Post #961336

2026-04-02 04:05 UTC

The biggest issue I’ve had with my Pinebook Pro is getting any external display to work. I have bought multiple dongles and none of them are working. In fact, there are multiple smaller issues all different depending on the OS installed. I settled on Manjaro but wifi stops working after coming back from suspend, and it needs to be rebooted. The speakers are weak too. And there’s software compatibility. Most of the software have an ARM packages in multiple versions, but sometimes it doesn’t exists or can’t work. Like wine. It’s not very polished and it requires knowing tech and Linux a good deal. It’s functional enough and could be useful for development, but I wouldn’t recommend it as an everyday laptop. I tried to have it nearby and use it from time to time but I just end up getting back to my x86 laptop.

Replies (1)

@tophneal@sh.itjust.works 2026-04-02 12:31

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

Open ##963176