| From: Alex Volkov via talk <talk@gtalug.org> | It looks like Pine64 are releasing Pinebook Pro, a laptop that I'm actually | willing to pay money for and then use. Interesting. Thanks for posting. | Specs: | | * Rockchip RK3399 ; big.LITTLE Hexacore A72/A53 SOC I don't think that there are good open source video drivers for this (Mali-T860MP4). There is a good closed-source driver from ARM but who knows if Rockchip and Pine licensed it. There are "coming along" open source drivers but I don't know it they are good enough. Also: other parts of the SoC may not be well supported by open source stuff. Video codec assists? This chip is perhaps the best popular ARM SoC. I was tempted to buy a cheapish TV box with one and hack it to run Linux. But most of what I read made it look like it might take a lot of hacking. But if the vendor targets Linux that should help TV boxes with rk3399 chips are significantly more expensive than ones with s912 chips. I wonder why. | * PCIe x4 that can take a m.2 NVMe SSD using an optional adapter Optional? I wonder why. | I'm hoping that the product would be successful enough that there's going to | be a release of a version with 8GB of RAM -- that would put it on par with | ultrabooks. I think that the rk3399 is limited to 4G. | Thought I don't think Pinebook Pro ever going to meet its $200 US target | price. Yeah. I've posted a couple of netbook deals with similare prices and capabilities. The Atom-family processors are a lot better supported by Linux distros. But an adventure with ARM might be fun.