PineBook Benchmarks For The ARM Linux Laptop Starting At $99 USD

[AndyChow]

Could you please provide which Chromebooks actually allow to replace preinstalled firmware with this inconvenient 30 seconds developer timer to normal Coreboot with regular TianoCore? I always skip Chromebooks because of this timer.

It's been about a year since I broke my last Chromebook, but ctrl-d or ctrl-u always worked to skip the timer and either boot on the eMMC or sd card. The timer is always there but you can skip it instantly.

[RussianNeuroMancer]

see here for the devices supported by the afaik bigger project that provides such replacement board firmware https://mrchromebox.tech/#devices
It's actually quite a lot.

Yeah, I looked into this particular project not long time ago, in hope that it also support ARM Chromebooks, and because of this I remember only Firmware Utility Script "only for stock ChromeOS firmware" features, and didn't look much into Full ROM replacing (as Full ROM replacing is not available for ARM-based Chromebooks). Thanks for pointing out that it can also flash firmware on Intel-based Chromebooks!

[jason.oliveira]

I’m still looking for a decent ARM based laptop and not finding such HSS me running a Ryzen based machine. In this case an HP ENVY. Great processor but can’t recommend because of HP and the lack of build quality. That and the battery not surviving very long.

Update the firmware for your mobo. Raven Ridge is *still* getting bios updates. They help a lot.

[phuclv]

I own one of these, bought it when it came out. Even at 1366 x 768, it can't play video files fullscreen without severe lag. I don't recommend it to anyone. Also the battery lasts 2h30-3h30 max.

The distros available aren't that interesting either, and there is no way to activate hardware acceleration (gpu).

Probably it's because GPU acceleration hasn't been used by the browser, because A53 cores should handle 1080p without problem, and according to this review 1080p videos can be played smoothly, just frames on Youtube videos are dropped

That said, the new pinebook pro should handle this much better. You can even play many games on it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EoIfSnFCs84

[AndyChow]

Probably it's because GPU acceleration hasn't been used by the browser, because A53 cores should handle 1080p without problem, and according to this review 1080p videos can be played smoothly, just frames on Youtube videos are dropped

That said, the new pinebook pro should handle this much better. You can even play many games on it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EoIfSnFCs84

No, even videos like mp4 stutter. I think some of the videos I tried were 480p and they couldn't even playback at full speed, not with vlc or mplayer. Probably some videos on Youtube will work at low resolutions. You can't use MATE or Gnome, it's much too slow. Even LXDE isn't fast on this.

The pinebook pro might have all these issues fixed.