I like the keyboard; it is firm and not mushy for the price.
It actually has a similar keyboard to my school-supplied Dell, which I quite enjoyed typing on.
The shell is aluminium and doesn’t feel <em>too</em> cheap, but I should note that it sure doesn’t feel like a Macbook if that’s what you’re expecting.
All in all build quality seems pretty good for a product in this price range.
I’m actually using it right now to write this article, and I’m actually typing faster than I would on my desktop.</p>
<p>The screen is bright enough and has anti-glare applied to it. I can use it with moderate light behind me, but not a sunset. Decent, and I can’t even use my phone with a sunset right on it, so that’s not a huge loss at all as I think my phone costs more than this haha!</p>
<li>Booting would sometimes not work at all. My SD card would sometimes boot, sometimes not. eMMC would sometimes work and sometimes not. Sometimes I would even get to the login screen, or fully logged in before it decided to freeze/hang. I could “drop to console” (Ctrl+Alt+Fx), but it only made my mouse stop showing, it would not actually display a console. This problem was worse when not plugged in.</li>
<li>Performance was not stellar, even for the RK3399.</li>
<li>I don’t like the Manjaro logo that displays during boot.</li>
</ol>
<h3id="dont-use-kde">Don’t use KDE</h3>
<p>KDE for me is a bit slow.
It is not a keyboard-driven desktop.
To give it some credit though, it does at least have zoom support built in; this is something I wish other desktops would have enabled by default.
I’m looking at your, Xfce.</p>
<p>I switched to Manjaro Sway, which is a Wayland-based i3-like tiling window manager.
I’ve used this on my Raspberry Pi 4, and it is by far my preference among other default distro configurations.</p>
<p>This can be done by flashing an SD card with any random Linux distro, then download <ahref="">Manjaro Sway ARM for the Pinebook Pro</a>.</p>
<p>Quickly, we should prepare the eMMC. Open <codeclass="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">fdisk</code> with your eMMC module and remove all partitions.
If you have issues with this, check if any partition is mounted, unmount it, then try again.
<codeclass="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">fdisk</code> is well documented elsewhere, so I won’t cover it here.</p>
U-Boot will prefer your SD card over your eMMC, so if you leave it in, it <em>will</em> boot to your SD card.</p>
<h3id="flash-your-u-boot-bsp">Flash Your U-Boot (BSP)</h3>
<p>U-Boot appeared to be the solution to my other two issues.
I was able to flash a new U-Boot program by using the following commands.
Be sure to run <codeclass="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">lsblk</code> beforehand to know which <codeclass="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">/dev/emmcblk</code> to write to.
Replace <codeclass="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">X</code> with the correct number for your system.</p>
<p>The <codeclass="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">dd</code> instructions are printed out after installing the <codeclass="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">uboot-pinebookpro-bsp</code> package, so make sure to follow what is printed there if it is different that what I have provided.</p>
<p>After doing this, not only have I since booted 100% of the time,
but my display now works correctly after a reboot without a full shutdown.</p>
<p>Whew! Looking good!!!</p>
<h3id="maybe-get-some-of-the-accessories">Maybe get some of the accessories</h3>
<p>I didn’t buy any accessories from Pine64.
I regret this somewhat.
For one thing, without an accessory to read the eMMC over USB, you need to have a working Linux distro on the SD card to get anywhere with it.
Flashing directly to the eMMC would have saved me a <em>lot</em> of time.</p>
<p>The other accessory I could see the occasional use for is the Ethernet adapter.
When downloading a big update (1GB+), it could be useful to wire in just temporarily.
Not a huge deal, but worth mentioning.</p>
<p>I would also be interested in the other batteries they have available.
Even though it comes with a battery, and I also don’t think you can install a second one, I would be interested to see if I could get more life out of it with an improved battery.
If this is a standard battery (Pine64 tends to use standard parts), then I would consider getting it from a supplier as well.</p>
<p>The Pinebook Pro does not come with any HDMI ports.
It comes with a USB type-C port that can be adapted to HDMI.
Or you can get a display that supports USB type-C.
I do not have a display that supports USB type-C, so it might be worth it for me to buy an adapter or find a compatible one more locally.