just some guy

Not at all! I upgraded the heavy lifters case fans to all noctuas, there’s still fan noise but it’s very easily drowned out. Actually the most noise came from my HAL model. Partly sunny days would trigger its sensor and it’d randomly start spewing lines.

Manjaro had such a strong start on the pbps, but maaaaaan did it feel like it just went to trash towards the end. That’s why I switched to fedora on mine.

About the display out, I actually found that there was something about the port (iirc) where the display out only worked in one way. You could plug in a usbc cable, not get video out, unplug and flip it, plug it in, and you’ve got video out. Of course many distros broke it altogether somewhere during the kernel v5.xx.

I will say that during the times I ran Manjaro or Arch on it, I was pleasantly surprised how many things from the AUR I could get to build/run on just by asking yay to try!

I agree though, support and the device are not polished enough to immediately recommend for daily driving. But I also saw last night that there’s more distros advertising images for it. I may have to grab an SD and give them a whirl, see if things have improved. Regardless, it was a poc that definitely showed ARM could be a viable alternative to x64 in laptops

It is. Iirc when the m.2/pcie board for the pbp was released a lot of people did use for alternate wifi chips. I opted for a 2260 SSD. I may revisit the laptop and see if it’s hammered out now though

I get that, one of my pis is in that boat. I’ve been putting off making a boot disk for the distro and chrooting in to reinstall the system.

on the bright side, barring physical damage or an spi issue, you should be able to get it booting again. If it might’ve been an install issue, you could force SD boot, reinitialize the emmc, and reinstall. Those things were really good about not being able to fully brick easily.

My pinebook Pro has been rocking it with fedora as its primary OS. The most issues it seems to have is with the wifi drivers after release updates. I’ve had good experiences with Debian/Armbian on SBCs too.

My only advice on getting an ARM device to run Linux is to check the wireless used in your desired device has good existing support. It’s a bit of a pain having to dig around for a no-fail dongle just to update drivers for the internal hardware.

it won’t boot from SD? Or was it a bad spi flash?

The table (dm) might finally make the switch from roll20 to foundry for a campaign!

But they are real! And work!

Source: had appropriate drive/disks in the beforetime