Pinebook Pro – First Impressions and Setup Tips | Hacker News Reader

Pinebook Pro – First Impressions and Setup Tips

haydenjames.io

177 pointsashitlerferad90 comments

I didn't think I'd find this post this useful. All my dev machines are underpowered, which is pretty much a lifestyle choice by now. Meaning they are ram-constrained, cpu-constrained and have slow disk IO. I'm not writing this to discuss why I do this, but I feel like that's weird enough to warrant a few words, so one of the upsides is that I am intimately aware of resource efficiency around me.

This post introduced me to zram (in-ram compressed swap), which sacrifices CPU cycles for evading in-disk swap usage longer. I've also not considered playing with cpu governors, which I was able to do while reading the post. And, the post provided some swap settings for use with zram, which is great. Again, very helpful post.

I bought PBP for the same reason. However, I am not satisfied with the quality of the touch pad and the screen, so I don't use it.

zram and zswap are some of my favorite tools on smaller systems. Happy other people are learning about them!

I appreciate you developing on underpowered machines, as it likely means the end product will not suck on the average user's computer!

> All my dev machines are underpowered

I believe this is a great choice. Most of our code will live in the cloud, and will be billed by the second. If you can feel if something goes slow, you can fix it before you're billed for it ;-)

Fast hardware can mask performance problems. I still remember a bug I had in a Turbo Pascal code when I switched from my 286 to a Pentium: my loop counter had an extra '0' and it run unnoticed on the pentium for hours because it was too fast...

I'd rather systematically measure and monitor my code and systems (which should be done anyway) than waste my time with slower CPUs, memory, disks, NICs, etc. I've spent some time doing embedded, and I'd never dream of using an 8mhz, 16bit machine just because that's what my target runs.

If a fast cpu masks a "problem", I'd submit that it might not be a problem. Hardware is cheap, I try to save my brain cycles for stuff that matters, like HN, .emacs.d, and codegolf!

EDIT: This turned into a bit of a rant about one sentence from the parent's post. Sorry about that, this is just aimed at the "hardware is cheap" mentality.

The "hardware is cheap" phrase was rampant in our company until about a year ago. A year ago an executive took a closer look at our cloud bill and, well, exploded. Now there's a huge push to reclaim those extra cycles and RAM as our "cheap hardware" bill is outrunning our overall salary costs.

Being at a point where this is a problem could be considered to be a good thing; we have enough traffic to cause it to be an issue. The problem is, the MVP was cost efficient (even at scale), it's the re-write that's costing us money. At some point, you have to grow up and realize that throwing hardware at poor code is not a sustainable solution.

At scale, the equation flips. Hardware becomes expensive, and any given developer's time is cheap.

Hardware is cheap, cloud services are expensive :)

The cloud is cheap, it's when you need so many clouds you can't see sunlight anymore it becomes expensive.

I don't underpower machines that I do creative work on, but switched to a crappy smart phone specifically to discourage me from spending time consuming media. It's really helped.

How much of the u-boot and Linux kernel binaries which ship with the Pinebook Pro (or are used in the images/installers linked from the wiki) is already integrated into the mainline or upstream of each of these projects?

If not much, where can I find information about their plans to contribute their changes?

Are there any plans for UEFI support to be added to the Pinebook Pro so that it can easily boot installers that already exist for 64 bit ARM Linux distributions?

I recently bought a dev laptop and was looking at Pinebook Pros. The main deterrent for me was the possibility of dead pixels. I ended up getting a refurbished Dell for $250, as it met my requirements of 8 gb ram and 256 gb ssd. Dell actively checks Linux compatibility so I had no issues at all installing Ubuntu first go

What model Dell?

Latitude E7250, I think its mainly used in corporate contracts. This was a plus for me as its built to withstand some abuse

An aside:

Why do so many websites (like this one) now have large blank spots near images when browsing with JavaScript disabled? I'm not much of a web developer, but it looks like the site was trying to use srcset but used it in a weird way that has two img tags with the srcset of the images, with one with a data URL in the src attribute that contains a blank image and the dimensions of the image. So right next to the image is a large blank spot. It appears that some JavaScript hides one of these images.

Similarly, many websites show all sizes of the images when you have JavaScript disabled. As far as I'm aware, it is possible to do responsive images without JavaScript, so I don't get why people do things like this.

Something to do with the fact that he is lazy loading images using JavaScript I believe.

So many websites are completely broken with JavaScript disabled. With or without, even printing a webpage to PDF is becoming a challenge. I sincerely wonder how disabled people use the web nowadays.

I can't wait for the ANSI keyboard version to be available again.

The only thing I wish it had that it doesn't is a larger battery. There is plenty empty space inside the shell and it'd be awesome to be able to install an extra battery in there.

Battery size in laptops is limited by airlines.

No, its limited by FAA.

Does this really limit the market for extra batteries a lot?

But that is 100 watt hours. If my math is correct (which it is possibly very wrong) this battery is only 50WH. My guess is this is to help keep cost down not because it wouldn't be allowed on a plane.

It's limited by the FAA to a maximum of 100Wh. The Pinebook Pro has a battery of 10000mAh at 3.8V (I think), so 38Wh. There is plenty of room for a bigger battery.

Can someone explain to me the logic of putting a pagefile on a ramdisk? If the pages are going to be in RAM anyway, why pretend that they're on disk?

Because it's transparently compressed, so you get more RAM out of your RAM at the cost of some latency and CPU usage. This is a good tradeoff on heavily RAM constrained workloads like attempting to run Slack clients.

I’m not sure why they went through all that hassle when there is zswap. That’s what I use for low ram devices.

In this case, because the storage device that's there by default is optimized for low power and not high speed, so RAM is dramatically faster. They implemented swap as well but only as a last resort when the compressed RAM runs out.

Sounds exactly like what zswap does out of the box.

"Zswap is a kernel feature that provides a compressed RAM cache for swap pages. Pages which would otherwise be swapped out to disk are instead compressed and stored into a memory pool in RAM. Once the pool is full or the RAM is exhausted, the least recently used (LRU) page is decompressed and written to disk, as if it had not been intercepted." https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Zswap

From that wiki page you linked to: "The difference compared to zram is that zswap works in conjunction with a swap device while zram is a swap device in RAM that does not require a backing swap device."

The default storage is an EMMC chip, so they are trying to avoid hitting that for swap completely. With 4GB of RAM, that’s a reasonable goal.

If think of you added in an SSD to the machine, then zswap might be more appropriate.

I've had a Pine64 in my closet for years from the original Kickstarter and completely forgot about it.

Now I've got a fun project for the weekend :)

I think the device seems incredibly good for the price. That said I don't think I'm ready to move to an arm laptop.

The other current Pine devices is just amazing. Check out this footage of the PinePhone running Arch Linux, Chromium and Firefox.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22127081

> Mainly, if I remain with the Pinebook Pro or switch to alternatives such as Purism 13, Galago Pro’s 14 or back to Thinkpad T series laptops

I am currently on my fourth Thinkpad in a row (T480s) and it's been a good streak, but this will be my last.

The Thunderbolt firmware has had severe issues and requires reflashing to be practically usable. Despite Lenovo officially being part of LVFS[0], the only way I could get my laptop operational, after about a full work-day of working with fwupdmgr, digging around the internet for cab files, trying to extract them from the Windows-only releases, running Windows in a VM, etc, the only way I finally got it working was grabbing an old drive from the drawer, installing Windows and downloading their Windows releases just so I could get my controller in a working condition. This is for a laptop released in 2018 with the update shipping in late 2019.

[0]: http://fwupd.org/

Do not fear! I hated Lenovo after the T480s and sweared to never buy anything from then ever again. But I bought T490 to my new job and spent a day tweaking it to my liking (I come from mac) and was pleasantly surprised how well it runs. Compared to T480s the touchpad has better feel and the laptop is able to cool itself so I’m not facing the fan issue (it is still present when on AC but hardly noticeable)

I’m running Fedora 31 with Cinnamon and with disabled Ethernet, Fingerprint and SD card reader in BIOS, the power consumption with 40 tabs on Firefox and brightness on 40% is around 3.5W which gets me ~10 hours. Pretty sure you could get it even lower with minimalistic Arch setup.

Don’t get me wrong, I would love Macbook (2015) in the linux world with stelar touchpad, great battery life and out-of-the box setup, but this as close as it gets and I believe there is no other option right now.

It’s not this issue itself as much as the half-assed practical non-support for Linux, and the suspicious malware they push on you.

At this rate one of the new contenders like Pine, Librem etc should hopefully be mature enough by the point I feel the need to upgrade in some years.. Or Clevo for that matter!

I have been looking for an ARM laptop at a reasonable price. It looks like this might just check the boxes I am looking for. Can't wait for the US version to be back in stock!

Similar from a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22076143

Lots more: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Considering the price, this can probably retrofitted into a Chromebook. It looks like that it has a better build quality than most Chromebooks in that price range.

There are several reasons I couldn't use this machine as a daily driver personally, but for $199 (!) it's tempting to get it just as a toy. Just to have a:

- Dedicated Linux system to play with

- Ultra-portable laptop

- Cheap travel laptop

Is it possible when considering form factor and cooling to pop other SBC's device advice such as this? 3 years down the road pop in a new board?

No mention about how good the screen is?

He mentions it shortly, in the Build Quality paragraph.

For me, the lack of guarantee about dead pixels is what is holding me back from buying a PineBook Pro.

It’s 2020. Dead pixels shouldn’t be a thing anymore. I would be willing to pay a little bit more and get a unit that is guaranteed to have no dead pixel. Alas, they don’t offer that option.

You can buy mine for a very good price if you are in Europe. It doesn't have any dead pixels, and I have only used it for 5 hours or so.

For how much and what country?

I'll take it. How can I contact you? I'm located in Germany.

Please pm me here (same user name, #pinebook channel): https://discordapp.com/invite/DgB7kzr.

"Don't RMA for a few dead pixels" is pretty much standard on every legal text ever, and just because it's

     date '+%Y'

doesn't mean that we've magically solved every problem when it comes to manufacturing, especially with displays.

If it means that much to you, get a Chromebook. They'll probably have about as much of a chance of getting a dead pixel, but hey, it's not like you'd know that because Chromebook manufacturers aren't as transparent as PINE64.

Assuming their policies haven't changed since I checked them last, Apple still allows 7-8 stuck/dead pixels on devices the size of the Pinebook Pro. Dell six.

Apple is the richest company in the world.

PINE64 doesn't even count as a startup.

Maybe it's because I haven't looked hard enough, or maybe it's because ppi is so high on modern displays, but I haven't noticed a dead or stuck pixel on any Apple product I've owned in...well, years.

That only strengthens the point that the presence of dead pixels is not influenced by the year the screen was made but it is clearly influenced by the amount of money invested into the quality of the final product.

I think the 2020 reference doesn't make sense because dead pixels are an inherent part of the manufacturing process. The only way to reduce the impact of dead pixels is to discard defective panels which drives up the price but this is a low cost product from a relatively unknown manufacturer who might cancel the product if there are too many RMAs.

It is perfectly okay to say "It's 2020, why does my company still force me to use flash when it's unsupported in the latest browsers?". Flash is obsolete and will only become more obsolete over time. Dead pixels will probably keep happening until we switch away from conventional display technology.

I think PINE's ordering page is very much clear that if that's the sort of thing you'd RMA for, they'd rather not have you as a customer. My understanding is they're making basically no profit on these early run PineBook Pros and PinePhones.

This is like an $800 laptop feel for a $200 laptop price. Minor defects are worth just living with. And eventually, you can always buy yourself a replacement screen too.

if their QA discarded every display with a single dead pixel, it wouldn't be $199

Well I bought it and I am not using it because the touch pad and the screen is not good enough. The backlight shines through the black parts (not homogeneously), the color varies a lot depending on the viewing angle, it is uncomfortable to look at. The refresh rate is bad as well, but I don't care about that. The touchpad has an awful lag, it is almost unusable.

AFAIK, they are aware of the issue with the TouchPad and are working on a fix.

There is a firmware update for it. Have you tried that? The touchpad works fine for me (I flashed the firmware).

See https://github.com/ayufan-rock64/pinebook-pro-keyboard-updat....

The display is decent. It’s better than low end Chromebooks for sure. There is some backlight leakage around the edges, but it’s only noticeable when the background is entirely black (rare for me - even running an editor with a dark theme, there’s window chrome that hides the leakage). Mine has no dead pixels and no other issues that I’ve noticed. My only complaint is that it’s not as bright as my middle-aged eyes would like, but it’s still quite usable.

The achilles heel of this laptop is really the touchpad. They’ve already released one firmware update to address issues and there will be more. I’m optimistic that they’ll dial it in over time.

TL;DR: A good laptop, especially at this price point, provided you’re willing to tinker with it. Build quality is significantly better than anything else you’d find at this price (and likely even at +$100).

Why so much ads on a personal website? Half the content of the page is dedicated to them, it's very annoying: https://imgur.com/a/DBuXPCp

Well, the thought crosses my mind every time I think of a good idea for a blog post: Make post, fill with as much ads as is bearable, post to HN, profit.

Can't blame him.

And that short burst of traffic from a tech savvy group with probably >90% adblock might earn you, like what.. $1.50?

My uBlock and uMatrix setup is pretty thorough and doesn't block these, much to my surprise

Local ads probably.

The ads are served from static.haydenjames.io. Looks like a Wordpress plugin called Advanced Ads Plus[0] is used.

0: https://wpadvancedads.com

Soon you'll need a gpu to run real time deep learning models that detect and filter these type of embedded ads...

sign me up

Interesting, I can't make pihole make them go away. It does not really matter for this site, but I want to be able to avoid it in the future.

Was anyone successful? Are they served from more than one place?

It's always gonna be hard to block first party ads that come from the same domain as the content. Fortunately almost no ads like this are really malicious.

No, it's served from the same domain as the content. They're static images, so the ad and the in-copy diagram are actually from the same source. It's a bit heavy-handed here, but honestly, this is the sort of advertising I don't mind not blocking.

Ahh, ok. That explains it. I was wondering what I was missing. Thank you.

edit: and that I can live with.

Exactly it's not third party, hopefully not selling the tracking info and it's aimed at the same interest group that reads the article. Might even be useful as opposed to all the targeting ads that never ever made sense to me.

Same reason you cant pi-hole youtube ads, they're all served from the same domain as the actual video too.

I think you greatly overestimate the number of people using adblock (even on here) and underestimate the breadth of people who use hacker news.

Remember that the people who use adblock talk about it a lot, and those who don't use it don't talk about it.

I try to minimize Adblock usage to the sites deserving it.

The reason is that ad blocking is killing the media, which is necessary for a functioning democracy. The magnitude of suffering a collective return to autocracy would cause is so disproportional to being slightly annoyed by ads, it doesn’t even matter if your faith in the importance of a free press is just a fraction of mine.

It’s usually not well received on HN, because journalists are generally held in lower regard than war criminals or chocolate thieves.

Every now and then I feel guilty about using an ad blocker, then people show how the internet really looks, and I don't feel bad anymore.

Looks like these ads show even through my adblocker and pi-hole, mostly because they're advertisements for himself, using locally hosted images linking to other pages on his blog.

This is the kind of advertising I'm totally cool with. Much less likely to be malware than random ads from some ad network.

This may be the future if everyone moves their advertising to first-party as third-parties are getting blocked by default

A possible solution would be providing adblockers with timed counters for each image so that for example all external popups/ads get blocked but say only the first 5 each hour coming from each visited site will be shown for say 30 seconds to one minute (to avoid distraction when reading). I believe it would be an effective way to send a message: be nice to me and I'll see some of your ads, but screw my surfing experience and you get no revenue. Otherwise as others have already pointed out, blocking everything would be the only viable option as surfing without blockers today has become a painful experience.

"Thank you for your ads. You have 5 free servings left for free access to my eyeballs. Please subscribe to my eyeballs for uninterrupted access."

I don't - I am under no obligation to not bite the hand that feeds someone else if that hand is abusing me.

You are under no obligation to read that content either... seems like the abuse actually come from you that did made the conscious choice to go there.

Even if we keep following my analogy then my behavior is not abusing the content creator in any way, so no, not really. Meanwhile the negative sides of advertising and ad tech are well-documented.

Not to mention the fact that I am not the person responsible for giving advertisers access to someone's website. If anything I'm going easy on the content creator by holding the fact that they do so against them.

> my behavior is not abusing the content creator in any way

Abuse[0]: Abuse is the improper usage or treatment of a thing, often to unfairly or improperly gain benefit.

You go somewhere that use ads to finance the content, while making effort to block theses ads/thus the financing. It's certainly the improper usage of his website, to unfairly or improperly gain benefit. The benefit being access to the content.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abuse

> Meanwhile the negative sides of advertising and ad tech are well-documented.

Then why not avoiding anything using ad tech? The negative sides of smoke from cigarette are well known, I'm still not there trying to keep smoking while trying to avoid the smoke.

Personally I have no issue with most ads. The only time I ever had an issue with them was over Engadget were I got 2 auto playing ads over the course of a few days, I just stopped going there. What are the negative side that you lived? That was the only one that I lived, a slight inconvenience, while everyday I get hundred of positive side. There so many content creator that I care deeply about that were able to live out of their content, that would never been able to otherwise.

> Not to mention the fact that I am not the person responsible for giving advertisers access to someone's website.

You are responsible for accessing it...

> If anything I'm going easy on the content creator

You are going easy on him? By accessing his content without respecting the terms he set on accessing it. That doesn't sound like anything generous.

You act like you deserve the access to the content and now you even act like you reading it is some sort of reward for the content creator. That entitlement is seriously wrong.

Oh man, this site is wild. I haven't seen any obvious ads in weeks, but the site looks just like this image for me. Everything loaded after a 1 second delay, so I'm assuming that that's how they got around ublock.

Crazy that I saw some no-name site like this getting around my adblockers before I've seen any major site do it so nimbly. Congrats, I guess.

>Everything loaded after a 1 second delay, so I'm assuming that that's how they got around ublock.

I'm not aware of any adblocker that disables blocking a few seconds after page load.

>Crazy that I saw some no-name site like this getting around my adblockers before I've seen any major site do it so nimbly. Congrats, I guess.

Not really surprising at all. Adblockers operate on blacklists, and if your site is small enough you might be able to fly under the radar and not get added to those lists.

There's not some advanced technical reason. He just hosts his own ads. It's not like ad-blockers can add every ad for every personal site. My personal site has some ads that aren't blocked either. Not because I'm trying to circumvent ad-blockers, but just because they've never heard of me.

As always, a reminder that the Reader button exists in the menubar in Firefox and it's a godsend for pages like this! (although one of the less intrusive ads still seems to get through).

Alternatively, the article itself seems to load fine without any JS enabled.

Half of the contents are listicles so I'd say it's a commercial site that just happens to be named after the author of the majority of the content.

well these days, it's these tech ads or ads about face cream and celebs. I mean its so hard to monetize these days. You can't please everyone. Maybe if the site had ads like these https://i.imgur.com/hg31VTB.png then you would be happy???

Remember when the web didn't have ads. People just used it to convey info and everyone didn't think they were going to get rich because of some ad revenue.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com