Hi, I’ve been playing with my Pinebook Pro lately and tried Armbian, Manjaro, Void and Gentoo on it. It’s been fun! New things learned like boot from u-boot, then moving to tow-boot as “first boot loader” which starts grub. I tried four distroes on a SD, Manjaro was the official and Armbian also was an .iso. Void and Gentoo I installed thrue chroot manually. I’m biased but it says something (at least I think so) that I did a Gentoo install twice to this small laptop. First one was just to try it and now I have a full working setup with Gentoo.
The Pinebook Pro uses ARM64 architecture which was new to me (if phones excluded) and it seems to be quite ok for normal laptop use. Firefox takes few seconds to start but not too bad! The best thing with this is that with few programs running the battery lasts and lasts. I can use this laptop for hours without charging! And check out the RAM usage!
I think next step would be to find a “decent” laptop with juicier ARM64 processor like Apple MacBook Air. Do you have any ARM processors running with Linux? I just know those Pi/BananaPi/boards. Pinebook Pro only has 4G RAM and I bet it doesn’t like if you have more than few tabs open on your browser.
Here’s a screenshot from my Pinebook Pro with Sway WM.
I have a whole bunch of ARM systems in my home network…
2 x MacBook Pro M1 - I’m perfectly happy with MacOS (it’s UNIX!) - not remotely interested in trying to run Linux on them (but I sometimes virtualize arm64 Linux - e.g. RHEL8 and 9, on them with UTM and QEMU).
2 x Pi Zero 2W (i.e. same / similar CPU to Pi4 - but only 512 MB RAM) - running Raspbian (32 bit armhf - but can run arm64) - one of them is in a Beepy “chassis” (has a blackberry keyboard) - pretty much “headless” but I can run OLWM on one of them if I need a GUI (I’m trying to figure out how to run that remotely - without resorting to XRDP / VNC)
3 x Pi4 (one 4 GB, two with 8 GB) - one is for Kali and mostly powered off - the other two are running Raspbian Bookworm (arm64) - the last two “headless” (i.e. no GUI - access via SSH only)
1 x Pi5 - 8GB running Ubuntu 24.04 (arm64) - i.e. GUI and DE
1 x Pi3 - 1 GB RAM, running Raspbian stretch (it has a TV-Tuner card/hat and I run TVHeadEnd server on it) - basically “headless”
I also have (but never use these days - all powered off)
2 x Pine64 (they’re utter rubbish - I hardly used them they were so unreliable and the software support was utter shite)
1 x BanananPi (was using it to run bind / named - but found Avahi did what I needed)
1 x OrangePi 2+E - was running armbian and TransmissionDaemon - but now running that on a Pi4
10 x NTC C.H.I.P. : similar to Pi Zero - one is in a PocketCHIP chassis - it’s the only one I ever power up
3 x Pi Zero W (stopped using them when I got the Pi Zero 2W)… Was using one of them as a “USB Gadget” in a case that looked like it was USB stick…
Oh - yeah I also have another OrangePi (Win+ ???) that I never really used…
Yeah - that’s way too many!
I’d love a Pi5 with 16 GB RAM - but I can’t really justify the expense!
You have them all! I only have one RPI 2(B?) but it’s not in use. I used it as pihole but it was unreliable. Maybe the SD card was bad quality. If I ever get an MacBook pro M1 I’ll try to install Linux there.
I have 2 arm systems. A RPi 3B+, that runs on Raspbian 32 bit, armhf, however the CPU is capable of 64 bit (arm64). That gadget acts as a BT speaker, but it announces the connected devices with a deep robotic voice. The sound outputs from a HifiBerry card, and it enters a Yamaha AX480 amp, which drives my Wharfedale speakers. It’s main purpose is to listen Spotify.
The fun thin is, that via gpio and a relay module the Rpi switches on and off the amplifier depending on actual need.
Another functionality of it is neteork scanner via Airscan, and an attached Lide60 scanner.
I have an O-droid HC4, which looks like a 2 bay HDD docker. But it is actually computer
It acts as my home-server, it runs on Debian 11 arm64. It is my Seafile server, but also has NFS shares, and Samba of course. With Seafile, and Radicale (for CalDav/CardDav) it is basically my private cloud.
But it is also my email server (not just mine, but couple friends have here unlimited email account).
It is the Dhcp and the Dns server in my home network, and provides a functionality similar to Pi-hole.
4GB RAM nowadays seem to be very few, but I never see memory usage above 2GB, in fact only about 1GB (+some swap, say 400MB).
It’s amazing that it is powerful enough to sync data with a speed of 70MB/s to/from Seafile, while Dovecot/Postfix serving e-mail clients flawlessly. The thing idles at 5.5W, while at full stress it draws approx. 15W only…
All this efficiency is the benefit of the arm architecture.
I love it
Nice! I have used RPI as Bluetooth receiver once. I made a cardboard box party speaker with a d-class amp and RPI and used mobile phone with Spotify as source. It was fun!
The Seafile server is cool. I’ve tried it and it works well. Never had an email server.
The 4 GB Pi4 acts as my Plex Media server - it’s not great at that job - but it kinda works (when I remember to remount my NAS over NFS if /when I lose power!).
The 8 GB Pi4 is basically my transmission-daemon server, but also my backup server, and reports to my LAN that it’s Apple TimeMachine “ready” and my personal M1 and my daughters M2 do time machine backups to it (via SMB). It has a 6 TB usb3 powered HDD mounted. All my other RPi devices backup to it as well (just rsync over ssh).
I don’t bother backing up my x86_64 Linux systems - 'cause my Documents and Photos and shell scripts and common configs are stored in my self-hosted cloud solution (ResilioSync). Every device of mine on my home network has the shell scripts share - so there’s 12-13 devices… My phone and my iPads also connect to ResilioSync - but mobile devices are pre-set to only sync what you specifically ask for (“selective sync”).
I have exponentially more devices to manage for work than I have on my home network
Probably one of the reasons I don’t do much VM’ing, or dual boot anything…
Just about the only time I VM is if I wanna test something with Red Hat or Oracle Linux…
They’re mostly tiny little things - have two in the kitchen by the WiFi router - you barely even notice them… But it does annoy me when I see RPi 2/3/4/5 described as “Credit Card” sized computers - NO THEY’RE NOT!
But the Pi Zero and Zero 2W are “credit card” sized - as was the NTC CHIP…
I only have one RPI 2(B?) but it’s not in use. I used it as pihole but it was unreliable. Maybe the SD card was bad quality. If I ever get an MacBook pro M1 I’ll try to install Linux there.