Preface: I picked up a Pinebook Pro back around 2019. I vaguely remember the other machine I was fiddling with at the time was a Chuwi Minibook. Nearly a year and a half went by and the Pinebook Pro spent most of it collecting dust, until my ThinkPad X1 Carbon 2017 went missing a while back. I really had no computer to use, so I dug it out and used it as my “main machine” for a stretch. And honestly, when the Pinebook Pro first launched, the ecosystem around it was pretty incomplete (though already a big step up from the old Pinebook). Now that I have a new temporary main laptop, I can set the Pinebook Pro aside for the time being. The days of using it were an interesting and painful memory, but it was also a chance to seriously try out this “open-source Arm Linux laptop” and see its strengths and weaknesses. So I figure I’ve earned the right to give it a subjective review here.

The ODROID-GO Advance is the follow-up to that ODROID-GO handheld. Better performance, plus a stick and shoulder buttons. From what I gathered reading various foreign reviews, the performance is supposedly monstrous and it has a huge future ahead of it… So I bought one. It actually arrived a while ago; I just never had time to put it together, and only recently dug it out and got to work. Recording it here.

The Odroid Go is a handheld project built around a dev board that you assemble yourself. In theory it’s open source, and you could put one together entirely by hand. Of course, someone also sells you a finished kit, and I happened to catch it on sale, so I ordered one.