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Armbian Buster and Bionic

Posted: Sat May 23, 2020 4:14 pm
by wove
Probably not of much interest here, but Armbian released updated supported version of both their Bionic and Buster builds for arm based machines. Since I have a Pinebook Pro this was somewhat exciting.

I installed the Bionic version, which is a very basic build of Ubuntu 18.04 with an xfce desktop. I used it as a base to install Kubuntu 18.04 and have there by recreated the desktop from my old Thinkpad X220. Of course you can install any of the various flavors of Ubuntu 18.04 on it as well. You can add the Neon repositories if you want the latest KDE.

bill

Re: Armbian Buster and Bionic

Posted: Sun May 24, 2020 4:56 pm
by crosscourt
Thanks for the info as Im sure many will find it helpful.

Re: Armbian Buster and Bionic

Posted: Sun May 24, 2020 7:58 pm
by tlmiller
On another note, how do you like the PineBook Pro? I was really interested in that when it was released, as it actually has a decent spec LCD (I don't do low end 720p lcd's regardless of price) and seems like it would be nice.

Re: Armbian Buster and Bionic

Posted: Mon May 25, 2020 1:21 am
by wove
I had decided I wanted to try a Pinebook. When I went to order it, I first saw the Pinebook Pro and I really did not read carefully. I just assumed the Pinebook Pro, was just a Pinebook with better screen, keyboard, trackpad and case. The reality is it is a different beast entirely. The Pinebook is well supported with many different OS options available, while the Pinebook Pro has few options and the options are somewhat half-baked.

The screen is very nice. It is a 14" 1920x1080 IPS panel. It has very good viewing angles. I have not found a color profile for it, so color corrected work is not possible on it. The other specs are nice as well. It has a 6 core 64bit processor, 4 gig of RAM, 8-10 hour battery all in a 2.5 pound magnesium shell. The keyboard has a nice typing feel. The trackpad is not that great and is by far its worse feature.

There is a lot of development needed to make it top notch. From what I have read kernel 5.7 will fully support the processor and it will be the next version of mesa that will add support for the Mali graphics cores. So a good deal of what works and how well it works is a bodge at this time

I am sort of stuck in early adopters woes. I expect that by the end of the year it should really come together as a top flight machine.

Armbian has an Ubuntu Focal image up today. I have found the Debian images work better than the Ubuntu and on the Debian images Gnome works better than KDE. Q4OS' latest testing image does not really work very well at all.

bill

Re: Armbian Buster and Bionic

Posted: Mon May 25, 2020 2:22 am
by crosscourt
Doesnt Pinebook ship the Pinebook Pro with Manjaro KDE edition and yet you say Gnome works better, very odd.

Re: Armbian Buster and Bionic

Posted: Mon May 25, 2020 2:51 am
by wove
The current Pinebook Pros do ship with Manjaro KDE as the default OS, when I purchased mine the default OS was MrFixIt's Debian with a Mate desktop that did not support much of the Pinebook Pros features. Manjaro has done an excellent job of supporting the Pinebook Pros features, but their KDE has many many problems.

I usually always stay away from rolling releases and I avoid distros that do a lot of heavy customizations. I like software setups that will give me an uptime measured at least weeks, if not months. If I get updates once a week I always wonder why they just did not build it right before they released it.

bill

Re: Armbian Buster and Bionic

Posted: Mon May 25, 2020 3:18 am
by tlmiller
Glad I decided to not be an early adopter then. REgular Pinebook simply isn't an option for me, the screen is too awful for me to actually use it. I would be endlessly irritated at the Pro only partially working, or only working with Gnome (which IMO is utterly unusable DE, I actually had to abandon using it even at work because it tries to force you into it's workflow instead of being adaptable to yours).

Re: Armbian Buster and Bionic

Posted: Mon May 25, 2020 4:32 pm
by wove
I gave the Armbian Ubuntu Focal build a try, installing the Kubuntu desktop. It runs very well uses about 500MB RAM when running. It does seem to always push the processor cores pretty hard, but generally it remains responsive.

KDE seems to me to just be getting worse and worse as far as applications go. Their is a great deal of effort put into the desktop and the UI, but core KDE apps (at least the ones I like to use) just languish. Kubuntu does not use KDE PIM, or a KDE browser, nor a KDE office suite. It makes sense because well the KDE versions of that software are just not being promoted or developed much any more. For me KDE PIM, KOffice, Basket and Karbon were major pieces of software and they are largely abandoned.

You can say that Gnome is very easy to use and very hard to get any work done. But KDE seems like it is getting to the point that all it is is a pretty desktop to look at.

bill

Re: Armbian Buster and Bionic

Posted: Mon May 25, 2020 6:21 pm
by crosscourt
I believe the Manjaro devs also have an XFCE and I3 variant for the Pinebook Pro but yes, Im not wild about rolling releases either.

Re: Armbian Buster and Bionic

Posted: Mon May 25, 2020 8:01 pm
by tlmiller
For me KDE proves to be better since I never use a PIM suite. In fact, one of the first things I used to do is 'apt purge kde-pim* kdepim*' after installing something. Calligra is heavily developed (koffice as named koffice has been dead for years), but was very experimental in it's design. I never grew to like it, although I've read good things about in in the last year or so. Karbon is quite actively developed still (part of Calligra). I've never even heard of Basket.