
Pinebook Pro longer term usage report - ingve
https://nibblestew.blogspot.com/2020/07/pinebook-pro-longer-term-usage-report.html
======
panic
_> The biggest gripe is that everything feels sluggish. Alt-tabbing between
Firefox and a terminal takes one second, as does switching between Firefox
tabs. As an extreme example switching between channels in Slack takes five to
ten seconds. It is unbearably slow._

This is a hidden downside of writing code that's only just fast enough to
work. It may feel fine for you, but anyone building a new computer will have
to match your computer's performance, or everything will feel sluggish. We're
raising the bar for new hardware way higher than it needs to be.

~~~
throwaway189262
What is this user doing lol? I've run Linux on an absolutely ancient Thinkpad
because we had some stuff in the field that needed serial/parallel port for
comms. It ran fine as long as you didn't have 10 tabs open.

And Slack has become a bloated piece of crap. It lags like hell on everything
I own. It takes a few seconds to switch between channels and workspaces on my
overclocked 3700x with 32gb of ram on fiber.

~~~
panny
>What is this user doing lol?

Right? From the comments in the article,

>It should be much faster than a Raspberry pi 3 that do not have all those
problems.

I agree. User doesn't know what he's doing yet.

One tip I would offer him is avoid Firefox. Firefox is built with Rust[1],
which doesn't support ARM as a Tier 1 platform. He would be MUCH better off
using Chromium, which supports numerous ARM Chromebooks running this exact CPU
just fine.

[1] [https://4e6.github.io/firefox-lang-stats/](https://4e6.github.io/firefox-
lang-stats/)

~~~
steveklabnik
It's funny you should mention that; first of all, Chomebooks also run Rust
code, at a really low layer. (Also, it appears the Chrome team is
experimenting with putting Rust in Chrome too; no clue how serious or how
likely though). The hypervisor stuff is in it. Secondly, ARM is on its way to
Tier 1, supported by the company itself.

(I use Chrome these days...)

------
heldergg
Typing this on a PBP, Manjaro 20.07 i3.

> Alt-tabbing between Firefox and a terminal takes one second, as does
> switching between Firefox tabs.

This is not my experience at all. I do not notice undue delays switching
between applications (do not use slack).

> The wifi is not very good, it can't connect reliably to an access point in
> the next room

No problems at all. This weekend I'm at my parents, I am connected to an old
wrt54gl all day long. I have problems with my other laptop (XPS 13) on the
same network.

> The screen size and resolution scream for fractional scaling but Manjaro
> does not seem to provide it.

I've been using this machine since late March, I didn't take notes when I
configured it but, from what I remember, I only had to make some small
adjustments [1] to get things right.

Sure, the PBP is an under-powered machine but, given the right allowances (the
software is under development, the trackpad is not the best, suspend is not
working correctly, etc), I find it easy to use as a daily driver most of the
time.

[1]
[https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/HiDPI](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/HiDPI)

edit: typo and link

~~~
tomxor
> > Alt-tabbing between Firefox and a terminal takes one second, as does
> switching between Firefox tabs.

> This is not my experience at all. I do not notice undue delays switching
> between applications (do not use slack).

I do wonder how much of his experience might be slack + gnome or KDE, some
desktop apps are just horribly bloated because they can get away with it. Also
modern DEs are just massive, most people don't realise how much resources they
take up because compared to 25 years ago we all have x86 super computers.

I find slack to be absurdly slow for what is fundamentally just a text based
web app and yet I'm using a 1yr old XPS with an 8th gen intel CPU... i run
i3wm and keep things very minimal, yet I still find myself waiting seconds for
slack to do stuff.

~~~
blihp
That's a big part of the issue. Just running a desktop browser like Firefox on
these ARM devices is an exercise in pain. While they technically run, they
would be described as sluggish on a good day. Then trying to visit a 'heavy'
desktop-oriented website will just bring everything to a grinding halt.

~~~
CameronNemo
Exactly. IME HN or text.npr.org will fly, old reddit / readthedocs / other
light js does fine, and SPAs like new reddit and Slack crawl.

~~~
nyanpasu64
I recently discovered that i.reddit.com or reddit.com/.compact is the "old
mobile interface" and a lot lighter than even old Reddit.

------
worble
For an alternative view to the article, I bought one of the first batches as
well, and I couldn't be happier. I don't know what the stock DE is like, as
the first thing I did was install arch and lxqt, since I knew from the get-go
it was a low powered machine and Plasma was just going to chug on it.

I'm not having any issues with playback in browsers (fullscreen or otherwise
using latest FireFox), and I use it in bed quite a lot for watching videos, so
I'm not sure if there's some specific configuration issue the guy in the
article is having, although this could probably be easily worked around with
youtube-dl into mpv if you're having something similar happen.

I'm also not seeing the same problems on the terminal. I'm using alacritty as
my terminal emulator and elv.sh as my shell, with similar customisations to
display git statuses etc, and while I notice the occasional white flash (I'm
not sure what this is honestly, something to do with alacritty rendering I'm
assuming) there's no sluggishness.

The trackpad is admittedly horrible, you really need to buy a bluetooth mouse
or seperate trackpad because it really is just frustrating to use, on the
other hand the keyboard is really solid, I love the feel of it and it's
responsive. The monitor, well I'm probably not the person to ask about that. I
personally think it looks pretty good, but I'm really not the kind of person
who cares or notices about sub-pixel perfect rendering, so YMMV with that.

The battery times are also not great, and although you can technically charge
it through the USB-C port, it'll still drain power if it's turned on. This
isn't helped by the fact I can't get the default brightness up and down
buttons to work and have to type

    
    
        sudo lxqt-backlight_backend --inc / --dec
    

to change the backlight.

Yes, it is kind of slow, but you really must've known that going into it
considering the price and the specs. Overall, my personal perception is that
the pinebook pro is batting well above it's weight (well, mine is anyway), and
I honestly expected it to be far slower than it is.

~~~
KozmoNau7
>since I knew from the get-go it was a low powered machine and Plasma was just
going to chug on it.

I run openSUSE with KDE on all my machines, and it's responsive and snappy
even on the Thinkpad X220i (Sandy Bridge Core i3, upgraded to 8GB RAM + SSD).
Firefox is what generally eats resources, but below 15 tabs it's fine.

Even on my Raspberry Pi 3, KDE is perfectly fine. It's not _fast_ fast, but
still feels responsive and usable.

KDE was kind of slow in the KDE4 days. Not so anymore.

------
Hoh6quee
Well, I can certainly provide an argument against expectations of long term
usage as well.

I bought a pinebook pro, perfectly knowing the performances limitations this
article discusses, and actually _wanting_ to learn to live with a less
powerful computer, consuming less electricity. In a era where we're roasting
Earth, this sounded almost like a duty to me.

But when I received the computer, I had a blocking problem with it : its SD
card reader was faulty and would trigger I/O errors after a few writes, and
the OS would remount the device as read-only. This is a major problem on that
computer because it has very low internal storage space so you're supposed to
use a SD card to hold data. I tried various OS, various SD cards, did my due
diligence to confirm it was a hardware problem - it was.

I wasn't that annoyed at that point because pine64 sells spare parts on their
web shop. So I went there to replace the SD card reader, which meant replacing
the main board as well, but OK. This was all very fairly priced, so no
problem. Except… the spare part was out of stock. So I waited a few weeks, and
it was still out of stock.

I mailed their support presenting my problem and asking a simple question :
will spare parts will ever be available again?

They answered by asking me to demonstrate this was a hardware issue, which I
did. They did not answer my question, so I asked it again, telling them that I
was not wishing to make the device travel the world and back, I just wanted to
replace the faulty part. They answered me with the address were I should ship
the computer to them. So I asked them again directly : will the spare parts
will ever be available again? They dodged the question once again and asked me
to send them the computer.

I guess asking to ship them a faulty product is totally fair, they want to
inspect it. I'm not willing do to that because we fly way enough products
around the world as is, and I can do any check they want me to do locally. But
fair enough, they want it back to solve my problem.

What troubles me, though, and what is relevant here is that while they
advertise selling spare parts for their computer, they actually don't, and
they're shady when asked if they will again. Which probably means they won't.
So yeah, I wouldn't bet on long term usage if you have an experimental device
that you can't repair.

~~~
emptysongglass
I think it's because they're all English-as-second-language support staff.
I've had the same issues as you and ultimately gave up trying to send them
money for spare parts they offered because we kept talking over each other.

~~~
Hoh6quee
It could be. I would say it's unlikely, given they had no problem handling a
technical discussion when asking me to demonstrate it was a hardware problem
(it was done in several mails, during which they asked relevant questions
after each of my mails). I guess it may have been handled by a different team,
though, sending the ticket back when confident it was indeed related to
hardware.

------
johnklos
Some elaboration would help.

First, it's clear that several of these things are OS / software issues.
Debian has issues with the screen and wifi, whereas other distros have better
wifi handling on the same hardware? That's the OS.

Firefox is slow with Slack? Firefox is slow with Slack on the fastest hardware
you can buy, so why state the obvious?

Firefox apparently doesn't have hardware video decoding enabled, which is,
again, a software issue.

Disk operations seem sluggish? Why not say whether you're using a cheap eMMC
or possibly even an SD card?

Unless you're selling your Pinebook Pro on eBay as-is, you've left out too
much information.

------
jancsika
> I bought a Pinebook Pro in the first batch, and have been using it on and
> off for several months now.

Me, too.

> Some people I know wanted to know if it is usable as a daily main laptop.

I've successfully used it as my only laptop.

> I originally wanted to use stock Debian but at some point the Panfrost
> driver broke and the laptop could not start X.

Only in FLOSS world would someone complain about a first-time-out laptop with
very early (reverse-engineered) FLOSS driver support not working on the
arbitrary, _non-default_ OS the author happened to install on it.

The Pinebook Pro ships with some kind of hybrid Debian Stretch-- it appeared
to have Chrome specifically compiled for this board, and probably some other
custom things (probably keyboard/touchpad driver, etc.). There's an icon in
the taskbar to update this "Debianstein" using "MrFixit's repo." This is the
official way to update the laptop-- it asks for your root password, downloads
stuff from the repo and then runs scripts. Super shady.

That aside-- if the Pine devs _weren 't_ shipping with stock Debian when
author and I bought it, there is probably a _very good_ reason why. And we see
one piece of evidence as the author tries to run "stock Debian" on the
Pinebook-- shit broke!

> Alt-tabbing between Firefox and a terminal takes one second, as does
> switching between Firefox tabs.

Again, on the operating system which Pine _ships_ with the Pinebook Pro, task-
switching between Firefox and the terminal (mate terminal?) is immediate.

It's weird to feel I have to defend a laptop that has the shittiest touchpad
I've used in a decade. But if you're going to do a serious review of a
fledgling laptop like this, either use the default software or know what the
heck you're doing wrt drivers/firmware. Otherwise it feels like the point is
to get me to sympathize with Apple's "stock OS or it's a brick" strategy.

~~~
seba_dos1
Running various distributions and having mainline support was part of Pinebook
Pro's value proposition, so while it's worth pointing out I wouldn't blame the
author for it that much. There are plenty of people who got or considered
getting Pinebook Pro to run things like "stock Debian" on it and aren't
interested much in such "Debiansteins".

~~~
wtallis
When it comes to hardware purchasing decisions, I don't really consider a
device to be open-source friendly unless the drivers are upstreamed. Out-of-
tree drivers that aren't at least on track for upstreaming in the near future
will in the long run be just as much of a hassle as proprietary drivers.

~~~
jancsika
That's a great philosophy to have and I haven't a clue what it has to do with
the Pinebook Pro.

AFAICT all the relevant video drivers are upstreamed. Additionally, there has
been official support in Debian since April plus an unofficial installer for
Debian. Plus a pretty healthy interest in the Manjaro community and a lot of
other distros. (I received my PBP in December, btw.)

What I'm saying is if you're a hacker and want to go the route of picking your
favorite distro for a first-time-out Linux laptop, you really ought to be able
to differentiate between borked configuration (esp. where reverse-engineered
free drivers for a notoriously unfriendly GPU company) and underpowered
hardware.

A good way to ensure success is to try out the hardware with the default
install the devs shipped. The author didn't bother to do that and his review
is misleading for it.

~~~
wtallis
_You 're_ the one who said that it's unreasonable to expect a run of the mill
distro shipping an upstream kernel to work on this platform. But now you're
trying to talk about underpowered hardware as if that has something to do with
being unable to start X in the first place?

The author experienced clear signs that this platform's software support is
not mature. You seem to want to blame Debian rather than the new platform and
its immature drivers.

~~~
jancsika
> The author experienced clear signs that this platform's software support is
> not mature.

The author claimed that alt-tabbing takes about one second. This was not true
on default install using Mate from December.

Author claims that merely entering a directory containing a Git repo freezes
the terminal. Again, clearly not true using stock Mate terminal.

Author goes on to rankly speculate that the problems with this laptop may be
"CPU and disk side." Again, completely misleading as to the actual hardware as
I stated above. And easily corrected by merely testing with the default OS
Pine shipped.

Aside from Panfrost I have no idea why the author ran into those problems. But
he doesn't either, and he falsely attributed them to hardware limitations when
it was facile to check his error by running the laptop for perhaps five
minutes in the default install.

------
oefrha
> I have a ZSH prompt that shows the Git status of the current directory.
> Entering in a directory that has a Git repo freezes the terminal for several
> seconds.

For this specific problem, use a prompt that asynchronously updates git
status.
[https://github.com/sindresorhus/pure](https://github.com/sindresorhus/pure)
is an example, and it contains all the primitives you need to implement your
own async prompt. Otherwise good luck working on a huge repo like chromium,
even on a faster machine.

~~~
EdwardDiego
Yep agree, I found rather OhMyZsh and ZPresto etc. slowed down significantly
in larger repos.

~~~
oefrha
ohmyzsh's git status function is utter garbage and has been that way for at
least _a decade_ :
[https://github.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/commit/8059c0727a09257dc3...](https://github.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/commit/8059c0727a09257dc387aa9ba17dc99d1842aa19)
(committed 2010) the function forks 32 times just to do some pattern matching
builtin to the shell! Needless to say any theme using that crap is criminally
slow. (Edit: It started out forking _only_ 14 times; the number gradually
expanded to 32:
[https://github.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/blob/d0d01c0bbf32ffe1dc22...](https://github.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/blob/d0d01c0bbf32ffe1dc22a66620ca85669c77e6b8/lib/git.zsh#L140-L189))

To my surprise, it seems the voice of reason finally prevailed, as that crap
has been fixed 20 days ago:
[https://github.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/commit/1c58a746af7a67f311...](https://github.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/commit/1c58a746af7a67f311ee47f97285a855eaf18b5e)
(It's still not remotely close to being well-designed.)

Prezto's git primitives are solid, but nothing could help you when git itself
is slow on a huge repo. Hence the need for async.

~~~
cevn
I thought this must be the case. Every time I enable oh my zsh git new
terminal opens slow by orders of magnitude.

------
Jerry2
> _The biggest gripe is that everything feels sluggish. Alt-tabbing between
> Firefox and a terminal takes one second, as does switching between Firefox
> tabs._

Looks like the culprit is the CPU/SoC: Rockchip RK3399. The specs for it do
look decent on paper [1] but I guess it's simply too slow and not suited for
laptops due to a small cache. It looks like a mobile phone SoC.

> _The screen size and resolution scream for fractional scaling but Manjaro
> does not seem to provide it. Scale of 1 is a bit too small and 2 is way too
> big. The screen is matte, which is totally awesome, but unfortunately the
> colors are a bit muted and for some reason it seems a bit fuzzy. This may be
> because I have not used a sub-retina level laptop displays in years._

Screen is a deal-breaker for me. I stare at screens for hours on end and if
it's not something in the same class as a retina screen on a Macbook or iMac,
I just ditch it quickly. As for fuzzy screen and muted colors, well, that's
the fault of the matte layer on the LCD panel. It's purpose is to diffuse
light and minimize reflections. Personally I don't like to make that trade-off
and prefer glass surfaces on my screens. I'll make a shade and make sacrifices
as to how I orient myself to enjoy crisp text and proper colors in
photos/video.

As for scaling, only Cinnamon DE does it right. I've tried almost all DEs over
the past 6 months or so and Cinnamon's new fractional scaling and HiDPI
support is the best by far. [2]

> _The trackpad 's motion detector is rubbish at slow speeds._

None of the non-Macbook trackpads are great. There's a project that's working
on a good Linux trackpad driver but it's far in the future. Don't bank on it
in the short-term. [3]

[1] [http://rockchip.wikidot.com/rk3399](http://rockchip.wikidot.com/rk3399)

[2] [https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2020/02/cinnamon-desktop-
fractio...](https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2020/02/cinnamon-desktop-fractional-
scaling-support)

[3]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23235609](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23235609)

~~~
emptysongglass
>None of the non-Macbook trackpads are great. There's a project that's working
on a good Linux trackpad driver but it's far in the future. Don't bank on it
in the short-term.

My Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition trackpad is great. I really don't think you
can apply this kind of blanket statement to all non-Macbook trackpads.

~~~
bauerd
It's obviously a question of preference but Linux trackpad drivers (eg
libinput) are less capable than Apple's in terms of gesture/palm detection
etc.

~~~
AsyncAwait
I haven't noticed much of a difference when using a Mac trackpad, but I am not
much of a gesture user, so that's probably why.

Linux UIs tend to encourage much heavier use of keyboard shortcuts, which in
some sense makes up for it.

------
Abishek_Muthian
I'm all in for Pinebook Pro, other open-source hardware projects and ARM
ecosystem in general (I even run my production application on an ARM server).

But at the same time, we need to be cognizant of the need for software
optimisations in ARM running pure Linux operating systems. Much of the
complaints levelled against Pinebook can be said for any other similar spec
ARM SBC for GUI applications. Some performance tuning could be made at user
end such as bloat free Arch ARM, SSD, Btrfs, Zswap etc.[1] but still
performance gap with similar spec X86_64 are clearly visible.

I have a Acer Chromebook 11 N7, running fan less intel celeron N3060, 4GB RAM,
MIL-STD 810G which retailed for $250 (but Google sent one for free to me)[2].
The performance enhancements Google has made with Chromium/ChromeOS is very
visible, with every update it got better, there's no sluggishness unless we go
overboard with memory. I think there's a reason Google ditched ARM for
Chromebooks in spite of it being favourable to run android apps.

Mozilla & other free software behemoths who build GUI applications should
seriously care about ARM ecosystem when we are voting for projects like
Pinebook/PinePhone/Librem with our wallet.

[1][https://abishekmuthian.com/getting-smoother-desktop-
experien...](https://abishekmuthian.com/getting-smoother-desktop-experience-
on-raspberry-pi/)

[2][https://abishekmuthian.com/reviewing-the-chromebook-
google-s...](https://abishekmuthian.com/reviewing-the-chromebook-google-sent-
me-for-free-after-2years/)

------
bArray
Personally I purchased a PineTab [1]. I hope it doesn't feel as sluggish. I
suspect most of the lag is the UI they are running. Apparently it purposely
runs at a resolution of 720 as not to tax the GPU too much. The plan is to use
the tablet mostly with an external keyboard, I suspect the keyboard I
purchased with it will not be so useful outside of some odd occasions.

I plan to use it for SSH'ing into more powerful machines, vim, a small amount
of compiling, LaTeX, a few tabs, etc. Just a machine to take into the office,
into meetings, etc. Not a powerhouse photo/video editing, multimedia viewing,
number crunching, compiler building beast.

As for dev'ing for the device, I'm working on upgrading wm2 [2] to work with
touch devices and to remove some of the cruft that didn't age well, whilst
trying to maintain the minimalism. I'm aiming for a < 8MB footprint for the
window manager and toolbar collectively.

[1] [https://www.pine64.org/pinetab/](https://www.pine64.org/pinetab/)

[2] www.all-day-breakfast.com/wm2/

~~~
josteink
I think this guy is having issues because he is using Slack, which is known to
kill any machine it is launched on (even high-end developer machines) on a
lower end, ultra-cheap ARM laptop.

The Pinebook Pro itself is probably reasonable (given its price), once you
disregard the use of monstrously bloated things, like Slack.

That said, the PineTab has half the ram and a measurably slower CPU[1] (See
A64 vs RK3399). It’s basically like a PinePhone with a big screen.

So don’t get your expectations too high :)

[1]
[https://gist.github.com/ayufan/ce5dc9e501e1b720c2afc31c3ed51...](https://gist.github.com/ayufan/ce5dc9e501e1b720c2afc31c3ed51f9d)

~~~
bArray
> I think this guy is having issues because he is using

> Slack, which is known to kill any machine it is launched on

> (even high-end developer machines) on a lower end, ultra-

> cheap ARM laptop.

Their "apps" are essentially small web browsers, no wonder!

> That said, the PineTab has half the ram and a measurably

> slower CPU[1] (See A64 vs RK3399). It’s basically like a

> PinePhone with a big screen.

This is why I'm working on a lightweight X11 window manager, there's no reason
why a UI should take up so many of the CPU horsepower and RAM.

------
fastball
> A laptop without an encrypted disk is not really usable as a laptop as you
> can't take it out of your house.

Really depends on what kinda stuff you store on your computer, no?

I don't full-disk encrypt my laptop, but everything that is actually sensitive
is stored encrypted at rest.

~~~
hibbelig
If someone gets their hands on it, they can install a keylogger, and then they
know the password for the encrypted part...

~~~
pizza234
I think this is not the scenario the parent poster refers to (that is, "three
letters agency attack").

The typical scenario is: dev brings the laptop out of home -> laptop is
stolen. In this case, encryption at rest spares the owner's sensitive
information.

Actually, I personally consider any machine at risk even if at home, as
burglary is not to so far fetched to be considered unlikely.

------
ninjin
I really appreciate write ups like this. While I had considered taking the
Pinebook Pro for a spin, the storage and limited RAM situation is ultimately
what broke the deal for me as I could not think of a use-case for me as it
would fall short of what I need from a laptop. Hopefully I can muster the
energy to write something similar after I get my Pinetab, for which I
hopefully have more realistic expectations to use as an e-mail terminal (mutt
and Syncthing) and occasional “browser peek” while jumping between meetings
where I do not feel like dragging a laptop along. My only concern now is
whether I can have it fully encrypted and what state video (not browser video)
playback will be in.

In closing, I have to say that I really appreciate what Pine64 are doing.
Their SoC boards, PineTime, and PinePhone are all great fun and I hope this is
just the beginning of a long series of awesome hardware to play around with
together with supremely hackable open source software.

~~~
rjsw
What is your issue with storage ? It can take M.2 cards.

~~~
ninjin
Thank you, that was a mistake on my part, it was just the RAM then. The
mistake is particularly embarrassing as I am very well aware on the M.2
expansion board for the PineTab, so I really should have remembered. Now if
only that expansion board would support both the M.2 and SIM at the same time
I would even have hopes for the PineTab to finally drive my cellphone out of
my life…

------
Havoc
So frankly about as expected given pricing and nature of this particular
beast.

I personally think they aimed a little too low on hardware specs. Sure the
price is cool but there is something to be said for just a tiny bit more to
boost adoption via credible usage

~~~
Sebb767
It's great for 200 USD. Of country it's not going keep up with a 2000 USD
MacBook Pro, but I doubt that's what they aimed at and the mid-size laptop
market is pretty saturated.

> I personally think they aimed a little too low on hardware specs.

I don't think so. The problems seem to come from more resource hungry
applications (yes, that's slack) and it's not much worse than what we had a
few years ago with hdd laptops. If you're poorer or in need of a cheap
replacement, it's great and priced exactly right.

~~~
Havoc
The target audience is developers though (for now) not poor people. I don’t
see developers sticking with it long term (and say contributing fixes) if they
get frustrated by everything being annoyingly slow (eg browser tab switching)

~~~
stefan_
Yes, as _a platform to develop_. Think of it like a dev board with a
permanently attached display and keyboard.

~~~
Havoc
Yeah I get that. To iron out bugs you really want devs using it though.

I like the concept. Just think they missed a trick there.

------
TulliusCicero
Thought it was odd that the author said it's close to being usable, then lists
a large number of huge performance problems. That doesn't really sound all
that close, though I suppose you could say, "well they just need to slap in a
more powerful chip and it'd be fine".

~~~
raverbashing
I am not sure, but from what I've heard, ARM has a lot of silicon
accelerations but not a lot of software (or compilers) already manage to use
it (Chrome being one notable exception)
[https://phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Arm-
Faster-C...](https://phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Arm-Faster-
Chromium)

I wonder what would be the potential if you had more of the userspace libs
optimized or a smarter compiler (I mean, LLVM is pretty smart maybe it just
needs some nudging)

------
rbanffy
The performance issues reported suggest the software treats all cores as equal
and, with that, when you start multiple processes or threads that need to
complete for something to happen, you'll end up waiting for the slowest one.
That might be bearable on symmetrical multi-core but is an issue with
asymmetrical chips.

Does anyone knows whether Linux can migrate processes from slow cores to fast
ones if the fast one is idling?

~~~
penagwin
I've been wondering this too. To my knowledge I don't know of any
language/framework threading implementations that let you do certain functions
in a "fast core thread" and others in a "slow core thread".

I'm guessing this means the kernel is making the decisions, which sucks for
application developers.

~~~
freehunter
How does Android (Linux) handle big.LITTLE chipsets? From what I understand
they’ve had this process for years so there must be some software they’re
using to handle what process goes to what core. Is that not something they’ve
upstreamed to the main Linux codebase?

~~~
zanny
Depends on the phone. Most 2015-2019 Qualcomm phones use niceness to determine
CPU allocation, whereas Android 10 has more complete cgroup support where
different groups are assigned to different cores and the APIs categorize tasks
/ threads / processes by what they are doing into different execution
profiles. Pre 10 had some fixed cgroups available but it wasn't as
comprehensive.

------
e12e
Anyone know if if there's support for Wayland? Fractional scaling works pretty
well out of the box for me on Ubuntu 20.04 (and also did on 18.04).

As for encryption, I see that Architect has support for zfs, but doesn't
appear to support installating with encryption out-of-the box. I suppose, if
the live Iso does support encryption, it should be possible to "convert" a zfs
install to encrypt most (probably not /boot) filesystems:

[https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/532619/encryption-o...](https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/532619/encryption-
of-existing-dataset-in-zfs-zol-0-8)

~~~
thallian
I am using the pbp with sway (if you don't know it, an i3 like wm for
wayland), works well for me. Hoping for gles 3.3 support in mesa (3.0 is
experimental but there) to be able to run alacritty :)

~~~
floatboth
Also for WebRender in Firefox.

------
danirod
I remember being a little too hyped over the Pinebook Pro a few months ago and
almost getting one, as it looked like a cheap and promising device I could use
to test the state of GNU/Linux desktops again, after switching to macOS 6
years ago. But they went out of stock, and then corona happened, which
complicated logistics and made these laptops impossible to get for a few
months.

I’ve recently come across a few long term reviews like this that conclude that
the computer maybe wasn’t that good, due to either specs or quality of the
hardware itself (keyboard, screen...). So now, I don’t know what to think.
Feels like I’ve dodged a bullet.

~~~
CameronNemo
Keyboard and screen are great IMO, but I am coming from a Macbook Pro
(butterfly keyboard) and Thinkpad T430.

The RAM is low, so you will need to take that into account and decide if it is
enough for you.

------
mrob
>Video playback on browsers is not really nice. Youtube works in the default
size, but fullscreen causes a massive frame rate drop. Fullscreen video
playback in e.g. VLC is smooth.

On Linux, Firefox uses CPU for video scaling by default. You can enable GPU
acceleration by enabling layers.acceleration.force-enabled in about:config

~~~
stefan_
Last I checked, there wasn't a single official browser release on Linux that
did GPU accelerated video decode, which is the norm on Windows of course. So
expect playing a 1080p video to hog two CPUs of a real laptop, or _all and
then some_ of this mobile chip. It's not even the scaling, if you are full
screen the compositor should do that.

~~~
DCKing
Check again: Firefox will do this for you now using VAAPI on Wayland since a
couple of weeks. If you have an AMD or Intel GPU it should just work on e.g.
Fedora and (not sure about if this is explictly needed) setting a Firefox
feature flag.

Of course the problem here is that this Rockchip's video decoder has no VAAPI
driver.

~~~
pantalaimon
> Of course the problem here is that this Rockchip's video decoder has no
> VAAPI driver.

That’s also not true, according to [1] it should work with Firefox 76 on
Wayland

[1]
[https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=9171](https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=9171)

~~~
DCKing
Although it's great news this is being worked on, that thread strongly
suggests that this is still very much in WIP status? The only thing they state
is that Firefox supports VAAPI _in general_ since 75/76 (which is what I
said), not that the RK3399 can actually use that functionality.

> 06-07 libva and libva-v4l2-request are basically broken except fro mpeg2.

------
Synaesthesia
Looks like a combination of slow CPU and slow storage. EMMC can often be quite
a bottleneck, maybe if they could get a faster storage controller like new UFS
or smth

~~~
ocdtrekkie
PineBook Pro can support an NVMe SSD with a cheap adapter that fits inside the
case.

~~~
TavsiE9s
I've got the adapter and an Intel NVMe SSD installed, the eMMC is only being
used to boot the system.

It works reasonably well for a device in this price range.

------
dasb
Slack is unusably slow on any machine, so there's nothing new about that.

------
Labo333
I have used the Pinebook Pro as a main driver for nearly 6 months because my
main died before isolation.

> Alt-tabbing between Firefox and a terminal takes one second, as does
> switching between Firefox tabs.

Using the OpenGL compositor (which should be the default in latests versions
of Manjaro) is a lifesaver! Web apps are and will still be slow sometimes (I
don't use slack but messenger can be sluggish).

> Video playback on browsers is not really nice.

Depends, YouTube is indeed quite slow (I think it became slower after some
YouTube update), but if YouTube was optimized for speed there wouldn't be all
those adds, right? I like to listen to YouTube music in the background, I use
[https://github.com/mps-youtube/mps-youtube](https://github.com/mps-
youtube/mps-youtube) for that and it works like a charm, uses 10% CPU and a
few MB of RAM. I don't use mpsyt for video but I guess it would also improve
your experience. Other websites (kissanime) work like a charm, even in 1080p.

> Manjaro does not provide a way to disable tap-to-click True, but installing
> `xf86-input-synaptics` (although it's deprecated) provides such an option.
> Also, I use ctrl+F7 to disable the touchpad while I type large chunks of
> text.

From the specs, one could think that the RAM is the problem but zram totally
solves that (I have dozens of tabs open in Firefox, including heavy apps like
Messenger, Trello and Overleaf). The slow CPU is a larger issue, with Gmail
being so slow to load it's almost unusable (loading my mailbox takes 20s and
creating a new email takes 3s).

Overall, I find the machine very much usable though. I only have two
complaints:

\- static noises

\- under "heavy" load (eg html5 games with compilation in the background), the
alimentation is less powerful than what the machine consumes, which leads to
the battery discharging.

I wrote a guide on my setup that includes other tricks. Shameless plug:
[https://louisabraham.github.io/articles/pinebook-pro-
setup.h...](https://louisabraham.github.io/articles/pinebook-pro-setup.html)

------
sukilot
Who makes Pinebook? Why do they seem to be maintaining anonymity?

They go to great lengths to hide their identity or the existence of their
native language, even having an About Us page that says nothing about Us.

[https://store.pine64.org/about-us/](https://store.pine64.org/about-us/)

It reminds me of how MSG manufacturers claim they only sell "flavor
enhancers".

------
gentleman11
> Eventually I gave up and switched to the default Manjaro. Its installer does
> not support an encrypted root file system

I am using manjaro with an encrypted file system. It was relatively easy to
set up and even the boot loader is encrypted. Does pinebook ship with a
different version?

------
aidenn0
Quick tip: you can use xinput to disable tap-to-click on most touchpads,
though the exact command is different depending on the touchpad driver used.

I occasionally run E and it doesn't have a setting for this either.

------
aaravchen
The review itself speaks volumes about the author's misconfigurations and lack
of Linux experience.

As everyone has stated, Firefox, and all major browsers at this point, are
resource hogs. On a low powered system, trying to run a huge and inefficient
webpage like Slack will always bog down the system. It will frequently cause
my browser to use upwards of 15 GB of additional RAM on my 64GB workstations,
regardless of the browser and OS involved. However it sounds like it's
especially bad on the author's system because he doesn't have any swap enabled
(more on that later).

HiDPI is a known weakness in Linux for all versions of Linux. The complaint
here seems to be that the screen is too good, and the author is slightly
uncomfortable with how small 1x scaling is. There is a solution in XWindows
that can partially solve that (see other comments), but no version of Linux
solutions using XWindows really exist for it that don't murder your CPU.

The console problem with zsh being slow is straight out of the beginner's zsh
configuration problems "handbook". Every beginner starting to play with their
prompts loads up the add ons and bogs it down. Not adding asynchronous
plugins, especially for git, makes the prompt on all systems slow, but is
especially noticeable on low-RAM systems that can't keep the entire git folder
cached for faster lookups.

This is obviously exacerbated by the fact that the author has swap disabled.
In his first step of the clang build, he says to enable swap. On a low-RAM
system, swap is especially important since you're going to run out of space in
RAM very frequently. Swap is how you help mitigate that problem, by allowing
some of your disk to be used as ultra-low-speed volatile storage. If the
author manually disabled his swap (which would be required if he actually used
the default install configurations claimed), it's no wonder the system is slow
to respond and slow for resource intensive tasks. It's only been recently with
the very high memory volumes available that there's been discussions about
disabling swap completely.

Related, I'm not sure if the sleep mechanism problems from the Pinebook Pro
are driver problems, but if your don't have swap configured then virtually
none of the Linux sleep mechanisms work. When the device sleeps, it stores the
RAM contents in swap. If you don't have swap, you can't sleep.

Slow build speeds are pretty much expected. Builds of large codebases are one
of the most taxing things you can do to a system. Having a slower CPU and
small RAM are the worst things for build times because CPU is frequently a
bottleneck on even the most powerful systems, and disk io (the other major
bottleneck) is usually mitigated by RAM caching. If the project is C++ you
also get crushed by the linking process on large projects, which can require
huge amounts of RAM. It's no wonder the author said to add swap since a lack
of swap and small RAM can cause a literal crash during linking due to failure
to provide minimum required volatile storage.

The complaints about the "lack of support for..." are really trite too. It's
Manjaro, even a cursory look up on it tells you it's a more stable and
slightly more user friendly version of Arch. Both still require you to be
comfortable with configuring your system manually, it doesn't come perfectly
configured out of the box, that's part of it's draw. Something like disk
encryption is a good example where they user is expected to configure their
own system. Similarly, Manjaro will perform more poorly than other distros on
some hardware if you don't configure it, because unconfigured systems are
always less performant than configured systems.

tl;dr

The author seems to have wiped and reinstalled the Manjaro OS, skipped
configuring it or explicitly configured it in a way that makes it perform
worse, then complains about the low-spec device performing badly.

~~~
floatboth
How are you measuring the memory usage? 15 GB sounds like a count of virtual
memory that includes lots of mappings that aren't physical memory.

On my FreeBSD desktop box right now, the main Firefox process has 1890MB RSS,
and the content processes have anywhere from 248MB to 675MB. (Swap is
completely unused.)

> if your don't have swap configured then virtually none of the Linux sleep
> mechanisms work. When the device sleeps, it stores the RAM contents in swap.
> If you don't have swap, you can't sleep.

???

Suspend-to-disk / "hibernation" (S4 in ACPI terms) is a really unpopular way
of "sleeping" these days. FreeBSD outright does not support S4 (except
S4BIOS).

The usual sleep is suspend-to-RAM. These days there's also S0ix which means
turning as much as possible off but not changing system power state. Mobile
phones are probably doing something like that.

> on low-RAM systems that can't keep the entire git folder cached for faster
> lookups

If you rely on caching for the git directory, the first time you navigate to a
repo would be very frustrating too. You can't always rely on caching.
Sometimes you have huge repos. Sometimes they are mounted over NFS and git
status takes >10s. :D

IMO git status shell plugins are unnecessary and not worth it.

> HiDPI is a known weakness in Linux

Maybe stop using the ancient terrible windowing server ;) It's a non-issue
with Wayland.

------
reddotX
use Ubuntu...

