May I ask how’s Arch/Manjaro running on ARM? What’s your general experience with Linux on ARM? Also how’s stuff like battery life and performance on PineBooks?
Manjaro ARM is awesome, it has great community support driven by the leadership of Strit. Linux on ARM is surprisingly usable. Since most of the tools that I use are open-source, pretty much everything I want already has official packages for it or AUR packages. If not, I can make my own PKGBUILD but that’s rarely ever needed. The only issues come with non-open-source projects. Things like the Android/Java SDK or VSCode extensions being closed source and only available in binary packages makes it impossible to port from x86 to Arm.
Battery life is awesome considering I haven’t even done any fine tuning (changing kernel governor, manual clockspeed throttling). I usually get 8-10h on a single charge which is really impressive considering it has ~1/3 the battery capacity of a Macbook Pro. Performance is adequate (compiling ffmpeg takes ~15m at -O2), the only issues right now are related to lack of hardware acceleration which is mostly due to the chaotic nature of kernel driver development. Drivers for video acceleration (Hantro G1/G2) are being developed by multiple communities simultaneously and alot of work is being accidentally redone since it’s hard to keep track of who already did what and what branch they did it on. The leading developers are the folks over at Armbian, the folks over at LibreELEC, aswell as Kwiiboo and Bbrezillon who seem to have done the majority of the work.
The hardware is capable of so much (even has Vulkan 1.1 support), it just comes down to the community working on drivers. Once these drivers are in mainline (and software is able to leverage it [FireFox with video accelerated decode]) I think the experience might be indistinguishable from a low-midrange x64 laptop.
oh wow, that nice! one more thing, how’s the displays color accuracy and viewing consistency and trackpad accuracy and overall feel? And just overall feel of the device?
I’m not sure how accurate the colors are tbh (I never do any color grading or color accurate work). Viewing angles are on the weaker side of IPS displays I’ve seen (but this might be because it’s a matte display?) however it’s still much better than a VA or TN panels. Trackpad is the worst thing about the hardware, it feels pretty bad at fine movements and the palm rejection is not great either. The keyboard is great, about the same or better than a 2015 dell XPS 13 with very solid key stabilization, travel, sound, and feel. Overall, if it weren’t for the track pad, the device would feel like a ~$500 thin and lite notebook which is great. Hopefully more firmware updates get released to get the trackpad up to par with the rest of the system.
May I ask how’s Arch/Manjaro running on ARM? What’s your general experience with Linux on ARM? Also how’s stuff like battery life and performance on PineBooks?
Manjaro ARM is awesome, it has great community support driven by the leadership of Strit. Linux on ARM is surprisingly usable. Since most of the tools that I use are open-source, pretty much everything I want already has official packages for it or AUR packages. If not, I can make my own PKGBUILD but that’s rarely ever needed. The only issues come with non-open-source projects. Things like the Android/Java SDK or VSCode extensions being closed source and only available in binary packages makes it impossible to port from x86 to Arm.
Battery life is awesome considering I haven’t even done any fine tuning (changing kernel governor, manual clockspeed throttling). I usually get 8-10h on a single charge which is really impressive considering it has ~1/3 the battery capacity of a Macbook Pro. Performance is adequate (compiling ffmpeg takes ~15m at -O2), the only issues right now are related to lack of hardware acceleration which is mostly due to the chaotic nature of kernel driver development. Drivers for video acceleration (Hantro G1/G2) are being developed by multiple communities simultaneously and alot of work is being accidentally redone since it’s hard to keep track of who already did what and what branch they did it on. The leading developers are the folks over at Armbian, the folks over at LibreELEC, aswell as Kwiiboo and Bbrezillon who seem to have done the majority of the work.
The hardware is capable of so much (even has Vulkan 1.1 support), it just comes down to the community working on drivers. Once these drivers are in mainline (and software is able to leverage it [FireFox with video accelerated decode]) I think the experience might be indistinguishable from a low-midrange x64 laptop.
oh wow, that nice! one more thing, how’s the displays color accuracy and viewing consistency and trackpad accuracy and overall feel? And just overall feel of the device?
I’m not sure how accurate the colors are tbh (I never do any color grading or color accurate work). Viewing angles are on the weaker side of IPS displays I’ve seen (but this might be because it’s a matte display?) however it’s still much better than a VA or TN panels. Trackpad is the worst thing about the hardware, it feels pretty bad at fine movements and the palm rejection is not great either. The keyboard is great, about the same or better than a 2015 dell XPS 13 with very solid key stabilization, travel, sound, and feel. Overall, if it weren’t for the track pad, the device would feel like a ~$500 thin and lite notebook which is great. Hopefully more firmware updates get released to get the trackpad up to par with the rest of the system.