Pinebook Pro impressions

I recently received my very own pinebook pro from the pine64 EU store, which they somehow managed to ship up to us here in Cosroe II.

The PBP comes packaged very nicely. The box includes a number of manuals and certifications, and a 5V 3000mA barrel pin charger. The fact that this machine charges on USB voltage is frankly amazing, even if it is principally a SoC. The quality of the PBP is solid, and the entire machine is light as a feather. When opened, the lid on my PBP holds its position well, however when closed seems to spring open about a milimetre or two. It stays shut fine, but I am weary to keep it in a separate compartment of my bag to avoid something slipping in and scratching the screen.

Booting up the machine for the first time, I am met with the Manjaro post-install setup. I have never used an Arch-based distribution before, but I have friends who speak very fondly of it, and were kind enough to give me a few tips, some of which I will repeat here when relevant. Immediately noticeable with the PBP is that the touchpad is sluggish, and imprecise -- the cursor seems to wonder a little after my finger has stopped moving. Fortunately, Manjaro's system settings provide a nice way of adjusting this, and after reducing the accelleration profile a little, I found the trackpad to be OK. I am used to working with Apple machines, which have bad keyboards but incredible trackpads, so I believe I am a little biased, and feel as though the PBP keyboard is really good but the trackpad not so much.

I am therefore keen to avoid using the trackpad as much as possible, for which my friends recommended Krohnkite, a tiling window manager that allows navigating between open windows using only the keyboard. There seemed to be issues with Krohnkite together with Wayland, so I was unsuccessful in setting this up. I discovered Bismuth as an alternative for working with Wayland -- building from source and installing with `makepkg` proved to be very straight forward.

esjeon/krohnkite

Bismuth-Forge/bismuth

Being able to avoid the PBP touchpad has made using the PBP very positive.

The performance of the PBP I find to be absolutely fine. I rarely use my personal computers in a particularly processor intensive setting anymore, so there is nothing I have not been able to do with the PBP yet. I have noticed the PBP stuttering a little when streaming videos on the web at high resolution and framerate, but I don't mind watching things in 720p 30fps, so this doesn't bother me. I principally use my perosnal machine to develop, watching conference talks, and for reading papers, and for this the PBP is perfect and portable. For reading especially, the range of screen brightness is quite broad (though it may be a little dull on a bright day), and I find the default colour profiles to not strain my eyes too much during extended use. When compiling big programs, I find the PBP has a built in "get up and do something else" reminder, in that the machine becomes a unresponsive and takes long enough to merit a stretch of the legs.

There is a slightly annoying pop which the speakers occasionally emit, particulary immediately after logging in or during intesive processing. The speakers will also sometimes emit a high pitched ring, which cannot be controlled with the volume controls. I see in the discord server that this is a problem many people are facing, and a software fix is currently being sought. The speakers themselves are pretty low quality and tinny, like listening to a song down the phone, but when plugging in headphones, the sound quality is absolutely acceptable. I therefore doubt I will use the speakers at all, and might even remove them to avoid the pops and rings.

The battery life is lasting anywhere from 2-4 hours with my current habits, but the charger is conveniently small so I find it no burden to bring with me where-ever I go. I might investigate external batteries of some kind later.

The 4GB of ram is not really enough for my conventional daily use of the web, and opening too many browser tabs quickly impacts the machine, which is unfortunate. For developing the 4GB is fine, though I haven't attempted any scientific programming with it yet -- we'll see how Julia copes with 4GB. Similarly, the 40Gb of MMC is quite small, but I happened to have a 256GB mini thumb drive lying around which makes up for this quite nicely.

I have not been able to get my external monitor working with the PBP via a USB-C hub, and I imagine this is because my hub is an inexpensive (and un-supported) device. I attempted the rumoured USB-C superposition fix (unplug, flip upside down, try again), though this didn't work (but gave me a good laugh in anticipation).

And that's about it so far. Looking forward to using this thing some more.