KDE Neon With Plasma Ported & Optimized For Low-Cost 64-bit ARM Laptop

[Trevelyan]

I would install Neon in a heartbeat if it were built for debian rather than ubuntu. Alass I have to make do with the KDE version from Buster.

To anyone triggered: We are all allowed to have our preferences and I am just voicing mine:

The dream: Debian stable with a polished KDE experience.

The reality: Unfortunately Debians release cycle and KDE cycle of starting again (almost from scratch) never really aligned up.

[flower]

I would install Neon in a heartbeat if it were built for debian rather than ubuntu. Alass I have to make do with the KDE version from Buster.

To anyone triggered: We are all allowed to have our preferences and I am just voicing mine:

The dream: Debian stable with a polished KDE experience.

The reality: Unfortunately Debians release cycle and KDE cycle of starting again (almost from scratch) never really aligned up.

plasma on arch is in a very good shape
(if you are like me and just dislike ubuntu... if you just have a very strong positive opinion for debian: just ignore my post)

[Morty]

I would install Neon in a heartbeat if it were built for debian rather than ubuntu. Alass I have to make do with the KDE version from Buster.

You could go with Netrunner then, been avalibel for teh Pinebook sice April BTW.

https://www.netrunner.com/netrunner-for-pinebook/

[BangoMopar]

it is. hence they had to optimize it in order to run properly. AKA disabling the bloatware.

KDE Neon is already as spartan a distribution as you can get. This comment is pure troll-bait.

[deant]

2 GB ram is too low. Just open 4-5 tabs in the browser whatever it is - and you are done!

[hax0r]

I have a Pinebook and I hate it. I got shilled into buying because everything looked great on the paper, I figured it would be a nice low cost laptop to escape NSA infested x86 botnet and would perform nicely with decoding H.264 content or anime because the PINE64 SoC boasts impressive capabilities. Right of the bat there's 3 big issues that plague every PInebook:
1. WiFi connection is randomly cutting out, the driver for the particular RTL871X is flaky
2. the spacebar on the keyboard is awful, you have to hit the dead center of the bar for key to register, this kills overall experience
3. the touchpad by design works in unexpected manner, e.g. whem scrolling a webpage up/down the touchpad will start resizing your text as if you're hitting Ctrl+- or Ctrl+-
4. desktop DE and compositor are unaccelerated, as userspace 3D acceleration is only available via EGL (any app that links against X11/GLX gets software accelerated), youtube in Firefox is awfully slow and power hungry, not to mention that youtube defaults to VP9, if you forced H264 in youtube you still wouldn't get far.

Aesthetics of the laptop are great, it is very good looking, slim, light, fanless etc.

There were 2 notable contributors, "longsleep" and "ayufan" on https://forum.pine64.org/, they used to cherrypick different sauces and spices (patches) and merge them ontop of the 3.10 BSP kernel. Sadly there has been no activity in last 1 year, https://github.com/ayufan-pine64/linux-build/. The Sunxi mainlining effort is still a mess, https://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainli...#Status_Matrix

I haven't watched a single H264 on the Pinebook, from what I remember the sunxi DRM kernel driver would bomb out or something of that sort. I'm also curious how KDE packaged their distro for Pinebook and what the experience is like. I wonder if Kwin can run on EGL. ayufan distro did come with a lot of tweaks/workarounds to make X11/touchpad/synaptics/keyboard experience decent, I wonder if these settings have been carried over. I will give Neon a shot.

[elvenbone]

2 GB ram is too low. Just open 4-5 tabs in the browser whatever it is - and you are done!

There are some other browsers that are more suitable for weak systems than Chrome.

[boxie]

I have a Pinebook and I hate it. I got shilled into buying because everything looked great on the paper, I figured it would be a nice low cost laptop to escape NSA infested x86 botnet and would perform nicely with decoding H.264 content or anime because the PINE64 SoC boasts impressive capabilities. Right of the bat there's 3 big issues that plague every PInebook:
1. WiFi connection is randomly cutting out, the driver for the particular RTL871X is flaky
2. the spacebar on the keyboard is awful, you have to hit the dead center of the bar for key to register, this kills overall experience
3. the touchpad by design works in unexpected manner, e.g. whem scrolling a webpage up/down the touchpad will start resizing your text as if you're hitting Ctrl+- or Ctrl+-
4. desktop DE and compositor are unaccelerated, as userspace 3D acceleration is only available via EGL (any app that links against X11/GLX gets software accelerated), youtube in Firefox is awfully slow and power hungry, not to mention that youtube defaults to VP9, if you forced H264 in youtube you still wouldn't get far.

Aesthetics of the laptop are great, it is very good looking, slim, light, fanless etc.

There were 2 notable contributors, "longsleep" and "ayufan" on https://forum.pine64.org/, they used to cherrypick different sauces and spices (patches) and merge them ontop of the 3.10 BSP kernel. Sadly there has been no activity in last 1 year, https://github.com/ayufan-pine64/linux-build/. The Sunxi mainlining effort is still a mess, https://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainli...#Status_Matrix

I haven't watched a single H264 on the Pinebook, from what I remember the sunxi DRM kernel driver would bomb out or something of that sort. I'm also curious how KDE packaged their distro for Pinebook and what the experience is like. I wonder if Kwin can run on EGL. ayufan distro did come with a lot of tweaks/workarounds to make X11/touchpad/synaptics/keyboard experience decent, I wonder if these settings have been carried over. I will give Neon a shot.

That is some very good information - thanks for sharing. I do hope they get the SunXI upstreaming sorted out so that it can run more recent kernels

[hax0r]

I do hope they get the SunXI upstreaming sorted out so that it can run more recent kernels

I on the other hand am OK with being stuck on 3.10 and having proprietary userland binary blobs , at least this way everything is working. I want to retract the previous comment I made on Pinebook, "I do not hate it" but somethimes things get frustrating. I think it is an amazing value for $99, it is why I bought it. Also H.264 decoding works without a hitch too, it is just matter of knowing what needs to be installed. The H.264 acceleration in Allwinner A64 has been implemented via VDPAU, so you need to install extra sunxi vdpau libraru and export correct env variable. I'm not sure how DRM kernel module was erroring out on me way way ago, since then I reinstalled and fully updated aufyan's spin of Ubuntu Xenial 16.04 MATE and everything is great!

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ayufan/pine64-ppa
sudo apt-get update
$ export VDPAU_DRIVER=sunxi
$ mpv --vo=vdpau --hwdec=vdpau --hwdec-codecs=all [filename]

https://github.com/linux-sunxi/libvdpau-sunxi [Experimental VDPAU for Allwinner sunxi SoC] http://linux-sunxi.org/A64 [Allwinner A64 (sun50i) SoC]

[hax0r]

I just tried the KDE Neon distro on my Pinebook. Right off the bat kwin crashed and restarted falling back to XRender backend, I saw the "OpenGL compositioning (the default) has crashed KWin in the past" message in "Compositor -- Systems Settings"

I really don't understand why would kwin not be running on EGL in this distro, I mean this is the whole point, who the f**k would spin up and release a KDE distro like this only to have it end up running software acceleration? (sorry if I offend anyone). The experience is awful. Pinebook cannot do regular accelerated OpenGL 2.0/3.0, it only does OpenGL ES and EGL. I also tried the following to force kwin to use EGL but without success:
$ export KWIN_OPENGL_INTERFACE=egl
$ kwin --replace

This distro...into the trash it goes.