Pinebook Pro Six Months In
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I have an old 64 Bit Quad Core Baytrail-T Z3795 1.59GHz tablet which just freezes on Twitter unless I disable videos.
Can these socs do any better?
We are paying for abstraction layers added to smooth web development.
I service a couple of chromebooks that I bought for my non-tech savvy family members. It's ideal since they spend 99% of the time in the browser and are less prone to drive-by attacks that download random executables.
However, I have a couple of concerns:
1) The build quality of the (various) chromebooks I've bought tends to be quite terrible, which is not great since many of them use it while cooking and get banged up a great deal.
2) Occasionally, they'll need a desktop app (e.g. the MS Teams web app has fewer features, or Google Docs just not always cutting it).
3) I hate locking them onto the Google ecosystem.
Now that they're due for replacement, I think I'll just get a Pinebook. The build quality is certainly better than the Acer and Lenovo chromebooks we have, and the fact that you can just replace the board for around $100 is very appealing.
That's the real progress we've made, the power efficiency of mobile devices.
[1]: https://twitter.com/ow/status/1135919541073014786
[2]: https://medium.com/@ow/its-finally-possible-to-code-web-apps...
Touchpad is kind of trash. You'll move your finger across and it'll take time to respond. I have seen there are touchpad upgrades but only for 2019 units which mine isnt.
The other is that suspend doesnt work. If I suspend; it appears to go asleep but it'll burn >5% battery an hour.
I booted up kali live and tested it, similar problems.
so like a 9 year old $50 thinkpad x220.
There are also many posts in the community about quality of the touchpad.
This may be naive, but I'm guessing a mid-range 2020 laptop shouldn't have a worse touchpad than a 2008 white clamshell MacBook.
After all, pinebook is more a hacker device than a consumer device.
The existence of this TM3141 touchpad[1]—which is every bit as good as a MacBook touchpad and works with a stock Ubuntu configuration—is proof that this is already a solved problem.
That said, it's a problem in the larger ecosystem.
I'm not sure why Chromebooks and even higher-end Windows machines tend to have lousy trackpads, when it's a "make or break" part of the user experience (and when Apple got it right enough 10 ~ 20 years ago).
Isn't kde pretty lightweight nowadays?