#Elementary os raspberry pi 4 software
So the potential of the hardware is there, the software stack just isn’t quite ready to take advantage of it yet. For example, the Alt Tab animation feels pretty smooth compared to the animation used when opening the applications menu. One interesting point is that you can clearly notice the difference between the GPU accelerated animations (done by the Compositor) and those done largely on the CPU by GTK. There are a number of tweaks we’ve applied to improve the experience somewhat, though there won’t be any big leaps in performance until we can move the stack to Wayland and to a greater extent GTK4. This is down to GTK3 largely not using GPU acceleration, especially when running on Xorg. Performanceĭespite elementary OS being a relatively performant distribution, the experience still isn’t as good as you might hope given the capability of the hardware.
#Elementary os raspberry pi 4 pro
We needed a version that was new enough to support the Pinebook Pro and a few patches, so this has come directly from mainline u-boot and not yet packaged as an upgradable. For now, though, the kernel is just built into the image at build time and so does not currently receive updates. deb and hosting it on a PPA, so we can push updates in future if necessary. In the short term however, we may consider packaging the Pinebook Pro kernel into a. Ubuntu already releases specific kernels for the Raspberry Pi, perhaps we’ll see a ready made Pinebook Pro one in the future.
![elementary os raspberry pi 4 elementary os raspberry pi 4](https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/raspberry-pi-4-specs.jpg)
So maintaining our own kernel configuration and patchset is a bit of a departure from that. We were initially using kernel 5.7, but have since upgraded to 5.8, which allowed dropping some more patches that have been mainlined.Įlementary normally relies heavily on the fantastic work done by Canonical in testing and maintaining kernel releases. So this is one major area where the Pinebook Pro builds differ from the regular Intel/AMD builds.
![elementary os raspberry pi 4 elementary os raspberry pi 4](https://i2.wp.com/9to5linux.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/elementaryos6.jpg)
For example, we’ve had to disable kernel module compression in the kernel configuration as this isn’t compatible with the Ubuntu update-initramfs scripts yet.Īs of this post, Ubuntu hasn’t released any kernels that are new enough or contain the necessary tweaks, options, and patches to run on the Pinebook Pro.
![elementary os raspberry pi 4 elementary os raspberry pi 4](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/B6BzlD_bW4k/maxresdefault.jpg)
It needed tweaking slightly to be compatible with the way Ubuntu/elementary works. We’ve simply taken a mainline kernel straight from, applied a few patches copied from the Manjaro repository and used a configuration set similar to the Manjaro one. Thanks to the great work that the Manjaro ARM team have done in this field, getting a working kernel for the Pinebook Pro was relatively painless. The process of producing both functional and high-quality builds of elementary OS for Pinebook Pro has been long, but was made substantially easier thanks to help from PINE64 and the work of other projects. If you’d like to see more projects like this, consider backing us on GitHub Sponsors. Lastly, our work on bringing elementary OS to Pinebook Pro has been made possible by PINE64 generously providing the hardware as well as by funding from our Early Access sponsors.
![elementary os raspberry pi 4 elementary os raspberry pi 4](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/pBmT-mAQVOk/maxresdefault.jpg)
Second, this post isn’t going to get into a lot of details about the hardware itself for that, see Cassidy’s recent personal blog post. That said, the experience so far has been a lot of fun, and we’re happy with the current state. PINE64 was gracious enough to send a few devices out to members of our team, and our work began.įirst, a bit of a disclaimer: Pinebook Pro support is still considered an experiment for elementary OS, and it’s not something we have committed to officially support indefinitely. We’d been loosely following PINE64 and the progress of Pinebook Pro, but hadn’t gotten our hands on one-so we expressed our interest. In June, PINE64 reached out to see if elementary would be interested in experimenting with elementary OS on Pinebook Pro. David Hewitt Desktop Engineer Fri, Aug 28, 2020