$200 Linux Laptop Pinebook Pro Is Available for Purchase | Hacker News Reader

$200 Linux Laptop Pinebook Pro Is Available for Purchase

itsfoss.com

47 pointsreddotX17 comments

Sadly 4 GB RAM is barely usable these days. I'm much more interested in the upcoming Pinephone[0].

https://www.pine64.org/2019/09/05/september-update-the-pinep...

I strongly disagree. Sure you need more to run the latest games, or some video/photo/sound editing, but you wouldn't be doing those types of things on this device. For browsing, checking your social media/email, etc. it's more than enough. Even for coding. I worked a year or so off of a chromebook(with linux installed) with 4GB RAM and never had any issues. This wasn't that long ago.

Chrome, Firefox, et all can easily use 4Gb of ram in normal situations.

I always see comments like this, but never understand where they come from.

To be clear, I'm not telling you that you are wrong, or lying. I do believe some people see this. I just don't understand how it's normal. I've -never- had anything like this. Am I the odd one out?

My system now has 32GB of memory. I have two chrome windows open, one with 14 tabs, the other with 2. Below is the memory situation of the entire machine.

  $ free -m
                total        used        free      shared  
  buff/cache   available
  Mem:          32094        3164       26741         864        
  2188       27612
  Swap:             0           0           0

>>>I have two chrome windows open, one with 14 tabs, the other with 2

I'm sitting at 5.8/16GB used with 87 tabs open in Brave.

I usually leave tabs open as a sort of "soft bookmarking", and a reminder to go back and read something later. For example, I have 7 tabs next to each other from the EvolutionM.net forum, and all those little Mitsubishi icons on the top of my browser are a constant "At some point you need to study how to properly maintain your dual-clutch transmission instead of paying Mitsubishi $1000+ for a fluid flush."

But surely you realize this is a luxury afforded to you by having purchased a machine with more ram.

For those that want or need to save money, less ram can be used and the same soft bookmarking can be accomplished by using OneTab or similar browser extensions.

Oh absolutely. I totally understand reducing your hardware costs if your use case is focused. I wish there were more options for purchasing "no frills" hardware in life....particularly cars.

You're not the odd one out. My laptop running ubuntu has 4GB, I use it for everything, I use Firefox all the time, and it's fine. I even edit video now and then.

Yeah, I'm not sure who the odd one out is honestly and no one does unless we have telemetry for all computers but chrome and firefox definitely can hog tons of ram. I guess it depends on what sites you frequent and have open

4GB is plenty for an ARM-based computer. It's rare to find a phone or a SOC with more than 4GB ram, and I think the reason is that you're more likely to max your CPU than your RAM on these limited chips. You're unlikely to be running VMs on these, and you shouldn't be expecting this to be your work primary machine at $200.

For $200 on a limited CPU, I think 4GB RAM is plenty.

My Chromebook runs 4GB (upper end of that product range, at least at the time), and it works fine for everything we have needed it to do (video streaming, Google Docs, etc). That's the type of device I expect this to replace.

Pine’s hardware is really nice. I would love to be able to install something very close to stock Debian on it, or a Debian distribution sourced directly from somewhere like Raspberry Pi, rather than the current OS offerings. Perhaps the OS situation has been improved with this latest hardware?

I’ve never felt comfortable with the OS side they provide: strange versions of Debian from unknown github accounts or links from their wiki to other third party sites I’ve never heard of. I can build from source but don’t have anything like the resources I’d need to audit the source code, again from third party hacker sites, and it doesn’t feel like there are enough collective eyeballs on the OS forks and patches to feel completely confident nothing careless or nefarious made its way into the codebase.

I’ve no real reason not to trust them, but if they could roll what they need for their system into an upstream vendor with a brand name I’ve heard of it would give me more faith in using their devices in high trust roles (ie: anything other than local coding or web browsing.)

Ever heard of armbian?

Nice. I didn’t know they had direct support for all this hardware.

I considered getting one of their 1080p 11" models, but feared receiving something with such a shitty build quality/keyboard it would just be $100 worth of e-waste.

Any of you HNers actually use one of these as a daily driver?

I'm also interested in real hands-on reviews by HN readers!

I just checked and it is out of stock.

I don't think it is possible to order one for purchase at the moment; every time I've looked at the website in the last 3 weeks its been either "try again in 1 hour" or "out of stock".

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