Don't suppose anyone has experience with a pinebook pro?

Finally giving up hope on my chromebook and working on my game engine using the Linux VM built in is just getting slower and slower...

Trying to get some opinions before I put down $360 to get one imported .-.

@theKarlisK I'm after something ARM based specifically so I can start working on integrating my projects to ARM desktop Linux and start working on apps for the pinephone once I can get my hands on one.

A second hand x86 would be my last resort considering I have a perfectly functional MacBook

@lxmcf cheap ARM Linux box...

That's just an RPi.

I have a Pinebook Pro. Nice machine. Wasn't able to do much with it yet due to lack of time (family requires attention), and so it is still running the stock Debian it used to come with (nowadays it comes stock with Manjaro).

Since there's a long weekend coming up, I hope to find some time to advance a new Debian Sid installation, and/or figure out how to properly install OpenBSD…

@SomeNone glad to hear, have you run into any issues and how well does it perform with a desktop environment?

I'm looking at running a barebones debian or Fedora with gnome considering elementary OS isn't available for ARM

@Parzi the rpi (at least up to the 3, not sure about the 4) had many design flaws though. For instance, the performance of usb ports was terrible and below spec, because they are actually all tied to the same usb hub.
The ethernet port? Also tied to that same usb hub.
And a buch of other issues that I don't recall.

A lot of RPi "clones" like the BananaPi or the Pine stuff seem to fix these design issues, but as usual: being technically better does not translate to being more popular.

The stock Debian has an arm64 kernel with armhf userland, and feels slightly laggy. Gmail in Firefox is slow, otherwise I have no real complaints.

I ran Fedora off an SD card for a few days, it seemed snappy enough but I didn't like it overall.

I'll reserve my final opinion until Kernel 5.7 is released, and I have Debian Bullseye (Sid) set up with Openbox.

@SomeNone awesome glad to hear, browser speed isn't super important to me tbh, as long as I can watch a video in picture in picture and run a basic code editor I'm good

@endor Most of them have been fixed with version 4, networking benchmarks show over 900MBit/s and it has full speed USB 3.0

I think the success from the Raspberry Pi comes from it's low price and it's great ecosystem, which makes the out-of-the-box experience by far superior to competitive single board PCs

Also, traditionally a Raspberry Pi has never been a machine for a great performance, but rather to get the job (whatever your usecase is) done. For performance, you can get a homeserver.

@StopMotionCuber Agreed. They're not meant at all to be powerhouses, or they'd not only come with like 32GB of RAM but have those $1000-phone-type 8 or more core ARMs with decent built-in GPUs and such, and that'd be way higher priced than these are as that's just a phone.

Chuwi laptops on AliExpress can be found for really cheap
Last time I check the best bang/bucks was the herobook (~230€, x86, 14")

@theKarlisK I mean the rpi 3 (up to the 3b+), I don't know of the 4 had those issues fixed. Not talking about drivers.