Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Trying out the Pinebook Pro – a $200 ARM Laptop

jeremymorgan.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 146 posts

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

#71

Post by qubex »

snogglethorpe wrote: post #48
nwrk wrote: post #35

Enjoyed the article. Thanks for write up. 4GB RAM sounds terrible even for browsing and basic tasks. I'm looking to switching to one of those devices in future, so far on trusted Thinkpad x230 (no FHD, $150 USD) for travel purposes. Can anyone comment on "no NPM yet that I know of though" ? Does node development work normally ?

Using a reasonable OS (Linux etc), 4GB is absolutely fine for browsing and basic tasks, and indeed is often fine for development and other more-than-basic tasks as well, depending on how exactly you work (Emacs/Vim instead of an IDE, for instance). Is 4GB considered too little under Windows these days?

It amazes me no end that when I turned 18 I was contracted to work on a Cray J90 with a staggering 128 Mwords of RAM at a financial institution, and that today 4GB is considered tight for running a consumer OS with a browser with more than a few tabs open.

I really cannot fathom what could possibly require so much memory. It’s just taking some hypertext markup, some scripts, and rendering a web-page.

I genuinely do not understand. I’m totally baffled.

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

#72

Post by kop316 »

nwrk wrote: post #35

Enjoyed the article. Thanks for write up. 4GB RAM sounds terrible even for browsing and basic tasks. I'm looking to switching to one of those devices in future, so far on trusted Thinkpad x230 (no FHD, $150 USD) for travel purposes. Can anyone comment on "no NPM yet that I know of though" ? Does node development work normally ?

For reference, I have a Thinkpad x200 with 8 GB of RAM (it has an Intel Core 2 Duo). I installed Debian with XFCE, and it idles at 300 MB of Ram, and I have yet to use more than 1.5 GB of RAM. I say that to say I think 4 GB of RAM is plenty if you use it for casual computing tasks.

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

#73

Post by kop316 »

nicoburns wrote: post #54
snogglethorpe wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using a reasonable OS (Linux etc), 4GB is absolutely fine for browsing and basic tasks, and indeed is often fine for development and other more-than-basic tasks as well, depending on how exactly you work (Emacs/Vim instead of an IDE, for instance). Is 4GB considered too little under Windows these days?

More or less. The main culprit is web browsers. Chrome will happily use 4gb by itself these days...

Heh, Firefox doesn't have that problem at all. I don't think I have pulled more than 1 GB on it? But then again I usually only have 10-20 tabs open at the most.

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

#74

Post by qubex »

thom wrote: post #42

I've been tempted by these as semi-destructible machines for my young kids to cut their teeth on. The oldest has a Chromebook but reinstalled with GalliumOS which has been perfectly adequate so far. I'd be intrigued to see a direct comparison between these as two ultra-cheap Linux options.

Why are children these days ‘allowed’ to ’destructive’? I was using my mother’s NeXT Cube back in the early nineties when I was about eleven or twelve and it’s still in mint condition. It was made very clear to me that allowing me to use it was an enormous privilege and that if I had in any way damaged it there would have been hell to pay and I have absolutely no doubt that my arse would’ve been kicked into tomorrow if I had broken my side of the deal. Teaching kids to take care of stuff is a key point in the escape from disposable consumerism.

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

#75

Post by qubex »

fheld wrote: post #67
qubex wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I’m not mistaken, 10,000 mWh is the maximum that can be brought on an airliner. EDIT: As the commenter below pointed out, the limit is 100,000 mWh and not 10,000 mWh. I stand corrected.

According to [0] the limit in the US is 100Wh, so you could fit a battery that is three times bigger (assuming 3.3V). I don't know what the relevant numbers are elsewhere. [0] https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/whatcanibring/...

Thanks, I stand corrected. Apologies for the mistake.

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

#76

Post by hajile »

tsukurimashou wrote: post #70
hajile wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've done some web development work on my raspberry pi 4. It's almost there, but even using vim, some things are still too slow (I do primarily front-end development). 4gb of RAM means I can't have a ton of things going on, but it's easily enough for back-end, webpack, editor, and a handful of tabs without much issue. Now, there are some CPU differences here. 3399 has 2 A72 cores at 2GHz and 4 A53 cores at 1.5GHz. Th…

stock vim or do you use plugins?

I use a few plugins to make web development a better experience. Nothing particularly exceptional. Syntax highlighting, nerdtree, ctr-p, linter, prettier, bracket highlighter, etc.

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

#77

Post by charwalker »

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 wonder how much cost saving they are finding in using like a standard, mass produced common laptop battery vs a larger or custom battery.

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

#78

Post by squarefoot »

aphistic wrote: post #4
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'm sure a bigger battery would increase the cost of the laptop. At $200 the margin has to be pretty thin already.

True, but starting from $200 there's still room for improvement. I would purchase in no time a $350 model with double the battery plus high power LoRa RTX module with external antenna connector, and GPS receiver.

I've used a few different small ARM SBCs which were a lot less powerful than this laptop, and the software availability is astounding: Codeblocks, Boa Constructor, Anjuta, Lazarus, Geany, Notepadqq, most languages and libraries, and many other non development related software. As an example, Libreoffice on Debian Stable is available ready to install (no build required) on i386, amd64, armel, armhf, arm64, mips, mipsel, mips64el, ppc64el, s390x. Same for example for lua (the language) while the sid (unstable) version adds another bunch of unofficial ports (alpha, hppa, m68k, powerpcspe, ppc64, ppc64el, riscv64, sh4, sparc64, x32). In many contexts one could move from x86 to ARM and never feel there is something missing because really there is almost nothing missing, save maybe for the horsepower.

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

#80

Post by reaperducer »

war1025 wrote: post #59
ColanR wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if we should return to the trackball. I have an old KVM keyboard that has one built-in, and it's not so bad. Seems like it wouldn't get in the way like a touchpad does. Why is it that we stopped using those?

Wouldn't fit in a super-thin form factor for one.

And since they're mechanical devices, they have to be cleaned and maintained more than most people want to.

Reminds me of the days of cleaning mouse balls. Man, those things get covered with the grossest stuff.

Post reply on HN