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Comment by X-Istence | Hacker News Reader

I own one of the original Pinebooks, and for $99 it is a great little machine.

Comparing it to my MacBook Pro... it's terrible.

It has some flaws, and it may be underpowered for things like YouTube, it works flawlessly as a small note taker that has an extremely long battery life and a decent screen/keyboard. It's also really nice for having a Linux machine around that most dongles/serial consoles just work with when you head into the datacenter to deal with a Cisco device that isn't playing nice.

For the price point, you get a lot. As an owner of a Pinebook, I am looking forward to the Pinebook Pro.

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You must have had a very different experience than I did; in my case even running something like LibreOffice was laggy, and the default install of KDE was laughably slow. Command-line applications worked fine, and yeah, I mostly live in the command-line anyway, but if the computer isn't even fast enough to go to Stackoverflow at a reasonable speed when I encounter s a problem, I don't see how usable it is for me. It was bad enough to where I tried opening it up to see if I could reasonably-easily install an ODroid N2 or NVidia Jetson in there. (I'm sure someone smarter than me could make that work but it didn't look like a trivial operation).

I'm hoping the PineBook Pro is bit better, since I love the idea of having a good ARM based laptop with FOSS software driving it, but as it stands my Pinebook is more or less a paperweight

In pinebook’s defense... OpenOffice/LibreOffice is slow and lags pretty much everywhere.

Sure, and my main "word processor" is typically vim+pandoc->LaTeX, so maybe that's a bad example anyway. Still, the fact that the web browsers are so completely unusable (I tried Chromium and Firefox; haven't tried something like uzbl yet) makes the entire system pretty difficult to use.

I have thought about writing some kind of ncurses application and having it live next to my server to display some cool diagnostic screens that I pretend to read, but most likely it'll just be a novelty that I whip out about once a month to complain about to my wife.

The only major(ish) browser I know of that seems to give half a damn about performance—by which I mean "does not make the whole system feel slow" rather than "achieves high scores on JS benchmarks"—is Safari, unfortunately :-/

I really miss when Firefox (Phoenix, Firebird) felt snappy and light. So, like, pre-2.0, back before 2006 :-(

I remember preferring lighter alternatives to LibreOffice (OpenOffice, in fact, at the time) on Linux back in the early and mid 2000s because that suite was such a sluggish resource hog, only firing it up if I needed a decent chance at MS Office compatibility, for which purpose it was merely a disk space hog, because so rarely used but necessary. Ditto KDE, for that matter, on the resource hog front. Guessing my main laptop back then (single-core 900Mhz Celeron IBM Thinkpad with 384MB RAM) was weaker than most of these single-board computers, though.

> extremely long battery life

How long? The reviews say around 6 hours; that's not long and definitely not extremely long. My X220 from 2011 has a lot more than that while being cheaper and a lot faster (really a lot; I am often surprised how fast this almost decade old machine is).

As a note taker, how long is the delay between you opening it to the point where you can type a note?

I was using Google Docs for note taking, and as long as drive.google.com was already loaded, I could pop open the lid and create a new document in about 3 - 5 seconds.

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