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Pine64 launches the cheapest Linux Tablet ever priced at just $99.99

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Re: Pine64 launches the cheapest Linux Tablet ever priced at just $99.99

#91

Post by asveikau »

lacker wrote: post #90
mNovak wrote: post #89

Slightly off topic, but I'm still always shocked when I see small businesses running iPads just to plug in a Square card reader, or run some basic form-fill application.

You can get a refurbished iPad for $100 and a new one for $280. And you know all your employees will be familiar with the interface. Why bother using anything else?

How well does iOS really work as a kiosk when your customers might interact with it, possibly unattended? I know I've seen many iPads in such a situation where they go on a lock screen and ask for a passcode, or you can hit Home and go to Springboard to open some apps or change settings, or at one point I had it pop up a prompt to update the major version of iOS and I hit "yes" and it seemed quite busy working on that upgrade ....

I guess there is "Guided Access Mode", but I literally just learned about it googling for this question, and it would seem a lot of people don't know about it.

Re: Pine64 launches the cheapest Linux Tablet ever priced at just $99.99

#92

Post by renewiltord »

founderling wrote: post #20

I wonder why they price their products so cheap. They seem to be totally overrun by demand. And give a terrible user experience when you try to order from them. Friends of mine have ordered (and paid!) Pine64 products weeks ago and get no information when they will be shipped. When you send them an email, it either gets ignored or you get a reply by someone who does not speak English. Telling you something like "Yes…

This explains why so many people have trouble with Kickstarter and I love it. I think these things are not for you. You have a lower risk tolerance and strong quality requirements for your customer experience. I think there were adequate signals that these were not going to be met, but if I ever do something like this I'm going to make it even clearer that this is early-access tool for the community and there are lots of failure points.

Honestly, I suspect this experience is just not for you, man. It's like when we funded the glowing plant on Kickstarter, or the smart mattress topper that became Luna and then Eight, or funded the development of neovim. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. These are people experienced at doing a thing but not all the things around the thing. There's going to be drop-offs.

I really wish there were a way to just say "If you have normative expectations, go elsewhere". I really want to be able to participate in this specific subsector of the economy without the general-consumer folks increasing costs because I'm willing to accept lots of cut corners on beta products and they want all the trappings of working with folks.

As an example, one of the things I bought they took two weeks to respond to me (it was a combination GPS/Glonass/Galileo antenna for cheap). That's okay for me. It took months to arrive with many delays every few months. That's also okay for me. I don't want them to hire more folks to ensure they can respond to everyone. I don't want them to hire more folks so they can manage the customs hassle. I want them to be able to validate the product itself because I want more of that product.

Re: Pine64 launches the cheapest Linux Tablet ever priced at just $99.99

#93

Post by rajangdavis »

founderling wrote: post #20

I wonder why they price their products so cheap. They seem to be totally overrun by demand. And give a terrible user experience when you try to order from them. Friends of mine have ordered (and paid!) Pine64 products weeks ago and get no information when they will be shipped. When you send them an email, it either gets ignored or you get a reply by someone who does not speak English. Telling you something like "Yes…

From my Pine64 experience as an initial backer, I 100% agree.

I think where Pine64 failed to deliver is that they overpromised on when they could deliver the product. I received mine very late and I couldn't boot the OS and support wasn't helpful.

Meanwhile, the Raspberry Pi 3 with 64bit support was announced after Pine64 and delivered before the Pine64 without hiccups.

Pine64 could have improved but I woule rather stick with something like a Raspberry Pi where there is a better level of support (from my experience).

Re: Pine64 launches the cheapest Linux Tablet ever priced at just $99.99

#95

Post by hebrox »

Gregordinary wrote: post #46
hebrox wrote: post #17

I did some actual work on an ASUS Chromebook C201P, running VS Code, Postgresql, pgAdmin and Node.js. It was a little bit slow, but not too bad. I kind of expected/hoped this to be better than that old Chromebook, but reading this https://www.cnx-software.com/2015/04/09/relative-performance... it looks like it has even worse performance (A17 vs A53)

Do you have that running Linux via Crouton or have wiped the C201P? Or something else? I just use mine for fun/learning. Have it flashed w/ Libreboot and running PrawnOS (Debian / Linux-libre based) which keeps seeing a nice amount of improvements. https://github.com/SolidHal/PrawnOS

I used Crouton. Support ended so I am looking for something to replace ChromeOS. Will take a look at PrawnOS, thanks!

Re: Pine64 launches the cheapest Linux Tablet ever priced at just $99.99

#96

Post by Lex-2008 »

zozbot234 wrote: post #42
NikolaeVarius wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4gb is fine if you run a lighter DE. I program go/python/c++ directly on a Jetson Nano w/ vim and firefox and haven't had any huge issues

OTOH a touchscreen-enabled device is exactly where a heavier DE might make some sense. GNOME3 is still only borderline-usable on 2GB of RAM (though you can obviously work around this by adding swap).

did you see https://sr.ht/~mil/Sxmo/? I haven't tried it yet, but it looks light and touch-oriented.

Re: Pine64 launches the cheapest Linux Tablet ever priced at just $99.99

#97

Post by Gregordinary »

hebrox wrote: post #95
Gregordinary wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have that running Linux via Crouton or have wiped the C201P? Or something else? I just use mine for fun/learning. Have it flashed w/ Libreboot and running PrawnOS (Debian / Linux-libre based) which keeps seeing a nice amount of improvements. https://github.com/SolidHal/PrawnOS

I used Crouton. Support ended so I am looking for something to replace ChromeOS. Will take a look at PrawnOS, thanks!

While I wouldn't call it polished, at the very least, the PrawnOS image will give you a quick way to get a Debian-based distro onto the c201 to customize as you see fit.

I noted above it uses Linux-Libre, so the internal WiFi does NOT work with the distro "as is". EVERY other component is supported though. If you need internal WiFi instead of external USB WiFi, you can modify the build script to use the regular Linux kernel & add the non-free Debian repos to sources.list. I've done it before and it works fine.

The default image when you build or download it puts you at a command prompt where you can either use it "as is", run a script to install a pre-configured desktop environment(XFCE, GNOME, or LXQT), or custom install things yourself.

GNOME was just recently added. The RK3288 processor in the c201 is now supported by Panfrost for 2D/3D acceleration, but I think it still has a bit to go before GNOME is completely usable. If save the resources if you're doing development.

4k output should be available soon, just tested patches for that. Admittedly 2160p was much smoother. Eventually there will also be hardware video decoding. The RK3288 has a full Hantro G1 VPU and drivers for that were recently merged into the kernel.

For alternatives, there is a decent list here that might be better suited to your needs: https://github.com/nikolas-n/GNU-Linux-on-Asus-C201-Chromebo...

Re: Pine64 launches the cheapest Linux Tablet ever priced at just $99.99

#98

Post by notatoad »

founderling wrote: post #20

I wonder why they price their products so cheap. They seem to be totally overrun by demand. And give a terrible user experience when you try to order from them. Friends of mine have ordered (and paid!) Pine64 products weeks ago and get no information when they will be shipped. When you send them an email, it either gets ignored or you get a reply by someone who does not speak English. Telling you something like "Yes…

it seems like they would benefit from a purchasing experience that's a bit less like the traditional e-commerce checkout. i think this is one of the things kickstarter really excels at - allowing companies to sell products that aren't really ready for normal consumer purchasing without it "tainting their brand", because it sets expectations correctly.

If pine doesn't want price to be a barrier to purchasing their products (which is an admirable position), and they don't have the resources to serve all the orders they're getting, they should throw up some other barriers in the purchasing process to handle the demand. instead of selling direct, do bulk buys through linux user groups or something like that.

Re: Pine64 launches the cheapest Linux Tablet ever priced at just $99.99

#99

Post by asdff »

asveikau wrote: post #91
lacker wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can get a refurbished iPad for $100 and a new one for $280. And you know all your employees will be familiar with the interface. Why bother using anything else?

How well does iOS really work as a kiosk when your customers might interact with it, possibly unattended? I know I've seen many iPads in such a situation where they go on a lock screen and ask for a passcode, or you can hit Home and go to Springboard to open some apps or change settings, or at one point I had it pop up a prompt to update the major version of iOS and I hit "yes" and it seemed quite busy working on tha…

usually it's the employee using the ipad and they'd only hand it to the customer to sign the receipt and tip. But the customer can totally screw with it if they felt like a jerk I guess.

Re: Pine64 launches the cheapest Linux Tablet ever priced at just $99.99

#100

Post by walshemj »

wyldfire wrote: post #28
katmannthree wrote: post #15

Anybody here remember the HP Touchpad firesale where HP liquidated their stock of cancelled not-quite-iPad-competitors for $99.99 and people went nuts for them? It's weird how that felt like a great deal and yet this one is expensive enough to make me question if I could get anything close to that much value out of it. The HP firesale was back in the days where a decent tablet cost around $500 and it was a screaming…

> I've seen Amazon's Fire tablets sell for $39 brand new. Agreed -- there's a big subsidy from Amazon there. But LCD screens and much of the same parts as computers+phones have had big economic forces driving the prices down.

I brought a 7 inch for £30 just so I can carry pdf copies of my pathfinder / starfinder books when I went to the Wargames Club to play.

Saves crippling my shoulder by carrying a "Damm Heavy" bag with me.

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