[mbreese]

Not for me.

I mean, it “works” as in it is a functioning computer, but it’s not really useful as a daily driver machine. Mine is very touchy and build quality-wise, it’s not great.

It is great for what you pay, don’t get me wrong. And I’m sure some people could use it daily, but between the battery life and sluggish performance, it’s not really in the same conversation as the Framework model here.

I think for me the real issue I have is that with the Pinebook Pro (and Linux on ARM in general), you’re limited to a specific set of “blessed” Linux distributions. There is still a lot of custom code that goes into these, so it’s not at the point of being able to just download your favorite distro and running it. It’s getting better, but there are so many variations of chips that it’s hard to get things running smoothly. The flexibility of the OS and ARM CPUs really makes it difficult without a major OEM/vendor taking charge.

[pierat]

I would have loved to be able to rely on Pine products. But they are all garbage-tier unsupported crap.

Their modus operandi is to take reference circuits, splatter on a few peripherals to IO lines, make a case, and call it a day.

Happen to have 2 USB-C ports (ala pinephone pro)? Hope you which one to use cause the other one will fry stuff.

You have a pine SBC? Says it will boot on their micro memory chips instead of mSD? Nah you still need a mSD to pass to the chip.

And they'll wash their hands of any support requests, and blame the open source community for support.

Save yourself the pain, suffering, and lost money. Do not buy Pine anything.

[arp242]

From the website:

"As a new open source platform, Pinebook development is an ongoing process and represents a great opportunity to get involved with computing on a different level, to customize and personalize the portable computer experience, to understand what is going on beneath the surface. If you are looking for a device in a convenient laptop form-factor that you wish to tinker with, then it is safe to say the Pinebook is the right device for you. We do no wish to discourage anyone from getting the Pinebook, but it is not a daily driver, so if you are looking to replace your current work or school laptop it may be wise to look elsewhere."

They have been extremely upfront about this from day 1. Your expectations are not realistic or in alignment with what Pinebook themselves has said about their devices.

[rjsw]

I run NetBSD on my Pinebook Pro, you are not restricted to specific Linux distributions.