Web browsing is my biggest concern with these lower powered devices. People always blame the browsers, but its really the whole ecosystem, but odds are you're going to need to access some web site on eventually that will just hang the whole thing.

From TFA: Run Firefox half-decently with a few dozen tabs that aren’t full of bloat (ie, not Medium, Reddit, or mainstream news sites)

I have an old 64 Bit Quad Core Baytrail-T Z3795 1.59GHz tablet which just freezes on Twitter unless I disable videos.

Can these socs do any better?

The sad fact is that SOCs are getting better and better every day, but front-end developers manage to raise the requirement for a smooth browsing experience at a faster speed.

Its Chrome codebase. Same websites on now ancient Opera Presto (12) flew at 1/10 the resource usage (not an exaggeration, you could open 100 tabs and still fit in 1GB ram usage).

We are paying for abstraction layers added to smooth web development.

Pinebooks Pro's as a chromebook replacement is actually quite appealing to me.

I service a couple of chromebooks that I bought for my non-tech savvy family members. It's ideal since they spend 99% of the time in the browser and are less prone to drive-by attacks that download random executables.

However, I have a couple of concerns:

1) The build quality of the (various) chromebooks I've bought tends to be quite terrible, which is not great since many of them use it while cooking and get banged up a great deal.

2) Occasionally, they'll need a desktop app (e.g. the MS Teams web app has fewer features, or Google Docs just not always cutting it).

3) I hate locking them onto the Google ecosystem.

Now that they're due for replacement, I think I'll just get a Pinebook. The build quality is certainly better than the Acer and Lenovo chromebooks we have, and the fact that you can just replace the board for around $100 is very appealing.

To me, the most attractive thing about this device is that it's fanless and relatively cool. My 'on the go' device is a 2012 XPS 13 which gets very hot and is uncomfortable to use as a 'laptop' on bare skin.

That's the real progress we've made, the power efficiency of mobile devices.

This is why I enjoy using my iPad Pro with LTE. I can mosh/ssh, I can even use vscode if I feel I need a GUI or am working on netsuite code.

How do you use vscode on your iPad Pro?

From [1] and [2] I understand that you can run the back-end on a server (in the cloud) and the front-end on the tablet in the Safari browser.

[1]: https://twitter.com/ow/status/1135919541073014786

[2]: https://medium.com/@ow/its-finally-possible-to-code-web-apps...

But the iPad pro LTE is significantly (6-7x ?)more expensive and you are still only using it as a dumb terminal.

Ive had my pinebook pro for a week or so. It does everything I want it to do in terms of function(youtube HD, word processing, chess) I have 2 pain points at the moment.

Touchpad is kind of trash. You'll move your finger across and it'll take time to respond. I have seen there are touchpad upgrades but only for 2019 units which mine isnt.

The other is that suspend doesnt work. If I suspend; it appears to go asleep but it'll burn >5% battery an hour.

I booted up kali live and tested it, similar problems.

>youtube HD, word processing, chess

so like a 9 year old $50 thinkpad x220.

I recently got one and the touchpad is so bad, its infuriating to use.

There are also many posts in the community about quality of the touchpad.

I'd like to see a brand that starts with optimizing the cost vs. quality of the touchpad, keyboard, and screen and works its way backwards from there.

This may be naive, but I'm guessing a mid-range 2020 laptop shouldn't have a worse touchpad than a 2008 white clamshell MacBook.

Why not buy one, join the community and help writing better drivers?

After all, pinebook is more a hacker device than a consumer device.

Because it's probably not a software problem. Why not source better parts from the beginning?

The existence of this TM3141 touchpad[1]—which is every bit as good as a MacBook touchpad and works with a stock Ubuntu configuration—is proof that this is already a solved problem.

1. https://www.newegg.com/p/0TP-001B-002C6

I wouldn't be qualified, personally, to write better drivers, but I do agree with your message.

That said, it's a problem in the larger ecosystem.

I'm not sure why Chromebooks and even higher-end Windows machines tend to have lousy trackpads, when it's a "make or break" part of the user experience (and when Apple got it right enough 10 ~ 20 years ago).

"I’ve never perceived KDE to be particularly lightweight"

Isn't kde pretty lightweight nowadays?