Drew DeVault's blog published a review of the Pinebook Pro on May 14, 2021.

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2021-05-16 06:20:08

I received the original Pinebook for free from the good folks at Pine64 a few years ago, when I visited Berlin to work with the KDE developers. Honestly, I was underwhelmed. The performance was abysmal and ARM is a nightmare to work with. For these reasons, I was skeptical when I bought the Pinebook Pro. I have also spoken of my disdain for modern laptops in general before: the state of laptops in $CURRENTYEAR is abysmal. As such, I have been using a ThinkPad X200, an 11 year old laptop, as my sole laptop for several years now.

I am pleased to share that the Pinebook Pro is a pleasure to use, and is likely to finally replace the old ThinkPad for most of my needs.

Let me get the bad parts out of the way upfront: ARM is still a nightmare to work with. I really hate this architecture. Alpine Linux’s upstream aarch64 doesn’t work with this laptop, so I have to use postmarketOS, an Alpine derivative, instead. I do like pmOS — on phones — but I would definitely prefer to use Alpine upstream for a laptop use-case. That being said, the Pine community has been doing a very good job of working on getting support for their devices upstream, and the situation has been steadily improving. I expect that one of the next batches of PBPs will include an updated u-Boot payload which will make UEFI booting possible, and Linux distros with the necessary kernel patches upstreamed will be shipping in the foreseeable future. This will alleviate most of my ARM-based grievances.

The built-in speakers are also pretty tinny and weak. It has a headphone port which works fine, though. Configuring ALSA is a chore; these SoCs tend to have rather complicated audio setups. I have not been able to get the webcam working (some kernel option is missing, my contact at pmOS is working on it), but I understand that the quality is pretty poor. It can supposedly be configured to work with a USB-C dock for an external display, but I have never got it working and I understand that there are some kernel bits missing for this as well. The touchpad is also pretty bad, but thankfully I use mainly keyboard-driven software. The built-in eMMC storage is pretty small, though it can be upgraded and I understand that there is an option to install an NVMe — at the expense of your battery life.