I spent some time installing and configuring Linux (Arch) on pixel slate. Here is what I find.
The good parts.
- Basically everything works out of the box (with one small fixable caveat below). I installed Arch Linux with KDE Plasma.
- Firefox is simply great.
- Battery life is very good. I get very similar battery life compared to Chrome OS. Battery drain in suspend is minimal.
- Screen rotation works pretty well once iio-sensor-proxy is installed.
- virtual keyboard (maliit-keyboard) works well too.
The bad parts
- Stylus works, but lags a lot. Might have something to do with Wayland?
- Gesture navigation can definitely use some improvement.
- The flatpak Plex client appears to lack hardware acceleration and lags a lot with 4k content. I have to rely on the web client at the moment.
Some notes
- My motivation to do this was to completely remove chrome from my devices. I chose Full UEFI boot. There is a very well written tutorial for doing so. For me the only hurdle was to obtain a SuzyQable CCD Debugging cable.
- The default Arch Linux install works well. The only issue was the hid_google_hammer kernel module. It is causing very long delays during the startup and you basically won't be able to properly shutdown or reboot. Fortunately the fix is easy enough. I just had to blacklist the two modules (hid_google_hammer and hid_vivaldi_common). From what I tested, this issue affects many distros, including at least Arch and Void.
Did all these start with the book sapiens? Horrible entertainment pretending to be scientific literature