pinebook for specific purposes

[chexmix]

Hi all -

I'm very interested in this project. I read on the main site that the Pinebook is (not Pro) not really a good choice if you're looking for a "daily driver," but am wondering whether it might serve the following purposes:


- learn/play with programming, particularly in Perl, Python, R, perhaps Ruby - and ARM assembly
- display PDFs with something lightweight like zathura (provided it's available for any of the ARM-ported OSs)

... a small form factor device that could do such things (and make many potential distractions unavailable ) would be of interest to me.

Thanks,

Glenn

[tophneal]

You should be fine with that use case. It's not recommended for daily driving b/c it lacked that bit of "oomph" people expect. However, I used mine as a daily driver with several OSes (Manjaro and Android /e/, mainly.) Things were a little slower, but it didn't stop me being able to browse the web using Chromium on it.

[chexmix]

You should be fine with that use case. It's not recommended for daily driving b/c it lacked that bit of "oomph" people expect. However, I used mine as a daily driver with several OSes (Manjaro and Android /e/, mainly.)  Things were a little slower, but it didn't stop me being able to  browse the web using Chromium on it.

Thanks. I have an old Netbook from ~2009 that I can still use for some things. The Pinebook is 1.5" bigger screen and ... well, I'm really tempted to try it out.

G

[tophneal]

It's a fun little laptop, I'm sure you'll enjoy it.

[Surehand53]

Hi.

I think for your use cases the Pinebook is absolutely fine.

- You can definitely do programming, I have done that with Erlang, Lua, etc. Of course you would not want to do professional programming, but to learn it works fine.
- reading PDFs is no problem and most Pinebook Linux distributions come with a PDF viewer

There are some characteristics of the Pinebook to be aware of:
- The Display is excellent (1080p version). Very sharp and crucially a matt display with hardly any reflection. Way better than many more expensive laptops with glossy displays.
- The touchpad is a bit so so. I have used the keyboard more and more to navigate the GUI. That works quite well with LQXt, KDE, etc..
- The keyboard works fine for me, it has a few quirks with the layout, the main one that " and ' get accessed by Fn key. But nothing you don't get used to.

All in all the OG 1080p Pinebook is very well usable for light tasks like writing, hobby programming and web browsing.
Of course it's super light and the battery lasts in the area of 10h depending on what you do.

[jezek]

- The keyboard works fine for me, it has a few quirks with the layout, the main one that " and ' get accessed by Fn key. But nothing you don't get used to.

This annoys me very much. I have only one working hand and because of that layout, programming is very difficult for me (you need lots of " and ').