Pinebook Pro Initial Impressions

[Arglebargle]

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So I fixed the firefox crashing problem by flashing Ubuntu+Mate img to MMC with Wizzard's great instructions. However page loading in Firefox and chromium is very slow. I waited for 11 minutes to load www.pine64.org in firefox and gave up. Reading the "connection information" in the wifi icon on the top menu I get values between 0 and 26 Mb/s on the PBP and 60+ Mb/s on my Asus laptop running Ubuntu+Mate  in the same location in my house and even more in my Mint netbook. Since I bout the PBP mainly to surf the inte4rnet, read email, etc online, this makes the PBP virtually unusable. Thunderbird times out while downloading 4 emails! Does anyone else have this problem?I'm guessing it's either a problem either with the wifi hardware, firmware, the or kernel. I like the PBP other features and look but this is a deal breaker for me. What can I do about this?

I noticed putting processor speed to performance helps a lot...

That worked, Rick! I turned up the processor speed to 2.02 GHz. Thanks you so much. I was on the point of of turning my PBP into a trivet! Internet speed is  better.I thought the processor speed was dynamically set to save power? I had it on "interactive" whatever that means.

Care to share where to find the setting for processor speed?

Just look at the top or bottom edge of the screen for a number. Click on it and select "Performance". Please let me know if that works for you. :-)

The Performance clock frequency governor locks clock frequencies at their maximum, system performance will be great but you'll probably want to use Ondemand to avoid excessive heat and power draw while still maintaining decent performance. Ondemand sets in-use cores/clusters to their max clock while they're running a task and then clocks them back down after.

Interactive should provide better battery life than Ondemand but may feel a bit sluggish due to the built-in ramp-up time the frequency governor uses before a core/cluster will go full speed. With some manual tuning this should perform as well as Ondemand, it's the standard cpu frequency governor for modern Android devices that don't have EAS support.

When we have a fully functional mainline kernel EAS is worth looking at too, it's a combination of task scheduler and clock frequency governor that intelligently places tasks on the best cpu for their performance need, so you should see significantly higher little cluster usage until a task actually needs a slot on the big cluster.

TL;DR - Don't just set the Performance governor and walk away, you'll generate more heat than the PBP can dissipate and wreck battery life. You probably want to use Ondemand instead.