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Comment by zwieback | Hacker News Reader

Philosophically cool but the comparison chart made me seriously consider a Pinebook at 20% of the cost.

I have an original pinebook and it would be usable for light computing tasks (note taking/light programming in vim, web browsing with FF + no script) if not for the awkward keyboard layout. The other issue with the pinebook is the Mali 400 GPU is not open source, so if you are after a fully open device the pinebook is not it. IIRC there are also some video acceleration issues caused by the Mali 400 drivers.

The new pinebook pro looks like a better product, but I don't own one so I can't really comment.

You might indeed be interested in the Pinebook Pro. I recently ordered one, and it's supposed to ship later this month. There is active work on an open source GPU driver[1], and OpenBSD lists it as a supported device on their arm64 port[2]. I'm excited to get my hands on it and see what I can get to run on it, as well as potentially replace my current AMD64 laptop with it.

[1] https://xdc2018.x.org/slides/Panfrost-XDC_2018.pdf

[2] https://www.openbsd.org/arm64.html

Pine tends to have that effect; there's a reason I have a pinephone and not a librem 5. Turns out, 80% as good for 20% the cost is pretty compelling.

What edition do you have? I wanted to buy it, but the Braveheart edition was sold out for a long time. I just noticed the "Community Edition: UBports" is available though and might just buy it.

I did manage to get a Braveheart edition. Software is still very much a work in progress, but it's finally gotten to the point of being basically usable in my opinion, at least on my preferred postmarketOS (honestly, other options are probably more polished already; I just like pmOS because I prefer its design).

I have a Pinebook Pro. It is an interesting machine if you want an ARM notebook to play with, and certainly impressive for the price. The keyboard and trackpad fall short of what you'd want to use as a primary computer though. The trackpad is somewhat understandable since that is a common issue from a firmware and software perspective, but most other notebooks have decent keyboards.

I also agree that MNT looks philosophically interesting, but it also looks highly opinionated to the point that it is a challenging sell even for the niche audiences of people who want an open source laptop and/or an ARM laptop.

I find the trackpad actively bad. Though this is, apparently, due to the proprietary trackpad firmware not behaving correctly. There is some effort to reverse engineer it, mostly by this guy (as far as I know) https://github.com/akirakyle/pinebook-pro-keyboard-updater/t...

(and there's also a bounty apparently! https://www.bountysource.com/issues/88375235-reverse-enginee...)

I'm surprised you don't like the keyboard though, I found it to be shockingly good. I often write on it instead of some of my other keyboards. I'll add the disclaimer though: I like apple scissor switch keyboards, and dislike mechanical keyboards. So that colors my opinion.

This is very much a laptop that has not allowed perfect to be the enemy of good, and I'm glad it exists. And I'm glad I got one!

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