromium, the "chrome://settings" tab keeps crashing within a second of fully loading. (was fun trying to sync my profile like this to get my password for the forum) The version is 72, so perhaps a newer one will fix it (78 seems to be the latest)?