I have used the Pinebook Pro as a main driver for nearly 6 months because my main died before isolation.
> Alt-tabbing between Firefox and a terminal takes one second, as does switching between Firefox tabs.
Using the OpenGL compositor (which should be the default in latests versions of Manjaro) is a lifesaver! Web apps are and will still be slow sometimes (I don't use slack but messenger can be sluggish).
> Video playback on browsers is not really nice.
Depends, YouTube is indeed quite slow (I think it became slower after some YouTube update), but if YouTube was optimized for speed there wouldn't be all those adds, right?
I like to listen to YouTube music in the background, I use https://github.com/mps-youtube/mps-youtube for that and it works like a charm, uses 10% CPU and a few MB of RAM.
I don't use mpsyt for video but I guess it would also improve your experience.
Other websites (kissanime) work like a charm, even in 1080p.
> Manjaro does not provide a way to disable tap-to-click
True, but installing `xf86-input-synaptics` (although it's deprecated) provides such an option. Also, I use ctrl+F7 to disable the touchpad while I type large chunks of text.
From the specs, one could think that the RAM is the problem but zram totally solves that (I have dozens of tabs open in Firefox, including heavy apps like Messenger, Trello and Overleaf). The slow CPU is a larger issue, with Gmail being so slow to load it's almost unusable (loading my mailbox takes 20s and creating a new email takes 3s).
Overall, I find the machine very much usable though.
I only have two complaints:
- static noises
- under "heavy" load (eg html5 games with compilation in the background), the alimentation is less powerful than what the machine consumes, which leads to the battery discharging.
> Alt-tabbing between Firefox and a terminal takes one second, as does switching between Firefox tabs.
Using the OpenGL compositor (which should be the default in latests versions of Manjaro) is a lifesaver! Web apps are and will still be slow sometimes (I don't use slack but messenger can be sluggish).
> Video playback on browsers is not really nice.
Depends, YouTube is indeed quite slow (I think it became slower after some YouTube update), but if YouTube was optimized for speed there wouldn't be all those adds, right? I like to listen to YouTube music in the background, I use https://github.com/mps-youtube/mps-youtube for that and it works like a charm, uses 10% CPU and a few MB of RAM. I don't use mpsyt for video but I guess it would also improve your experience. Other websites (kissanime) work like a charm, even in 1080p.
> Manjaro does not provide a way to disable tap-to-click True, but installing `xf86-input-synaptics` (although it's deprecated) provides such an option. Also, I use ctrl+F7 to disable the touchpad while I type large chunks of text.
From the specs, one could think that the RAM is the problem but zram totally solves that (I have dozens of tabs open in Firefox, including heavy apps like Messenger, Trello and Overleaf). The slow CPU is a larger issue, with Gmail being so slow to load it's almost unusable (loading my mailbox takes 20s and creating a new email takes 3s).
Overall, I find the machine very much usable though. I only have two complaints:
- static noises
- under "heavy" load (eg html5 games with compilation in the background), the alimentation is less powerful than what the machine consumes, which leads to the battery discharging.
I wrote a guide on my setup that includes other tricks. Shameless plug: https://louisabraham.github.io/articles/pinebook-pro-setup.h...