
Pinebook Pro Six Months In - notRobot
https://wiki.alopex.li/PinebookProSixMonthsIn
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zantana
Web browsing is my biggest concern with these lower powered devices. People
always blame the browsers, but its really the whole ecosystem, but odds are
you're going to need to access some web site on eventually that will just hang
the whole thing.

From TFA: Run Firefox half-decently with a few dozen tabs that aren’t full of
bloat (ie, not Medium, Reddit, or mainstream news sites)

I have an old 64 Bit Quad Core Baytrail-T Z3795 1.59GHz tablet which just
freezes on Twitter unless I disable videos.

Can these socs do any better?

~~~
alpanka
The sad fact is that SOCs are getting better and better every day, but front-
end developers manage to raise the requirement for a smooth browsing
experience at a faster speed.

~~~
rasz
Its Chrome codebase. Same websites on now ancient Opera Presto (12) flew at
1/10 the resource usage (not an exaggeration, you could open 100 tabs and
still fit in 1GB ram usage).

We are paying for abstraction layers added to smooth web development.

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jszymborski
Pinebooks Pro's as a chromebook replacement is actually quite appealing to me.

I service a couple of chromebooks that I bought for my non-tech savvy family
members. It's ideal since they spend 99% of the time in the browser and are
less prone to drive-by attacks that download random executables.

However, I have a couple of concerns:

1) The build quality of the (various) chromebooks I've bought tends to be
quite terrible, which is not great since many of them use it while cooking and
get banged up a great deal.

2) Occasionally, they'll need a desktop app (e.g. the MS Teams web app has
fewer features, or Google Docs just not always cutting it).

3) I hate locking them onto the Google ecosystem.

Now that they're due for replacement, I think I'll just get a Pinebook. The
build quality is certainly better than the Acer and Lenovo chromebooks we
have, and the fact that you can just replace the board for around $100 is very
appealing.

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yabones
To me, the most attractive thing about this device is that it's fanless and
relatively cool. My 'on the go' device is a 2012 XPS 13 which gets very hot
and is uncomfortable to use as a 'laptop' on bare skin.

That's the real progress we've made, the power efficiency of mobile devices.

~~~
shmoogy
This is why I enjoy using my iPad Pro with LTE. I can mosh/ssh, I can even use
vscode if I feel I need a GUI or am working on netsuite code.

~~~
jamespetercook
How do you use vscode on your iPad Pro?

~~~
ciupicri
From [1] and [2] I understand that you can run the back-end on a server (in
the cloud) and the front-end on the tablet in the Safari browser.

[1]:
[https://twitter.com/ow/status/1135919541073014786](https://twitter.com/ow/status/1135919541073014786)

[2]: [https://medium.com/@ow/its-finally-possible-to-code-web-
apps...](https://medium.com/@ow/its-finally-possible-to-code-web-apps-on-an-
ipad-pro-90ad9c1fb59a)

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sleepysysadmin
Ive had my pinebook pro for a week or so. It does everything I want it to do
in terms of function(youtube HD, word processing, chess) I have 2 pain points
at the moment.

Touchpad is kind of trash. You'll move your finger across and it'll take time
to respond. I have seen there are touchpad upgrades but only for 2019 units
which mine isnt.

The other is that suspend doesnt work. If I suspend; it appears to go asleep
but it'll burn >5% battery an hour.

I booted up kali live and tested it, similar problems.

~~~
rasz
>youtube HD, word processing, chess

so like a 9 year old $50 thinkpad x220.

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schmidp
I recently got one and the touchpad is so bad, its infuriating to use.

There are also many posts in the community about quality of the touchpad.

~~~
newsbinator
I'd like to see a brand that starts with optimizing the cost vs. quality of
the touchpad, keyboard, and screen and works its way backwards from there.

This may be naive, but I'm guessing a mid-range 2020 laptop shouldn't have a
worse touchpad than a 2008 white clamshell MacBook.

~~~
alpanka
Why not buy one, join the community and help writing better drivers?

After all, pinebook is more a hacker device than a consumer device.

~~~
cxr
Because it's probably not a software problem. Why not source better parts from
the beginning?

The existence of this TM3141 touchpad[1]—which is every bit as good as a
MacBook touchpad and works with a stock Ubuntu configuration—is proof that
this is already a solved problem.

1\.
[https://www.newegg.com/p/0TP-001B-002C6](https://www.newegg.com/p/0TP-001B-002C6)

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alpanka
"I’ve never perceived KDE to be particularly lightweight"

Isn't kde pretty lightweight nowadays?

