Isn't all their software support done by the community still?
PINE's hardware has always been amazing. But their software support has always been terrible.
Pinebook – Powerful, Metal and Open Source ARM 64-Bit Laptop
31–40 of 54 posts
Re: Pinebook – Powerful, Metal and Open Source ARM 64-Bit Laptop
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
I own one of the original Pinebooks, and for $99 it is a great little machine. Comparing it to my MacBook Pro... it's terrible. It has some flaws, and it may be underpowered for things like YouTube, it works flawlessly as a small note taker that has an extremely long battery life and a decent screen/keyboard. It's also really nice for having a Linux machine around that most dongles/serial consoles just work with when…
You must have had a very different experience than I did; in my case even running something like LibreOffice was laggy, and the default install of KDE was laughably slow. Command-line applications worked fine, and yeah, I mostly live in the command-line anyway, but if the computer isn't even fast enough to go to Stackoverflow at a reasonable speed when I encounter s a problem, I don't see how usable it is for me. It…
I remember preferring lighter alternatives to LibreOffice (OpenOffice, in fact, at the time) on Linux back in the early and mid 2000s because that suite was such a sluggish resource hog, only firing it up if I needed a decent chance at MS Office compatibility, for which purpose it was merely a disk space hog, because so rarely used but necessary. Ditto KDE, for that matter, on the resource hog front. Guessing my main laptop back then (single-core 900Mhz Celeron IBM Thinkpad with 384MB RAM) was weaker than most of these single-board computers, though.
Re: Pinebook – Powerful, Metal and Open Source ARM 64-Bit Laptop
#33Linus Tech Tips put out a video this week on Floatplane about the Pinebook (not the Pro edition) and it was woefully underpowered. CPU was compared to the PS3 and GPU was compared to the original Xbox, for reference. It barely ran with the stock software (they had to install updates/new software to get it running) and was unable to play a 480p YouTube video fullscreen without noticeable frame drops. The hardware in i…
>Linus Tech Tips put out a video... They just uploaded it to youtube: youtube.com/watch?v=sXLdIYL30tw
So a quick look at Linus Tech tips tells me far more about the video creator than the hardware.
This is a combination of gurning and cheap shots. This seems to be a repeated methodology. Ordinarily I would consider reviews like this completely worthless, but I think I might have overestimated their value.
The fact that people are repeating attitudes conveyed by these videos elsewhere would suggest to me that they simply make the world a worse place.
Normally I try to maintain a more positive air in comments, but this is simply terrible.
Re: Pinebook – Powerful, Metal and Open Source ARM 64-Bit Laptop
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
You must have had a very different experience than I did; in my case even running something like LibreOffice was laggy, and the default install of KDE was laughably slow. Command-line applications worked fine, and yeah, I mostly live in the command-line anyway, but if the computer isn't even fast enough to go to Stackoverflow at a reasonable speed when I encounter s a problem, I don't see how usable it is for me. It…
In pinebook’s defense... OpenOffice/LibreOffice is slow and lags pretty much everywhere.
Sure, and my main "word processor" is typically vim+pandoc->LaTeX, so maybe that's a bad example anyway. Still, the fact that the web browsers are so completely unusable (I tried Chromium and Firefox; haven't tried something like uzbl yet) makes the entire system pretty difficult to use.
I have thought about writing some kind of ncurses application and having it live next to my server to display some cool diagnostic screens that I pretend to read, but most likely it'll just be a novelty that I whip out about once a month to complain about to my wife.
Re: Pinebook – Powerful, Metal and Open Source ARM 64-Bit Laptop
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's an opensparc 1000 running proprietary firmware, much like the Intel Management Engine and company. There's a small effort to replace that in open software. If I had oodles of free time I might contribute, but I've got my own projects to fry.
So, other than mangement engine firmware, that's a yes? We'll be able to turn it on and run 2d and 3d acceleration without closed-source blobs?
No, it has a Mali GPU, you still need a blob for that. The SoC doesn't have 2d hardware, unlike some older Allwinner chips.
Re: Pinebook – Powerful, Metal and Open Source ARM 64-Bit Laptop
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not saying the old Pinebook wasn't bad, I've never owned it but some of your points are a bit hollow for me. > CPU was compared to the PS3 and GPU was compared to the original Xbox, for reference. Why is this a problem? This is "desktop" hardware against mobile hardware. > It barely ran with the stock software How so? It didn't perform well? It didn't boot at all? > and was unable to play a 480p YouTube video ful…
> Why is this a problem? This is "desktop" hardware against mobile hardware. No one said this was a problem, the commenter was simply stating the comparison. > How so? It didn't perform well? It didn't boot at all? The commenter explained that in literally the second part of the sentence: > > It barely ran with the stock software (they had to install updates/new software to get it running) >With which software? Did i…
> It's not too far fetched, they're not very different at all, they're both quad-core A53 (ARMv8) 64-bit based SOCs with similar clock speeds, and the some of the Pine boards with more RAM can run Win10.
There's a lot more to a system than the CPU.
For the Raspberry Pi, someone bothered to port EDK2 and write ACPI tables: https://github.com/andreiw/RaspberryPiPkg
And Microsoft themselves were interested in the Pi (for IoT Core), so they even have some support for weird Broadcom hardware in the NT kernel.
If someone writes ACPI tables for Allwinner SoCs, it will work :)
> more closed than RPi due to the AllWinner SOCs they use
Allwinner has the most community support out of all SoCs there are. It is reverse engineered of course, but it's really good. To the point of someone writing a FOSS driver for the video decoder: https://linux-sunxi.org/Sunxi-cedrus — the RPi still only has blobs for video acceleration. The GPU situation is a bit reversed: VC4 is well established and maintained by Broadcom, while Panfrost and Lima are still pretty young.
It would be very incorrect to suggest that anything is more closed than the old garbage SoC that's in the RPi. It starts booting from the GPU (!) and it has a custom Broadcom exclusive interrupt controller instead of ARM GIC (!!). The author of the open GPU side firmware for the Pi literally suggested Allwinner (sunxi) as a better alternative: https://github.com/christinaa/rpi-open-firmware/issues/37#is...
But Rockchip of course a much better company because they themselves work with upstream Linux.
Re: Pinebook – Powerful, Metal and Open Source ARM 64-Bit Laptop
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
So, other than mangement engine firmware, that's a yes? We'll be able to turn it on and run 2d and 3d acceleration without closed-source blobs?
No, it has a Mali GPU, you still need a blob for that. The SoC doesn't have 2d hardware, unlike some older Allwinner chips.
You don't. Panfrost is already capable enough to run a simple desktop like Weston :)
Re: Pinebook – Powerful, Metal and Open Source ARM 64-Bit Laptop
#38The thing that I was missing in the last version, and most of why I didn’t buy it, was that the GPIO present on the Pine SOC boards (and Raspberry Pi’s, etc.) were not exposed in any way, shape or form on the last version. I think it would be really neat to have some flavor of internal GPIO (exposed pads on the edge of something are just fine, a low-profile connector with a fanout cable would be great for repair, too…
We used to have GPIO ports in all computers including laptops via the parallel port.
Re: Pinebook – Powerful, Metal and Open Source ARM 64-Bit Laptop
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
In pinebook’s defense... OpenOffice/LibreOffice is slow and lags pretty much everywhere.
Sure, and my main "word processor" is typically vim+pandoc->LaTeX, so maybe that's a bad example anyway. Still, the fact that the web browsers are so completely unusable (I tried Chromium and Firefox; haven't tried something like uzbl yet) makes the entire system pretty difficult to use. I have thought about writing some kind of ncurses application and having it live next to my server to display some cool diagnostic…
The only major(ish) browser I know of that seems to give half a damn about performance—by which I mean "does not make the whole system feel slow" rather than "achieves high scores on JS benchmarks"—is Safari, unfortunately :-/
I really miss when Firefox (Phoenix, Firebird) felt snappy and light. So, like, pre-2.0, back before 2006 :-(
Re: Pinebook – Powerful, Metal and Open Source ARM 64-Bit Laptop
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, it has a Mali GPU, you still need a blob for that. The SoC doesn't have 2d hardware, unlike some older Allwinner chips.
You don't. Panfrost is already capable enough to run a simple desktop like Weston :)
Looks like Lima would be needed on the Pinebook, how well does that work ?