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Review: The PineTab2 with various operating systems
Quoting: DistroWatch.com: Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD. —
When it comes to evaluating the experiences the PineTab2 can provide I feel it important to separate the capabilities of the hardware from the software. The PineTab2 hardware, while affordable in cost and somewhat modest in capabilities compared to a new laptop, is pretty good. It's not high end or flashy, but the PineTab2 hardware is certainly capable. It has a fairly quick processor for a mobile device, lots of cores, plenty of memory for most tasks on a Linux distribution, and enough hard drive space to store plenty of songs and videos for a long journey. When running an agreeable user interface, the hardware is certainly able to play videos, edit documents, check e-mail, and otherwise provide a no-frills desktop experience.
The one weak point in the hardware appears to be the camera. As far as I can tell, none of the Linux distributions which run on the PineTab2 have the proper drivers to work with the camera. This means the PineTab can consume media, but it's not a good video conferencing tool.
The software side of the experience was less appealing. It looks as though ten distributions have been ported to the PineTab2, but a few have already abandoned their efforts. The are no recent builds of about half of the distributions listed in the PINE64 wiki and some of the ones which are available don't have much in the way of documentation or mobile-friendly interfaces to offer. This leaves users with few appealing options.
I tried two distributions and three user interfaces during my long weekend with the PineTab2 and each of them had serious problems. Lomiri was easily the best user interface - it was fast and capable and it offered convergence. However, UBports didn't produce sound and it isn't supported any longer. I also had strange behaviour when trying to run the terminal application with the keyboard attached.
Arch running Plasma was not a good experience, for several reasons. Discover doesn't work with the ARM-Arch repository, the virtual keyboards don't work on the login/lock screens, and rotation orientation was broken. Plasma also isn't a good match for a touch interface as the elements are too close together and some programs, such as Dolphin, don't work smoothly with touch.
Arch running the Phosh interface was promising. I had sound, I had a working terminal, the keyboard worked properly, and I had sound. Performance was better under Phosh than with Plasma and the settings panel easier to navigate. The screen rotation problem persisted though and I still had the problem of not being able to login without a keyboard plugged into the system until I enabled auto-login.
There are not a lot of people in the Linux community working on mobile devices and fewer are working on open hardware tablets. It's a small community without much (if any) financial incentive. As a result, it feels as though the Linux community doesn't have a solid offering for the PineTab2. This is a shame, because it's a pretty good device, in terms of hardware and capacity to run software. However, at this time, it looks like support and interest around the PineTab are shrinking rather than growing, and the software experience is lacking in polish.
It is possible to do good and useful things with a PineTab, but it takes work, it takes tinkering, and it requires some compromises. I'm hoping the projects which run (or have run) on the PineTab will renew their efforts to provide a more polished experience because the hardware is fairly good, it just needs support from distributions to shine.