I recently acquired a PineTab2 tablet from Pine64, and have been messing with it off and on for the last couple of weeks.
If possible, I would like this device to eventually become my main travel device, especially for short trips when I am unlikely to need to do much on my main computer other than maybe SSH'ing in to edit the occasional file. There are a number of reasons why that may not work out as well as I hope — among other things, I'm used to having my entire laptop with all of my files with me whenever I go anywhere overnight, and connecting to a server in my apartment from elsewhere has occasionally been unreliable — but the quality of the device suggests that it could easily fill the netbook niche if treated well.
I spent some time fiddling with my pinetab on the day it arrived. Given that this is a fairly early-stage device (we don't even have a working wifi driver yet!), it's quite impressive: although the default KDE UI feels a bit slow compared to a laptop, and desktop applications like Firefox are sluggish compared to what I'm used to, it certainly gets the job done. Things done in a terminal, on the other hand, are quite snappy, and I'm certainly not about to complain that a full-fledged desktop browser — which can take a moment to open even on a laptop with a Core i9 processor — isn't nearly as responsive on a tablet as Vim is.
As I an not particularly used to KDE, I won't be using the default compositor either way. Currently, I have Sway installed and use that as my primary compositor, but I may explore other options in the future, given how keyboard-focused Sway tends to be (although more on that later!).
Modulo a few very minor issues, such as what feels like limited touch sensitivity in the corners of the screen, I have very little if anything to complain about, and almost no criticism whatsoever that doesn't boil down to reminding developers of popular open source packages that performance optimizations for lower-resource devices (and possibly also for ARM) are worth investing some time on. In the default configuration, it can also be annoying to try and get the virtual keyboard to open and close only at the right moments, but again, that's almost certainly a software issue that will eventually be fixed.
The default image does not come with full disk encryption enabled. This would be a mistake in a mainstream line of devices, but for an early-stage device like this one it is an understandable decision likely made in the name of reducing complexity, or discouraging users from giving up or complaining that something doesn't work due to an issue with LUKS or cryptsetup.
Getting full disk encryption set up was, unfortunately, a bit of a struggle. I followed the instructions here with the ordinary Arch install instructions open in another window, making sure to set up a LUKS-encrypted root partition and make the appropriate modifications to the mkinitcpio hooks, but the system nevertheless consistently failed to display a decryption prompt on the tablet's screen (or any text other than a couple of lines that I failed to write down). Only after much exasperation and trial and error did I finally connect to the tablet from minicom via the included UART adapter — a process that itself required a bit of trial and error to get working — and discover that the decryption prompt was accessible only via the virtual serial connection. Once I had decrypted the drive through minicom, I learned that the install had in fact succeeded, and a bit of searching the internet told me that adding
console=tty0
to the kernel parameters would make the decryption prompt appear on the tablet's screen (which it did). The only downside is that now, of course, I no longer get the decryption prompt over the virtual serial connection — but if something goes so wrong that I can't decrypt the tablet via tty0 and I intend to connect via the UART adapter, I can always just turn on maskrom mode and boot from an SD card.
If you set up disk encryption, remember to generate an appropriate /etc/fstab file, and also to explicitly specify a cryptdevice in the kernel parameters (i.e. bootargs) in /boot/boot.txt (or an equivalent location if you choose to replace the factory image boot loader with GRUB or something else). Remember to regenerate boot.scr with mkscr afterwards!
So far, there is no working wifi driver for the PineTab2, so you'll need a WiFi dongle or wired connection to get online at first. When my device first arrived, I was able to connect using a Lenovo Ethernet to USB-C adapter that I had lying around (although my Hoyoki USB hub did not work at all). This solved the immediate problem and allowed me to run pacman -Syu, but a tablet is supposed to be portable and being tied to one corner of the room would not do.
Eventually, I ordered an AWUS360ACU WiFi dongle, which is currently my primary way of getting my pinetab online. This adapter requires a driver as well, but if you are using Arch or an Arch-based Linux distro (including DanctNIX), the driver in question — rtl88x2bu — is available in the AUR as rtl88x2bu-dkms-git. You will also need to ensure that linux-pinetab2-headers is installed for the driver to function proparly. I have had no problems with WiFi now that both of those packages are installed.
It is supposed to be possible to tether via USB to a phone, although I didn't manage to get that to work the one time I tried it, and I haven't had reason to try since. If you'd like to go this route, there are instructions on the wiki page. A list of other compatible WiFi dongles is also linked to from the wiki.
As an i3 user on my main computer who is nevertheless curious about Wayland, I installed Sway. It works more or less the way you would expect, although it required a bit of configuration to get touch working and make the orientation of the screen change automatically — following the instructions in this thread solved most of those issues.
I've also set up ligsd with a few gestures to change workspaces and open an application launcher, but there is still a certain amount of configuration required to make all touch functionality fully usable with Sway. This is fine for me — I'm a keyboard-first user outside of a few specific tasks, and the detachable keyboard that comes with the PineTab2 is fairly nice given how little it cost — but if you intend to use your tablet exclusively or semi-exclusively in traditional tablet mode with the keyboard folded up or detached, you might want to consider GNOME or KDE instead.
I haven't timed how long the battery lasts, but I have managed to fit several multi-hour setup and debugging sessions onto one charge (on different days, with the tablet powered off in between). I suspect that it would last you through most of a work day if it weren't under too heavy a load, although I have never tested this. I've been charging the tablet with a charger meant for my phone (no charger comes in the box), which charges it relatively slowly; I haven't yet investigated what the ideal charger would be other than to heed the voltage restrictions given in the instruction booklet.
Since the PineTab2 is an ARM device, your chances of getting a first-party Signal client working on it are slim (I have not personally succeeded). There are a few third-party clients out there, of varying quality (use at your own risk!) — my eye is currently on Axolotl, which should allow you to link an existing account in the near-in-FLOSS-terms future.
This is definitely Linux. If you're hoping for a tablet that will just work out of the box and do everything your iPhone does on the day you get it, you may want to wait until the world's Linux nerds have had a chance to play with the PineTab2 and work out all the kinks (as well as writing drivers for the WiFi and camera). But if you don't mind fiddling around with things that don't always work correctly on the first try, and you have some Linux experience, it isn't that expensive.
I've written some of the notes for this blog post (although not the post itself) from the PineTab2, SSH'd into my main computer. The detachable keyboard is surprisingly good, and while I certainly wouldn't want it to be the only keyboard I ever used, I could imagine doing some serious writing on it, especially if I were traveling light and it meant I didn't have to bring a heavier laptop. The trackpad doesn't make clicking as easy as it could be, but on a touch device that isn't as important, since you can just touch the screen to click. If an ISO version of the detachable keyboard were offered, I might spring for it at some point, but for now, I can live without the extra key.
The next step, of course, is to go out to a café, sit down with a cup of coffee, and try to do something useful with my pinetab. There may not be an opportunity to do that for a while, but stay tuned for a possible sequel to this post in the near to mid-range future.