11-29-2019, 06:47 PM
(11-29-2019, 09:54 AM)JCjr Wrote:(11-28-2019, 04:17 PM)pjsf Wrote:(11-28-2019, 11:01 AM)JCjr Wrote: Has anybody tried this yet? I'm looking at the Pinebook Pro as a solution to x86 laptop woes, but there's still a bunch of questions about compatibility.
Fedora updates to the latest stable kernel soon after release while Debian doesn't. They also mentioned that the panfrost driver is available now, and they've shown it running Fedora Workstation 31 w/ stock Gnome3 on an RK3399 SBC at some kind of trade show (I forget who had the link). According to Collabora, the panfrost driver was supposed to have been mainlined in Linux 5.2. So is this actually usable now? Has anybody tried it with Fedora 31 aarch64?
Also, there's the question about the other hardware that makes the PBP unique from its SBC counterparts, namely things like screen compatibility and the big elephant in the room: wireless and Bluetooth support, specifically in Fedora. I'd like to see some kind of 802.11ac wireless that DOESN'T require proprietary firmware blobs, but that situation is looking pretty grim, with no manufacturers committing to changing for "WiFi-6".
The PBP looks good, but I also work with GTK3+ apps and want to target Gnome3 development, so this is a requirement.
I'm debating whether to invest money into a laptop that could still have compatibility issues, or to go with an SBC that lacks some of those troublesome hardware for OSS.
I'm a long time desktop fedora user and will very likely give it a go on the PBP when available. However currently on the PBP I'm using Manjaro with a gnome (3.34) wayland session using the 5.4 mainline kernel with Panfrost. They've got bluetooth and wireless working well, still some issues around suspend tho. check out the threads currently running about manjaro and mainline kernels in the forums, those might answer a lot of your questions.
Manjaro just doesn't cut it. I'm looking for a vanilla GTK install for development. See why here:
https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2018/10...-at-scale/
Wouldn't expect you to try Manjaro, just trying to say that a recent mainline kernel with current gnome, wayland and panfrost certainly should work on the PBP and that if you're worried about blobs, the manjaro thread might be a place to look at what they're having to load since fc31 will probably need to do something pretty similar. The only issue I'm seeing with this setup at the moment is that shadows don't seem to work properly - which is an issue for things like nautilus and gnome-logs which have 'greyed' panels which turn out almost black under panfrost, Early days yet tho.