Pinebook: My First Few Surprising Hours with a $99 Linux Laptop

I just got mine after being on the list for about a year. It's a wonderful little machine. It's how laptops should be - they should be concerned with less heat and longer battery life, not on how many cores we can run at super speed for six seconds at a time.

I'm slowly compiling all the software for it that I think I might ever need in preparation for making it my primary machine. With NetBSD, the laptop feels nimble and quick.

The keyboard layout takes a while to get used to, like the article says. For those of us who are on the command like 95% of the time, the pipe really takes some time. But aside from the layout, the keyboard feels darned good for an inexpensive laptop.

Within a month I think this will become my main portable.

A ThinkPad x1 14" model weighs the same as the Pinebook, and is roughly similar in size. Even an older model x1 would run circles around a Pinebook in most every respect. ThinkPad x2x0 models weigh in heftier, but generally can be found at prices aren't much higher than a Pinebook. For heavy typing there's practically nothing to recommend but ThinkPads.

I have a couple years old Dell XPS 13 and it's small, light, and has really good battery life. Coincidentally the only thing I'm not a fan of is the keyboard, though I'm not sure how it compares to other laptops of equal flatness.

Anyway I really enjoy using it. If I'd have to buy a new laptop again today I'd probably just buy another XPS.

I can see a few reasons:

1. It's a full-featured, widely tested desktop environment. If a user can't figure out how to enable Bluetooth in LXQt or there's screen tearing in Xfce, then they might blame your hardware. You especially also need someone to rely on, who does ARM builds, which many distros do, but fixing the build of the desktop environment often is something you need the help of the DE devs for.

2. It looks modern and polished. You can theme the more lightweight alternatives, but they often still have UI elements that are not correctly aligned and such.

3. The KDE Community is big, and many of them got the news of this Pinebook. If some buy it for themselves, or gift it to someone, or just tell their friends about it, that might very well be your first year of funding secured.

4. It is kind of news-worthy on its own that one of the most feature-rich OSs ships on one of the cheapest laptops.

KDE is quite lightweight these days.