Having spent so far 3 days with the PBP, I can tell that it's been
a joy. This ARM laptop can do things you couldn't dream of, like
play retro-games, GZDoom, OpenArena/Quake 3, and even games like
Celeste, thanks to stuff like XNA I believe.
Enough about that, however. The default operating system, Debian,
really pulls it's weight. Out of the box they put in stuff like
Hexchat, Chromium(eww), LibreOffice, SMPlayer and a few other
applications for the average user. I don't believe this is an
average user's laptop, as in order to really get things running,
you need to have an understanding of the Linux/BSD world. Once
you do though, you're in for a treat.
One of the things I really dislike about this laptop, and the
only thing, is that it comes with 64 GB of eMMC storage. That's
like nothing in today's world, but given all the other premium
features you get for $200+tax+shipping/handling and customs
I would say it's a steal.
Now since it's an ARM laptop, obviously it's not going to be
running stuff like Steam, or any other big name X86 applica-
tion, but that's fine for someone like me. I usually end up
gaming on a game console anyway. Here's my setup:
Claws-Mail
Firefox
cmus/VLC
weechat/Hexchat
ssh
nano/Leafpad/Emacs
mpv/SMPlayer
Caja/Thunar/ranger
By default it uses the MATE desktop, which means GNOME 2
paradigms. You can change that, of course, and I recomm-
once it gets a bit more mature and has
feature parity with the default desktop.
Overall, I'd rate the device a 8/10. Still a few
kinks here and there, but a pretty solid experience.
