Thread of 8 posts
jump to replies
The PineNote is here! I'm planning on making a hands on video to share my experience. Let me know if you have any questions you want me to try and answer. I don't plan to do technical tests but open to collaborating on it.
First impression, feels like a quality and sturdy device. Feels good in the hand, the texture is a kinda soft grippy plastic. Pen felt good, the writing friction seems ok, I don't want to make any software qualifications until I update the device but still happy with the out-of-box experience. The wake from sleep time is essentially instant.
@PINE64 great work on the PineNote, I'm very impressed with the hardware!
Edit: Link to blog post with thoughts after day one. Since I'm on a single user instance most people may not see the thread with info that hasn't been boosted, the post has all of it.
I have been really hoping the warm front light was decent. It is fantastic! That's about halfway up the brightness scale. The regular (white/blue) and warm front lights are separate sliders both in the quick access menu (white is totally off).
Garmin watch is still showing a bit more blue than white. I adjusted the color balance to correct for the camera and get it to a close as what I see in a pitch black room.
More updates later, send any questions you have. Quick (pine) note 🥁, the plastic back feels good but it's a fingerprint magnet but the folio cover is very nice.
PineNote Fedi Q&A
Thanks for the interest. There were some overlapping questions, I'm reviewing by category. I don't have answers for every question but I'll do my best and some of it will have to come later out of necessity. I'll be adding a link to a full blog post here soon™: (PineNote - Day One).
Linux Experience
This is a first-class Linux device, full on Debian Trixie with a full Gnome desktop with Pine specific packages that are pinned so they're not overridden by generic packages. The on-screen keyboard has been the only source of frustration. The display runs at 200% and the keyboard isn't optimized for that.
Display Rendering Modes
There's a handy widget to change the current display rendering modes based on what you're doing.
- Grayscale: 16 levels of gray for best quality, slowest refresh, good for graphics.
- DU4: 4 levels of grey, great for reading (text is very crisp).
- B&W + Dither: best for fast refresh needs, writing, terminal, etc. still easy to read but display will feel lower res.
B&W and B&W invert: these exist but I haven't found them to be that useful for me yet.
Backlight
Wonderfully configurable from very dim to burn your retina. The white and the warm backlights can be controlled individually from the quick access, so you can create your own perfect color temperature. Genuinely delighted by this!
Applications
- Terminal: Gnome Terminal, everything works great, touch typing hampered by on-screen keyboard but entirely good experience as a terminal with B&W + Dither mode.
- Browser: Firefox, full install, works with plugins (only tried uBlock Origin).
- Reader: KO Reader (more utilitarian) and Foliate (more UX polish) but both work great with epub and mobi, didn't try pdf much but it works. I will test annotation, marking, etc. later. It's a good eBook experience, I'm happy to say but as long you realize that it's not that small but definitely not heavy for its size and build quality.
- Note-taking: Xournal++, works fine out of the box but can be improved with some community config. Haven't used the writing much, more on that in the future. Without config, totally usable but not a dream.
- App Sources: Anything available in Debian Trixie and Flatpaks cab be enabled. I plan to test and use Flatpaks, will report back.
- Sync: Syncthing built-in but I read people are also using NextCloud with it. Will test both in the future, might need a test NextCloud instance (if you want answers sooner).
Battery
Definitely not enough data to say. I've been poking and prodding the device most of the day and it has used about 30% of charge so that is very encouraging. Closing the folio case and opening it up again is almost instant response, which I love (was a big fear).
Speculation: The device must be doing some good battery management it seems since first launch of app after inactivity takes a bit to startup but is responsive after launch.
Peripherals
I have not connected Bluetooth devices yet, I plan to test it with Bluetooth mouse, keyboard, and headphones and report back in the utnext couple days.
Disclaimer based on very quick research: There's no USB-C dock functionality, the chip supports USB 3 PCIe,but the actual circuit out to USB-C connector is USB 2.0. There is no physical way for display mirroring (as in act as a external display) or multi-monitor support (as in extend/duplicate screen). But there are Gnome tools to achieve this, I'll play with them at some point.
Resources
- On-device documentation shown on startup.
- Great blog post with device overview and links to resources.
- @carbonatedcaffeine's YouTube Channel demo and tutorials.
- Community developed Debian image that is shipping on device.
Thanks for asking
@PINE64 I haven't tagged you on every single reply/post but I did want to make you aware in case I misrepresented anything, I'd be happy to correct any factual errors.
PineNote - Day One, my first 24 hours with the device and my thoughts so far (most of the posts above and a few others items).
Next week: note-taking and portable thin client workloads.
Made an outline for the PineNote video. I'm going to put together a "good enough" video so it actually gets done and I can make more videos to cover different aspects later.
I'm surprised by the amount of interest but I'm so excited to see that. I want to do my part of the Community Edition contribution by sharing all the info I can. Software development isn't the only way to contribute to FOSS!
I reflashed the PineNote back to stock with the latest image from January. Even though I had updated via apt update to the latest kernel and software patches, the device feels more delightfully responsive after the re-flash. I would recommend it if/when you get one, AFTER you back it up.
I had to go look look in multiple places for backup and flashing instructions and some of the instructions are for version 1 so they didn't line up exactly. I plan to upstream this into the documentation if they'll have it, but it's published in a 'gist' on Codeberg now, so feel free to check it out. I would love any feedback you have.
https://codeberg.org/shom/gists/src/branch/main/pinenote-backup-flashing.md
It came down to the wire but I did manage to finish a Week One PineNote video: https://makertube.net/w/cSDcWZVjFksZsxpPx5yo8j
@PINE64 has created an excellent device and the community around it is awesome, kind, and super helpful. There are rough edges for sure but it is totally usable out of the box and I'll go into application specific configuration in future posts/videos as long as people find this useful. Let me know what you'd like to see!
Of course there's a typo in the title card :(
Will re-render and upload tomorrow after I proofread the subtitles one more time.
9 visible replies; 2 more replies hidden or not public
back to top
@shom Awesome to see the device in action. Like you say in the video, on-screen keyboards are just never going to be great, so I'd love to know how it performs with a Bluetooth keyboard tethered since my primary use would be for reading + note-making.
Would also be interested in you elaborating on what those "rough edges" actually are...
A thousand thanks for making the video!
@mikro2nd hey thanks. Yes, I definitely plan on doing a Bluetooth devices and "thin client" style use cases next. Thanks for confirming the interest.
As for rough edges, I think Xournal++ is great but not out of the box and it does not play well with the 200% scaling, the UX of picking the right render mode for the right applications is clunky and manual (but I love the manual option and would never want to lose that), backing up the guts of the device is important (I have pieced together a guide from other guides) but it's not consumer-easy, it's Linux-easy (which is more than fair since it's targeted to the community).
So, literally mean rough, definitely not jagged and definitely can be polished! Hope this quick answer helps. I'll dive deeper into it in later video/posts.
@mikro2nd @shom
@PINE64
thank you so much for this video (and posting on peertube)!
makes me really thinking of getting a #PineNote instead of a laptop...
could you show us how syntax highlighting looks like for coding on this greyscale screen, for exmple opening some code with micro editor?
of course i'd love to see #postmarketos with #sxmo running on it, but maybe this will become a winter task for me 😅
there or other nice touchscreen keyboards to use, see here:
https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Input_methods#Other
@pocketvj hey thanks, Peertube seems like the appropriate place for videos for the fedi. But sometimes I do wonder if I should also post the the most mainstream video platforms so people find other options.
As for code highlighting, I will definitely cover that when I get to typing with a Bluetooth keyboard. But I took a couple photos now of a Python script in DU4 and full grayscale mode. Light vs dark syntax can be distinguished but the color differences of course cannot be. So if there are grayscale focused syntax highlighters I'd be curious to know and try out.
Hope this helps.
@mikro2nd
wow. that was quick, thank you. yea, i see its not much of 'highlighting'
concerning video: maybe crosspost on both platforms and on post&blogs use the fedi video link, so you exist on yt, but you promote fedi
#SyntaxHighlighting on e-paper could be done with changing font style, e.g. regular, italic, bold
or even deeper with various fonts, e.g.
red = arial
green = times new roman
etc.
just could not find any editor yet🤷
@AnthonyStevens Glad it could be useful. Let me know if you or they have any follow-up questions.