KDE developers release stable images for the the Pinebook

dot.kde.org

32 points·Bro6666··6 comments

The Pinebook is a small, inexpensive and light netbook built around the PINE64 SBC that can (now) run a full KDE Plasma desktop.

When "Apple" or "Dotan Cohen" are mentioned in the title, I'll understand that no explanation is needed. But when tiny companies and products that are completely unknown are presented, an explanation is proper. The title should have been "KDE developers release stable images for smartphone-powered laptop".

That said, the device seems decent for the price. It looks like a Macbook clone, but with an ISO keyboard layout. The screen resolution is horrendous, and with only 2 GiB of RAM and 16 GiB of storage, the device is too weak for any real use case.

It's particularly egregious because the original article title says "...on ARM laptop Pinebook".

It is a netbook competitor, not a macbook competitor.

Pine64 is pretty well known.

I wonder what the speed is like. I bought a netbook as soon as I could back in 2007 or so. I still run my Dell Mini 9 to this day. Back then I wanted to be able to hack on emacs in bed (seriously). I never actually did that much because using a keyboard (especially a very small keyboard) in bed isn't very comfortable. But the other point was this was a portable computer I could actually afford (it was less than £200). The computer also has no moving parts whatsoever which I found very cool. It's powered by 32 bit Atom and these days I find even Lubuntu has unsatisfactory performance. So it now run Gentoo with a minimal kernel and just enough to run i3wm with Firefox and emacs on there.

I guess the ARM64 is more powerful than my Atom. But it still only has 2GB of memory which is the same as my netbook! (I might have upgraded my RAM, I can't remember).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com