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Trying out the Pinebook Pro – a $200 ARM Laptop

jeremymorgan.com

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Re: Trying out the Pinebook Pro – a $200 ARM Laptop

#131

Post by matt_heimer »

smacktoward wrote: post #2

Seeing all that empty internal space makes me wonder if they couldn't increase the device's appeal by fitting it with a bigger battery. 8-10 hours of charge time is good, but a $200 laptop that could go for (say) 20 or 30 hours on a charge would really turn heads. I suppose it's possible that would require some kind of custom battery, and this is just the most appropriate battery for this enclosure they could get off…

I don't think there is as much empty space as you think. If you look at https://youtu.be/TsNR2lECd2s?t=121 it has a Macbook air design where its wedge shaped with no vertical space in the front.

Re: Trying out the Pinebook Pro – a $200 ARM Laptop

#133

Post by seba_dos1 »

dplgk wrote: post #66
seba_dos1 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple's touchpads are nothing special, at least these days where you can easily get a high quality touchpad on pretty much anything but the cheapest laptops available. It's actually how macOS handles touchpads that makes them feel special. However, apparently Pinebook's one is actually pretty problematic and needs some firmware updates to work better.

Do you have an example? My mother in law just got a big fancy windows laptop and the track pad is small and same old clunkiness.

I've been an exclusive user of touchpads on some Lenovo and Dell laptops over past 10 years and I also have Apple Magic Trackpad 2 and access to a Macbook, so I have a comparison.

The only difference in the actual hardware that I noticed (aside of the surface texture, which is up to personal taste, and of course size, which you can easily check before even buying) is that the ones from the first half of the decade required some jitter-filtering in software, while newer ones did not. Also, Apple touchpad does an unusually big share of input filtering on the device itself, while most other ones leave it to the software (which is fine, unless your software does it poorly of course).

Generally Windows drivers for touchpads used to be shit for a very long time; this only started to change a few years ago. On GNU/Linux it depends on the configuration, but there's a ridiculous amount of ways to screw it up, so some people don't even realize that it can be better (although it seems to be getting better with recent driver stacks).

Re: Trying out the Pinebook Pro – a $200 ARM Laptop

#134

Post by seba_dos1 »

geerlingguy wrote: post #68
seba_dos1 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple's touchpads are nothing special, at least these days where you can easily get a high quality touchpad on pretty much anything but the cheapest laptops available. It's actually how macOS handles touchpads that makes them feel special. However, apparently Pinebook's one is actually pretty problematic and needs some firmware updates to work better.

I've tried the pads on the past few years' Dell XPS laptops, and the one on the MS Surface Book, and I can say they are definitely not as nice (physical touch-wise, ignoring the integration with the software at all) as Apple's. Whatever process Apple uses to finish the glass touchpad surface must be hard to replicate, because I haven't found anything comparable. Some are bearable, but not as much of a joy to use (com…

I have Apple Magic Trackpad 2 and Dell XPS 9380 touchpads next to each other right now, they're very similar, with the Dell one being slightly smoother. I liked the surface on my old Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro a bit more than both of them though, although that one was slightly less responsive for the very light moves because it required a bit of jitter filtering - Yoga 900 improved on that, but the surface was IMO worse there.

Those differences are very minor though compared to how touchpads used to work and feel like on Windows 10 years ago.

When it comes to how well they work, they're all essentially equivalent. The only reason to get the Apple one is if you care about its quiet haptic feedback (the Dell XPS one clicks very loudly) - and on Linux you can actually make it even more quiet than what macOS allows you to configure ;]

Re: Trying out the Pinebook Pro – a $200 ARM Laptop

#135

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

sneak wrote: post #116
StillBored wrote: post #108

The really nice thing is that the RK3399, while an old and not particularly fast ARM, has almost entirely open documentation. A bit of googling should land both parts of the TRM, which covers every bit of the SOC's registers and devices minus the Mali. The follow-on RK3588 announced last year with 4x A76's (and 4x A55s) in 8nm should completely crush the RK3399 performance wise. If it comes with open documentation to…

Does it use any proprietary blobs to boot? I have yet to see a GPU without them, and you said "almost", so I assume the answer is yes?

WRT GPU there is [1] https://bootlin.com/blog/wrapping-up-the-allwinner-vpu-crowd...

The rest i don't know exactly. But all in all this seems like a viable replacement for the obsolete 12/13' ThinkPads coveted in some crowds. Could have more RAM, better Displays, but hey, all Open Source, so this really could be new 'ecosystem' for that.

Edit: I know this is for Allwinner, but this applies to other SOCs which embed MALI also. I'm watching this space, and it slowly 'trickles down' there. [2] https://bootlin.com/?s=Mali

Re: Trying out the Pinebook Pro – a $200 ARM Laptop

#136

Post by numpad0 »

rchaud wrote: post #88
therein wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right but you can do that for many other notebooks as well.

I didn't know that. What kind of power bank would you need for a Macbook or PC laptop?

Ones that do USB-PD which allows other voltages than 5V

Re: Trying out the Pinebook Pro – a $200 ARM Laptop

#137

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #135
sneak wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it use any proprietary blobs to boot? I have yet to see a GPU without them, and you said "almost", so I assume the answer is yes?

WRT GPU there is [1] https://bootlin.com/blog/wrapping-up-the-allwinner-vpu-crowd... The rest i don't know exactly. But all in all this seems like a viable replacement for the obsolete 12/13' ThinkPads coveted in some crowds. Could have more RAM, better Displays, but hey, all Open Source, so this really could be new 'ecosystem' for that. Edit: I know this is for Allwinner, but this applies to other SOCs which embed M…

[2] https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/blog/2019/12/20/open...

[3] https://stikonas.eu/wordpress/2019/09/15/blobless-boot-with-...

Re: Trying out the Pinebook Pro – a $200 ARM Laptop

#138

Post by cerberusss »

numpad0 wrote: post #136
rchaud wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't know that. What kind of power bank would you need for a Macbook or PC laptop?

Ones that do USB-PD which allows other voltages than 5V

Actually 5V also works on my 2016 MacBook Pro. I used an older iPad charger with a USB-A-to-C cable to prolong battery life, or to charge overnight.

Re: Trying out the Pinebook Pro – a $200 ARM Laptop

#139

Post by herogreen »

phs wrote: post #58

My pbp arrived a few days ago. The stock image it ships with seemed a little laggy, probably due to aggressive cpu throttling for power. Since I'm interested in encrypted disks I knew I would be installing a new OS from the get-go. Desiring LUKS basically rules out image-based distribution, so to find a compatible installer this [0] page was useful. I opted for straight Debian (bullseye). This amounts to a script wra…

Regarding the trackpad latency, have you seen that there is an update for it ? https://forum.pine64.org/announcements.php?aid=23 while it is more about the mouse moving while you are typing, it may help in your case.

Re: Trying out the Pinebook Pro – a $200 ARM Laptop

#140

Post by Youden »

zozbot234 wrote: post #122
Youden wrote: post #37

This is a tad tangential but has anyone done extensive software development using an ARM device? I was able to get pretty far with a rooted Samsung tablet running Debian in a container (C++ development works great, you can install stuff like VSCode and Clang without too much trouble) but when it came to anything mobile, ironically it all fell apart because the Android toolchain isn't built for ARM64 (save the one in…

> but apparently Debian copies all the code into its own repositories and doesn't make clear how to update it. Debian always keeps the maintainer's patches separate from the "clean" upstream code. I'm not saying that it can't sometimes be hard to do major updates but please don't blame the Debian folks for that, it's not cool.

I'm sure Debian has reasons for doing it that way but the undeniable consequence is that they made a decision that resulted in more complicated package updates.

I'm used to Arch Linux where, for the most part, you can just download a PKGBUILD, increment the version number and you're done. Have a look at Arch [0] vs. Debian [1]. Arch's package specification just tells the build tools where to get the code and how to build it. Debian's includes all the code so the repository has to be updated first (which I tried, resulting in merge conflicts).

Perhaps this approach has advantages (like not relying on the third party code hosting) but it also comes with disadvantages.

I have no ill feelings towards the Debian project or its contributors but they are responsible for the choice that led to the issue I have, so I feel it's entirely reasonable to "blame" them (I don't feel that's the right word, they just made a tradeoff that is inconvenient to me but might make sense to them).

[0]: https://git.archlinux.org/svntogit/community.git/tree/trunk/...

[1]: https://salsa.debian.org/android-tools-team/android-platform...

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