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  • 🐈‍⬛David Sommersethdazo@infosec.exchange
    Aug 21, 2026, 8:03 AM

    I received my #PineNote from @pine64 yesterday evening.

    I've not had much time to play with it yet. But I'm looking forward to do that.

    First general impression:

    • Nice specs, nice display
    • Feels like a real computer and not a straitjacket. Great for hacking, but is it great for the average non-tech consumer? However, this is currently more a hacking device, so it makes sense
    • It's an e-ink display, so it can feel a bit more laggy than it most likely is - due to the screen update latencies
    • It runs a Debian Trixie build with GNOME. GNOME does not feel like that right choice for such a device. Floating windows and soft-keyboard getting in the way all the time
    • The software keyboard is designed to look nice - functionally, it's quite annoying.
    • The pen which follows feels extremely plastic and really poor quality. But it does the job.
    • I would love the pen to be magnetic so it could be soft-attached to the edges of the tablet.
    • It ships with Syncthing pre-installed!

    But it seems to require some work to get apt update and apt upgrade working smooth. The images installed seemed to be quite out-to-date and several PGP keys used to verify packages was out of date. And there were some issues with the /usr symlink move. So the base install is very premature. Some hacking time will be needed to get it into a more proper shape.

    The documentation both on paper and the pre-installed help docs is very scarce on details. And quite some details were even not correct.

    Overall impression currently is that the PineNote is not a device I would recommend to non-technical people at all. But it feels like a very capable device for those who likes hacking and don't mind some "rough edges".

    I do see this as a device which I should be able to tweak into a pretty functional device with some time. And I'm looking forward to that.

    #foss #opensource #pine64 #hardware #tablet #eink #hacking

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Replies

  • 🐈‍⬛David Sommersethdazo@infosec.exchange
    Aug 21, 2026, 8:08 AM

    The device itself: pine64.org/devices/pinenote/

    Note that Pine64 is having supply chain challenges, especially related to eMMC/DRAM supply. See their own announcement: social.treehouse.systems/@pine

    If you want a hackable e-Ink tablet - I would consider to order a PineNote as long as it is in stock - but please join the community to help this device to move forward.

    If you just want a "fully functional device out-of-the-box", I'd recommend to look elsewhere currently. PineNote is not at that stage just yet.

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  • 🐈‍⬛David Sommersethdazo@infosec.exchange
    Aug 21, 2026, 9:59 PM

    Had more time digging into the #Pine64 #PineNote tablet today.

    There were a few known issues related to getting apt upgrade work. This repo helped a lot.

    Used both the serial console (via a USB-C adapter which was in the package) and SSH. All works like a charm.

    Got git and @radicle running on the device after the software updates got installed. This will be great to fix stuff on-the-fly.

    Tested #Xjournal, and that looks looks like it's going to work a lot better than what I expected. Together with Syncthing, this might actually replace the Kobo Elipsa tablet I have (which has collected dust for a while, due to Rakuten's/@kobo@lemmy.world #enshitifaction of the Kobo devices).

    Discovered the two different ways to adjust the light (separate white/blue-ish and orange-ish sliders).

    Overall experience so far today is quite good! But still not convinced about GNOME as the desktop environment. Perhaps something like a tiling window manager would be better? It helped a bit though, reducing the default 200% zooming to 150% - values below was basically too tiny for this display.

    I'm now pondering on encrypting the /home partitions at least.

    And I'm going to look into installing OpenVPN on the device and getting some backup running as well.

    But overall I'm quite happy what I've seen so far, at least in regards to the ability to hack this device.

    Still find the pen way too simple, though.

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  • shomshom@gts.shom.dev
    Aug 21, 2026, 10:28 PM

    @dazo nice! Great to see more folks using and posting about the pine note.
    You might be interested in this repo: https://git.sr.ht/~hrdl/pinenote-dist

    I would absolutely encourage you to switch to the hrdl kernel, even if you are not using the whole repo as is. Currently, I'm running just the kernel, it's a significant improvement over the stock.

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