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Comment by unlimitedbacon | Hacker News Reader

I have this laptop.

The beauty of it is that it is unashamedly bad. It is the humblest of laptops. The body is a direct copy of the 13" MacBook Air. As a computer, it is at least as usable as a Raspberry Pi. The teardown photos are hilarious because the motherboard only takes up about 1/6 the internal space. The rest is empty. https://hackaday.com/2017/04/28/hands-on-with-the-pinebook/

It comes with Ubuntu 16.04, but there are other distros available that work to varying degrees. Since Firefox Quantum came out it's actually pretty usable for web browsing.

Features:

* It does in fact turn on.

* It boots surprisingly fast, since it is running on flash memory.

* There is an HDMI port, which may work in the future.

* The battery life is fantastic, due to it's meager CPU.

* Most have no more than 2 dead pixels.

* You can charge it from another computer's USB port.

* Potato quality camera.

* It costs less than a replacement battery for my ThinkPad.

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It has one of those goddamned AllWinner chips in it, I wouldn't hold my breath on the HDMI or any of the GPU acceleration working in the foreseeable future. Hardware drivers is not their business, nor is releasing docs that might allow someone else to write a driver.

I have a dev board with one of those chips and getting any of the peripheral hardware working turned out to be a complete nightmare. I eventually gave up on it. Hopefully whomever is doing the Ubuntu port knows Mandarin and is living next to the factory in China so he can sneak out some driver specs.

> Hardware drivers is not their business, nor is releasing docs that might allow someone else to write a driver.

Is there a third road to device support? What's the point of selling hardware if you're not going to provide any sort of path to enablement?

This is a question that has puzzled linux devs for a long time.

Why the hell release a linux only device, marketed at the DIY/hardcore user with no, or very limited ways to actually use the damn hardware? (like being stuck on some ancient kernels with 3.24x10^43 remote holes)

Its pretty astonishing, and seems to be primarily driven over paranoia about IP/patents.

After the answer a lawyer is always going to give to the question "Is there legal risk here" is yes, companies arnt going to do better until we demand they do.

I'm sure they release documentation - under NDA - to companies buying this. However the legalese probably makes it impossible to use those documents to release the source to a linux driver.

Hackers like us are not a large market. Those who need a lot of CPUs for something that nobody even realizes has a CPU are ultimately a much larger market.

Looking at the pics there looks like enough space to be able to experiment with other dev boards. I wonder if we can just think of it as a case. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Ready Bunny Huang's book on working in China, it sounds like knowing someone who works at Allwinner is in fact the way to go.

Oh! I would hold my breath, because I backed this project: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/bootlin/allwinner-vpu-s...

The bootlin group is a awesome collection of embedded linux engineers and they are well known if not one the top of the lines engineers for the Linux-Sunxi community.

This will be big if it pans out. There are tons of SBCs with AllWinner chips that look amazing on paper but are kneecapped by the poor/nonexistent driver support. It's shocking how many ship with Linux distros that support only half of the hardware on the board.

People who say that the raspeberry PI is "bad" and "barely useable" say so because Ubuntu + Chrome + botnet social networking sites tend to slow your PI to a crawl.

If you configure i3, compton, and build your own distro from scratch WITHOUT ubuntu, then the rpi can actually be very fast and snappy for programming.

If this laptop is anything like the raspberry pi, then it will require LOTS of customization to get the OS to work right. But once it's configured just right and you stay away from botnet browsers and sites like FB and IG, then the pi is actually quite nice.

Yup, just _not_ using a massive DE goes most of the way for improving performance, especially on little devices like this. i3wm is great for this because it's a tiling window manager for both the masses and for the expert.

Also once you are using i3 then using Debian instead of Ubuntu makes little difference to the user while going a fair way to removing a lot of bloat.

However suggesting linux from scratch is a bit extreme, it can be fun but you can get 99% of the benefits with i3 alone and maybe choosing a distro with a lighter HD footprint. Building your own OS is a lot of work for most people on the otherhand, and will scare people off your otherwise sound suggestion :P

Well said. :)

Personally, I don't think laptops like the Pinebook should ever be used by the masses because, like you said, building your own OS from scratch is difficult, even for the tech savvy! And no I'm not talking about compiling your own Gentoo yourself. What I mean is just starting with a barebones distro with NOTHING installed, then sudo apt-get intsall your carefully selected list of packages- followed by tons and tons of googling and man pages to figure out how to configure your config files in just the right way.

This is how I learned linux- the hard way. My powerful windows 10 workstation died one day, and I decided to actually try using my abandoned rpI for day to day use. It took a LOT of googling, but I finally figured out how to make my pi enjoyable after close to half a year's worth of effort.

I'm definitely buying this laptop when I get paid because I am one of the few people out there who's masochistic enough to enjoy pi-like devices. This laptop is EXACTLY what I have been looking for.

Do you reckon a recent RPi is good enough for Emacsing away, with the occasional PDF-reading and watching videos w/ mpv? I think having a desktop computer with a wider monitor would be a nice improvement for me, given using a laptop for long times is not really ergonomical. If I can have a decent enough desktop experience with such a setup, that'd be very nice.

Emacs? yes. Terminal work is enjoyable on the pi.

PDF? PDFs and the web will be laggy unless you set up a compositor like Compton to speed things up. There's enough GPU power in the PI to set up decent 2d compositing with transparencies.

Videos? I wouldn't count on it because youtube videos are still choppy for me. Even after a ton of work, I still get light choppiness on 320p video. I haven't tried local video files yet, though I assume local files might perform better than web videos. I mean, gifs and webms play smoothly without choppiness, so why not mpv video?

One of the biggest flaws in the raspberry pi is the USB Micro port. If your USB micro cable is broken and unreliable, then your PI will get extremely slow and may even crash a lot due to the flickering power supply. Your pi won't tell you what's wrong either, which makes troubleshooting a pain until you figure out that the lightning bolt icon on your screen means power problem.

If you like linux and tinkering, I would highly recommend you get a pi. Just don't expect a pi to work out of the box. Most distros are so bloated and the pi is so limited, that you have to trim everything down for the pi to be even remotely enjoyable.

If you wish to send me a download link to an example video file of yours, I can play it on my setup for you and let you know how well the video performs.

Thanks a lot! I'm quite comfortable with Gnu/Linux and FreeBSD, and I do have a Pi, though it sits there on the shelf running a couple cron jobs and being a CUPS server. I've never tried it for desktop computing tho (I don't think I've ever used it unless through ssh). I'll definitely test it out when I have a monitor handy (I'll either use a Pi or connect the monitor to my laptop, I really need a screen at my eye level, I'm fed up with the neck aches because I was too caught up with reading a paper, or more often, fiddling with my emacs config).

WRT PDFs and web, I use qutebrowser w/o JS, which is lightweight, and most PDFs are just papers with nothing fancy (I'm a humanities student / prospective researcher). I can take the choppyness if it's not unusable.

The videos are just any video on Youtube. Mpv is a program similar to mplayer, and I use it to watch any video on the disk or use it like "mpv <youtube url>" to view videos from youtube (it even has titles and can show progress, really nice), I guess you mistook it for a video format.

How come you have trouble with 320 when people are using them to watch HD movies with kodi?

I find Pi64[1] to be a decent improvement over Ubuntu on the RPi 3 (haven't tried it on one of the shiny new ones, though).

1: https://github.com/bamarni/pi64

Thanks. I'd probably put FreeBSD on it though. I can't use it because I can't get suspend and resume working on laptops, but I miss it like Odysseus misses Ithaka. One of the few software I actually love, it is...

“a barbones distro” ≠ “nothing installed”

Maybe you mean nothing more than what comes with the distro's install? In that case a clean Ubuntu counts? I think you should rethink what you have in mind; maybe you mean a distribution with few default packages and minimal preconfigured settings? Something like Arch?

You're right, I probably used the wrong words there. By barebones distro, I actually meant "headless debian with minimal packages configured to fit nicely inside 1/3rd of a 32 Gb SD card". My main problem with Ubuntu is that even Xubuntu felt too bloated for me under raspberry pi. I can't even fit Xubuntu into a 64Gb SD card without running out of space. What do all those extra gigs do? They sure as hell don't make my rpI faster that's for sure.

yeah, once you move away from any kind of "it comes preinstalled with a DE" type distro, moving to a headless barebones distro is easy, and you can mostly take your configs with you... xorg is also so frickin easy these days. I've yet to try something even more minimal like arch or.. from scratch! but maybe one day with enough time :)

I think The trick to helping others though is to show it can be done in stages, because trying to learn everything at once is too hard, it's easy to forget how long it took to acquire all of the knowledge and skill that make it seem easy to set up a bare bones linux distro into something comfortable and yet lightweight.

For most people I'd advise: Ubuntu (cos the web will help), then find your lightweight desktop of choice by installing and experimenting along side... then try to replicate it on barebones (or ubuntu server, mostly just involves adding xorg to your install list)... then experiment with more lightweight distros... and if tinkering with your desktop is not satisfying enough then you will no doubt go down the from scratch route as well eventually but at that point you don't need people telling you what to do. The thing that's lost with my seemingly simple suggestion is that you will learn so much by yourself while trying to achieve this, but without sacrificing your productivity.

I recently switched to Gnome 3 (5th of march, tells me mercurial), and it just crawled my laptop, w/ 4G mem and i3 cpu @ 1.80 GHz. That's not super fast, but it freezing with merely Firefox and Emacs running was unacceptable. I tended to blame that on Firefox, but when I switched to Qutebrowser I understood that it was not it, and decided to see what was the cause. I saw that my fairly minimal Gnome 3 DE (i.e. the session and nm-applet, no extensions) took half of the resources. Six days ago I switched to Xmonad, boom, the machine hasn't used the swap since. Even when I start Chromium for some silly websites life makes me use. Even when I have Chromium, mpv, Qutebrowser and Emacs all open at once. With Gnome I'd probably have to kill Emacs in such a session a couple times...

Gnome 3 is really really bad. It is so bad that it actually makes me want to use Windows 10 instead.

Context: i've been using Xfce4 for the last 4-5 years and recently had to use Gnome3.x because of RHEL. Since I've a recent Gnome, I decided to also try a recent KDE.

Well...

- XFCE manages to be consistently fast and overall a joy to use

- KDE is getting usable again after the KDE4.0 mess. Still too much gummy by default, but it's so customizable that you can turn off most of the trash that is enabled by default.

- Gnome really looks like it has been designed for and tested against mentally challenged people. It's infuriating, most of its utilities lack menus and basic options/settings, to the point where having a GUI is more of an impediment rathen than being something useful.

I am very worried by the fact that Ubuntu is reverting back to Gnome.

I wanted to use it [edit: i.e. Gnome] in order to slim down my heavy configuration. But just not worth it. All I do is use two GUI programs, and it managed to get in the way. XFCE gets bonus points for its configuration being in plain text and version controllable. I had to have this for Gnome: https://github.com/cadadr/configuration/blob/master/scripts/... https://github.com/cadadr/configuration/blob/master/xdg-conf...

> The teardown photos are hilarious because the motherboard only takes up about 1/6 the internal space. The rest is empty. https://hackaday.com/2017/04/28/hands-on-with-the-pinebook/

As mentioned in that review, the software part seems to be a problem area for Pine. That could also be why it's cheap (because it's mainly the hardware alone that one is paying for). I got the original Pine64 board through the crowdfunding campaign, and I found the distro images provided to be lacking and also not kept updated. I wanted to use it like a headless server/NAS kind of setup with VNC access to run other programs as necessary, but found that a bit too hard to get done. So it's just been gathering dust since then.

The Ubuntu image has been actively maintained for a while now. Though now the maintainer is putting more effort towards Android 7.1. Which is the crux of the issue... These distros are usually maintained by just one community developer.

serious question: why do people insist on using Ubuntu for low-end hardware like this and the PI??? Ubuntu is a cluttered nightmare full of so much unecessary stuff. Why not use a minimalistic non-GUI barebones version of Debian and build your OS up from there?

I agree. I'm a fan of headless Debian, and running i3wm when needed. (I currently run headless Ubuntu, but only because Debian on the Pine is no longer maintained)

If you need multimedia and heavy web browsing, run Android. That's what it was designed for.

That's good news. Could you please point me to where these updated images are? I had been looking at the official site [1] once every few months last year, but didn't find the Ubuntu (or Debian) images updated. The dates are still from end of 2016.

[1]: http://wiki.pine64.org/index.php/Pine_A64_Software_Release

https://github.com/ayufan-pine64/linux-build/releases/

I'd recommend the Xenial images. There are Mate/i3wm versions for the pinebook, but all the others (Pine64 & Sopine) are headless and require the installation of a GUI.

Thanks for that link. I'm looking for updated images for Pine64 (not Pinebook), and all of them on this repository seem to be minimal images (without a desktop environment). Is my understanding correct? I'm looking for one with a desktop environment.

Yeah, I'm afraid that's the case :/ So you'd have to SSH into your pine64 and install a GUI yourself.

Then to enable Mali support (which basically lets the device actually use the GPU to render the screen), you have to add an additional repository:

  - apt-add-repository ppa:ayufan/pine64-ppa -y
  - apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-armsoc-sunxi libmali-sunxi-utgard0-r6p0

then you'd run the script to enable it. Probably need root to run it.

  - exec /usr/local/sbin/pine64_enable_sunxidrm.sh

Then in your GUI's settings, you'd disable software compositing (force it to use the Mali GPU instead of the pine's CPU)

  -  System -> Preferences -> Look and Feel -> Windows and disable Enable software compositing.

If things go awry, or you have more questions, there's a community IRC that's usually pretty active with people willing to help. http://pine64.xyz/

FreeBSD makes images available for it that you burn to the SD card and pop in and you are off to the races, although just for -HEAD so you end up chasing new images every so often since the system is still heavily in flux.

Thanks for the pointer on FreeBSD for Pine. I wasn't aware about this. I've now found the images online, though it'll require some reading to figure out if it's appropriate for me.

> * It does in fact turn on.

That is something you and I both have experienced with this laptop :P

As for the rest, it really is bad. Like really bad. Although I did get lucky, I have 0 dead pixels.

What is the actual battery life?

If it has a decent one (atleast 12 hours) I could use it as a travel notebook instead of my hefty thinkpad.

A quad core A53 consumes around 2W when idle. The battery is 37Wh, so I don't think it can make 12 hours (including screen consumption).

2W when idle is very high.

Are you sure it is just the Core A53 or is it measured in power/battery connection which account for the display, wifi, DDR, IO, etc?

I did power profile for cellphone SOC couple years ago. Typical power usage for CPU is very low - milli-watts or less range for IDLE, worst case 1-2 W at full performance mode OP (Operating Point).

When I profiled it, the Display, Wifi module consumed a lot more power than CPU/SOC during "normal" operations.

I surely used the wrong term - I meant that the entire board consumes around 2W in idle/light workload.

I can't guarantee about the precision; 2W may be 1.5W or 2.5W on my tool (it doesn't have decimals), although, I've measured my XU4 consumption, and it's consistent with third party measurements (5W on idle).

Thank you for the link and the review.

It does in fact turn on

This one made me laugh

> * It does in fact turn on.

Genius. I was seriously doubting how it was possible to be this cheap.

I just added my name to the BTO list. How long did you have to wait before they contacted you (and then before it shipped)? I can't seem to find anything about that on their site...

They are making them in batches. Whenever they get enough people on the waiting list they send out the order emails, then they manufacture the batch and ship them out. Once I was able to actually place my order I received it 3 weeks later.

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