Comment by gadgetoid | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gadgetoid | Hacker News Reader

I tested the Mk III back in Dec 2020 before it dropped out of existence (parts shortage I think.) Due to relocating during the Covid chaos I actually daily drove it as my workstation for a few months (using VSCode/Slack/Discord and writing C++ for RP2040 and running more MicroPython recompiles than I'd care to imagine). The keyboard left a little to be desired (inconsistent actuation force), but having a Linux-first, mini laptop at that price point was compelling. The decent resolution (1080p at 11") screen, SATA SSD (rather than eMMC) and backlit (!!) keyboard made it worthwhile and I still use it for work.

If they've revised the keyboard/trackpad in Mk IV then it could be a pretty solid little machine.

I also had some weirdness with the USB Type-C power adapter (ha I wish this was the only hardware I could say this about) but that may or may not have been fixed (in the Mk III) with a recent firmware update. Though it did take them the best part of the year since my vague and difficult to reproduce bug reports. A 12v barrel jack supply was rock solid. No surprise there.

I know it's no Framework, but it's nice to have a System76-a-like this side of the pond.

Since linux+hardware discussions usually leads to the >$1000 laptops e.g. System76/Framework (both of which I highly recommend) or Thinkpad; I'm hijacking the top comment to mention to those who are looking to get into Linux from Windows or macOS that Linux Operating System almost certainly works well with your existing hardware or any entry-level computer too.

In fact I've been buying entry-mid level low TDP laptops with good IO for several years now and put the cost saved in massive memory + storage upgrades for that laptop. Due to the accessibility of such laptops worldwide, I find that support/bug fixes to Linux OS/kernel arrive faster as well.

For small form factors, Converting a 11" Chromebook to Linux laptop can be done with some effort[1] and the compatibility varies with the chipset. But due to Google subsidies, such portable laptops costs way lesser than purpose built Linux hardware.

[1] https://mrchromebox.tech/

I use Pinebook Pro as daily driver for a couple of month, and my only complaint was about the keyboard. Even the screen is bearable.

A good, cheap keyboard would be a game changer for low-end devices, it's definitely the bit I find hardest to compromise on.

The SoC is really slow, do you mostly use it as a terminal to your servers? What's your rational behind getting it? The price and it being "open"?

I was running one of those 7" OneMix laptops for a while. They have 16GB ram and a 512 SSD. Apparently they have switched to 10" form factor now[1].

[1] https://www.1netbook.com/product/onenetbook-4-platinum/

The SoC is not that slow if you only use Firefox to read Hacker News and Stackoverflow, and the rest of the work happens in the terminal.

I am more bothered by unreliable suspend to ram. It kind of works, but then it does not for me.

On my PbPro this is caused by the lid sensor magnet being badly positioned. When I close the lid expecting that to trigger suspend, it will suspend too early as the lid closes, then un-suspend once it fully closes. Suspending manually first (via keystroke, for example) and then closing the lid solves that. I've read you can fix the sensor's position if you're willing to open the LCD-half of the laptop. The other issue I have is if you plug or unplug the power (via USB-C, at least, I haven't tested using the barrel plug) it causes the PbPro to resume even if the lid is closed, so I always make sure to plug it in first and avoid taking it out while it's suspended.

Barrel plug will do it too. It's an odd behavior, for sure.

I don't think I even realized it had a suspend sensor in the lid. I suspend mine via the power menu, wait for the green LED to go off, then close it. If you've got the proper suspend (deep sleep) stack working, it's very much a power sipper when asleep as well - I've had it asleep for a week (when I thought it was off), and still had plenty of battery when I woke it up.

The PBP CPUs aren't fast, but they're certainly "enough" for daily driver use if you're not insanely demanding. I use one as one of my daily drivers, and it handles web (Firefox and Chrome), Element, Marktext for editing blog posts, and various other things perfectly fine. It's not fast by any means, but it's entirely adequate. Photo editing takes a couple ticks to process, and I wouldn't try video editing on it, but neither do I do video editing, so...

Battery life is excellent (8-12 hours depending on what you're doing), the 2021 trackpad firmware solves the fact that the trackpad was beyond vile, and other than wifi glitching every couple weeks and needing a reboot, I've really got no complaints with it. Plus, it's $200, and very light.

If you're the sort of person who "needs" 64GB of RAM and a 2TB SSD with a 6C/12C workstation processor in a laptop, it's not at all useful, but it's quite a bit more capable than most people realize, and that I have no fan noise, and it doesn't roast my legs in normal use, is really quite nice.

I thought the Pinebook Pro screen was fantastic. 14'' feels spacious after 13.3 :) The keyboard you sorta get used to. My main problem was the 4GB of RAM that couldn't really run Emacs and Firefox simultaneously. Do you code without a browser on the side?

I've tried to have an emacs-only workflow - but lots of stuff is complicated. CIDER will now open/browse ClojureDocs, but there is still no way to display JavaDocs without a browser. I also dunno how to browser Github short of cloning every repo I use.

I'd appreciate any tips :)

However, that said, I never found the processing power problematic

I'm not the GP, and I don't necessarily have a solution for you, but I'm curious about your workflow.

My 19-tab Firefox (with Gmail open) is consuming 1.2 GB, and my fully-loaded Spacemacs is ~250 MB. What's your memory consumption look like, and how many tabs do you usually have open?

Suggestions for reducing memory usage: check about:performance for high-memory tabs, use uBlock and NoScript to block large images and JavaScript from loading by default, set permissions.default.image to 2/3[1] if you have lots of image-heavy sites, I suppose?

You might just have to resign yourself to using a small number of tabs. Firefox doesn't give you a lot of knobs to tune memory usage with, and already is lighter on RAM than Chrome (at the expense of CPU/latency).

[1] http://kb.mozillazine.org/Permissions.default.image

Reducing the Firefox content process limit from the default 8 to perhaps 2 should help (assuming the default is the same on smaller systems, I guess I'm not sure it is ...)

Postscript: it would be really nice if Firefox allowed a "click-to-play, but for images" addon - but it seems like that's not possible, given that zero addons exist that implement it.

I do tend to get carried away with tabs.. :)

I'm also generally working in Clojure/CIDER which eats tons of memory. The JVM just doesn't give back memory easily. I need to see if maybe there is some JVM setting I can set that would help. I even have issues with this on my 8GB daily-use laptop

Then you carelessly do something intensive, blow through your memory limit and the OOM-killer nukes your process

Emacs has some browsing capabilities itself. I've used `eww` in the past with some success.

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