Very much dependent on the particular hardware - here, the pinetab2 has some support. The danctnix mobile linux community maintains builds for it, so it’s a subset of Arch on Arm.
https://github.com/dreemurrs-embedded/danctnix-packages/tree/main/pine64/device-pine64-pinetab2
outside of that, there’s some limited support for postmarketOS and mobian
A good place to start understanding the challenges you’d face would be on the wiki:
I just bought one. The default KDE is a bit heavyweight for it, I’m thinking something lighter might be better.
I would say that they perfectly nailed the description, this is not a beginner device. You’ll not be distrohopping without knowing how to patch your own WiFi drivers and fix the auto rotate (90° clockwise further than it should be out of the box).
I love it, really cool. But not an easy in for beginners.
Feel free to ask me questions or check something, or send a picture of something!
I replaced an NVMe drive on a Windows 11 machine the other day. Cloned to new disk, booted up. After posting and entering the bootloaders, it said “BOOT DRIVE INACCESSIBLE”. The drive needed a driver to BOOT once Windows took over.
A Western Digital 850x black 2TB. This is not an uncommon drive, but I had to patch in the driver to the disk from a live CD.
I don’t see how people put up with this crap.
Preinstalled OS is useable, though you’ll want to update it.
Installing the updated OS on an SD card is easy enough. I haven’t tried flashing it to disk yet. I’ve not felt hampered by major performance penalties.
The WiFi dongle workaround is that simple, yes. Pick one that’s supported in the mainline kernel, and you’re off to the races.
Be aware, you’ll need to pick one that’s USB C if you don’t want a second converter attached.
My preference would be to tether my phone I think - but my USB C 2.5G Ethernet adapter worked pretty well too.
Some more presient info from my investigation:
I got the latest Danctnix 20260630 running on it, and it’s working better now. Suspend is unmasked in that version, but it is not working all the time.
The WiFi driver is still unstable, but you can disconnect/reconnect quick enough when it drifts off.
Running phosh and sxmo/sway was a fair bit faster than full KDE.
The primary problem is hardware acceleration. For video, it’s just not there yet. You can make some video formats work, but this SoC is limited in what it can do in hardware, on its VPU. What little can be done, isn’t available without compiling your own ffmpeg.
This link shows what can be done with the 3566 hardware:
https://pine64.org/documentation/General/Mainline_Hardware_Decoding/
This link shows how it can be done:
https://clehaxze.tw/gemlog/2023/09-17-hardware-accelerated-playback-on-pinetab2.gmi
The bottom line is, without hardware acceleration for video decoding, it feels very underpowered.
I did bother to set it all up, and it’s a damn competent little tablet when you do - but all your effort won’t apply to streamed video unless you use MPV or something to play it, to take advantage of the ffmpeg. Straight up Firefox and chromium don’t offer selectors for YouTube etc to pick the right encoding format for your CPU, and they typically use more modern encoding formats. (e.g. VP9 over VP8)
Also, battery life is great! I’m sure not playing video helps…