PineTab-V tablet with a RISC-V chip gets community-supported software builds (including KDE Plasma desktop)
https://liliputing.com/pinetab-v-tablet-with-a-risc-v-chip-gets-community-supported-software-builds-including-kde-plasma-desktop/Open linkView original on slrpnk.net185
Comments16
Open source processors. What a time to be alive.
Hasn't ARM always been open source?
No, it's licensed. RISC-V isn't necessarily open sourced either. It's an open standard, but you can develop your own proprietary designs on it.
Yup!
To my understanding RISC-V is like BSD lisenced not GPL.
I think it was MIT, which is basically the same like BSD
Whoa! So RISC-V is already that far? We can have tablets? Nice.
I'm almost in "shut up and take my money" -mode already.
That's pretty cool. What's the battery life like on this thing?
Without ever having used it, I can say with complete confidence that it’s probably bad. It’s not an optimised consumer level device, it’s a product aimed at enthusiasts and tinkerers who want to implement Linux on a new platform and form factor.
I remember getting a PineBook Pro when it came out. Seemed like a great machine but the screen failed in less than a week. Thankfully they refunded me but it was disappointing.
Mine is still working. Armbian is great on it, though I still wish I could get hardware video decoding working in-browser. Best I can do right now is GPU OpenGL acceleration, but any site with video maxes out the CPU and kills battery life.
That all said, I love the keyboard on it.
Armbian was the most promising when I had mine, but still wasn't ready. I just couldn't get into manjaro, but every time I loaded a new OS the screen would die, come back, flciker and a "shadow" around the perimeter of the screen.
Hm, sounds like you got unlucky and the display cable died on you
Yeah it was unfortunate because of their (basically) no returns policy I didn't want to roll the dice on a second one.
I still use my Pinebook Pro as daily driver (next to a desktop pc) and I‘m actually quit happy with it. It’s not the most powefull machine but it does it‘s job.
Also I never really experimented with all the special distros. Nowadays I just run plane Debian on it and everything seems fine.
Does the pinetab v have working WiFi drivers? The arm version doesn't
I think I found my next machine to run Emacs and EXWM