Pinebook Pro Review
The Pinebook Pro looks great on paper:
System on a Chip provides enough CPU and GPU.
4GB of ram is reasonable; I perhaps want some more.
64gb of disk that can be upgraded. Including m.2 nvme possibility.
1080p IPS screen that is excellent.
802.11AC/5ghz wifi.
1080p front facing camera.
Metal body used for passive cooling.
Massive 10AH battery.
$200 USD + $90 with customs/shipping.
An equivalent laptop is probably >$500, not to mention it is open hardware and designed for the Linux ecosystem so that is of a huge personal value.
The Pinebook Pro ships with Manjaro + KDE. Manjaro is very popular at Distrowatch and it’s been some time since I last tried it so I’m having fun checking it out again. Better yet, I haven’t used KDE for at least 10 years and I really love the modern improvements like the pinned applications on the taskbar and cleaner lines in general.
The metal case feels sturdy but is also very thin and seems to cool well. When I put the device under heavy load (load average of about 60) the Pinebook gets a bit warm but nowhere near usual laptop heat. The keyboard has a nice almost mechanical feel to it.
First issue
The touchpad was terrible out of the box. It was very difficult to control the cursor so I checked the settings and discovered a ‘noise cancellation’ feature. I disabled it and the touchpad improved dramatically. I also read through support documentation and discovered that older versions of the laptop needed new touchpad firmware. The touchpad is usable but sometimes it does not react like it should.
Overall, general usage including fully patching the machine went smoothly.
Second issue
I took it off power around 11pm and suspended the system but in the morning I had 0% battery which is >10% battery/hour.
Device ff9a0000.gpu failed to suspend: error -16
The laptop doesn’t suspend because the GPU wakes up and prevents it. I was already fully patched so I checked out the forums and others are having this same problem without any working fix.
I saw a comment by another user that Manjaro + XFCE works. I installed XFCE and suspend works properly. The touchpad even seems to be better, not 100% but better. Progress!
After some research I discovered that the mainline kernel around version 5.6 broke suspend to ram. My problem isn’t solved, but I expect a future update will fix it.
After installing XFCE the touchpad is completely usable and suspend to idle while on power and shutdown while on battery works.
Review
My 2 issues were fairly minor and though I do expect to experience a few more, I also expect to be running mainline with full stability in about a year. I may never install Kali, opting to build my own instead.
Overall I am very happy with the Pinebook Pro. The community behind it is very active. Debian used to be the primary OS but now they have gone Manjaro. Kali, Fedora, Armbian, BSDs, Chromium, Android, Open Suse and a few more niche distros are in development.
The Pinebook Pro’s future is very bright.