so i am sure plenty of people are going through the motions trying to find that perfect distro to set up on their pinebook pro. and are having either good or bad success. i figured i’d post a few notes on the distros i have attempted to try so far.
manjaro plasma – installs, runs, jittery. ran this on emmc without sd installed. it jumps all over the place. you will notice this when under high load.
manjaro gnome – installs, runs, jittery, ran this on emmc without sd installed. it jumps all over the place. you will notice this when under high load.
manjaro xfce – installs, runs, smooth. running this now on emmc with sd installed (512GB samsung EVO A2). seem to be bumping into random freezes. not really sure what’s causing it but i am sure it is related to flakey emmc issues. hopefully i can catch it when it happens.
armbian xfce – does not run on emmc. this may be related to emmc issues with pinebook pro. i somehow managed to get it to run with emmc disabled on a sd. xfce is a bit lacking and you run into weird issues like firefox not being able to ‘save as…’ files. i tried to fix this by removing thunar to use the gnome filemanager instead but thunar had tons of xfce deps attached to it that i thought i could remove as well. that did not work out so well and xfce was wrecked.
armbian gnome – after ruining the xfce install i decided to just go ahead and install gnome on it. this was probably the best ux i had with the pinebook pro but, again, does not boot from emmc. the only way i managed to get this to boot was using tow-boot. also i ran into an issue after an udpate where i HAD to choose “boot from SD” in the boot menu of tow-boot instead of it automatically booting. i never really looked too deep into that since i moved onto manjaro xfce which seems stable and does what i need.
dietpi – just like armbian i could not get this to boot from emmc. this may be related to the emmc issues people are discussing. not sure though. it did boot from sd. it is a very stripped down version of armbian and the install was really nice with console menus to get you started. it is up to you to get a decent setup going though. you are pretty much starting out with the bare minimum which is what this distro attempts to do in order for you to take your own path. apt though so that’s always nice.
openbsd – it managed to boot from sd but needs serial console at this time. i did not get farther than this since i didn’t have a serial cable. maybe i’ll look into this when it is further along or i get my serial cable.
fun fact about armbian.. it is actually more ubuntu than debian. just saying.
maybe this will help someone out.