The PinePDA

Feb 23, 2022

The dream is a single device, that can act as both an extremely portable computation device as well as be "docked" and be a desktop system.

I've tried to use several devices over the years, but I think it has finally been realised with the PinePhone, using the official keyboard dock. I am affectionally refering to it as the PinePDA, as it fulfills the duties similar to that of a Personal Digital Assistant[1] that we had in the not-so-distant past.

I've settled on using sway as the desktop environment, by way of the SXMO interface for the pinephone (with some minor tweaks to fit my asthetics.

There are some issues though:

• If the keyboard is charging the phone, the USB-C dock doesn't seem to work, but I rarely spent so much time docked that the battery wouldn't last.
• Obviously, it's a fairly slow system, so running something heavy like firefox does hog the CPU a lot. However sitting in a terminal, running vim is as smooth as any modern hardware.
• The dock that came with the system doesn't stay in the port unless held in place, a minor issue that doesn't impact other docks, but annoying non-the-less

I am really enjoying silent computers, the Raspberry Pi400 and the PinePDA. Bliss.

Silence is Golden

PS. It seems VIM supports gemtext syntax hilighting. (But not on the version on the PI...)

PPS. After writing such a positive post, the PinePDA keeps shutting down when I tried to commit these changes to git, corrupting the local repo. Fortunately it seems to have made it to the backup machine, so I'll just have to wipe it and clone it again. Sigh

[1] Wikipedia - Personal Digital Assistant

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