In addition to others’ answers here, I suggest reading over this document whenever you get frustrated by Debian: Don’t Beak Debian

Debian has a particular philosophy for its design choices. Using non-standard sources.list entries, for instance, can break your system in the future. You’ll have a much better time in the long run if you come to understand why Debian is the way it is

For web browsing I can navigate alright using spacebar to scroll. Naturally, that works best with a bluetooth keyboard attached, but you could resize the window and use the soft keyboard if you prefer. The “vimium” extension for Firefox makes keyboard navigation much nicer.

I also have one and agree with your conclusion. My PineNote is so cool and really fun to use!

I use mine most often for displaying and editing my character sheet while playing tabletop RPGs.

The display looks great and mine doesn’t have the stuck pixel or the buggy lines issue you experienced, though I do have very noticeable ghosting artifacts. Probably this is because I mainly use the “performance” optimization setting rather than “quality”. Animations play very poorly, so I found it necessary to use extensions to disable animations wherever possible.

Also, of course, the screen is only black and white so sometimes you lose out on information. E.g. if my GM says “the goblin that stole the flask is highlighted yellow. The one highlighted pink is standing his ground. What do you do?” I would not be able to tell them apart.

I get acceptable but not fantastic battery life. Usually after about 3 hours I’ll have around 60% life left. It would probably be better if I was using a lighter program than Firefox. Mine also has phantom battery drain and loses maybe 15% battery life per day if left unplugged while suspended.

I paid $460 USD for mine, shortly before the import tariffs were implemented.

Overall, I would recommend it for someone who meets these criteria:

• is a Linux enthusiast comfortable with the command line and willing to read and follow various guides (there’s a long README that opens on boot which has crucial information in it, like how to fix critical bugs)
• wants to avoid proprietary lock in wherever possible
• wants to avoid shovel ware and use mainline Linux
• wants to support FOSS development and doesn’t mind paying extra to do so
• understands the severe limitations of an e-ink display

I would not recommend it to most people because it is an enthusiast Linux device with an e-ink display. If you’re the kind of person that specifically wants an enthusiast Linux device with an e-ink display then I think you’ll love it

I was really excited to install PostmarketOS on my Oneplus 6 but it didn’t boot afterward. It turns out I actually have a Oneplus 5, which is very different. Amazingly, the tools available for these devices allowed me to recover from being bricked.

It’s now running LineageOS but between its limited hardware features and its bad battery it is a glorified alarm clock

In addition this was back when airlines had strong restrictions on wireless being used on planes, so many devices had physical switches to turn WiFi/Bluetooth off. Maybe it’s still turned off

Also an old fart, also love XFCE

I am a longtime fan of Debian Stable, for exactly that reason. I installed the XFCE version using the custom installer about 8 years ago and have had very few issues.

Initially my GPU wasn’t well supported so I had to use the installer from Nvidia, forcing me to manually reinstall the driver after every kernel update. That issue has been fixed in recent years so now I can just use the driver from the Debian repos.

I installed the unattended-updates package about 2 years ago and it has been smooth sailing since

I have some bad news for you - any random idiot with a driver’s license and a two-ton death machine already puts your ass at risk, all the time. We call it “traffic” because we’ve just gotten used to it

This is the one I got. I wonder why they use different photos sometimes

I came to the comments to mention that exact experience. There must be historical reasons that SCP uses -P and SSH uses -p but I certainly didn’t expect it since they’re both from the same package (openssh)

I first used XFCE on my old 700mhz processor Thinkpad back in the day. Back then, Gnome and especially KDE were known to use excessive resources on low-end machines so XFCE was preferred.

However, I actually quite liked the DE so I just switched to it permanently, even on my more capable machines. I’ve been running XFCE for around 15 years 😆

Not to mention, OP didn’t specify where they live. Who knows defamation law for the whole world?

How could you not include the classic printer lp0 on fire!

I actually got that one around 2010 on Ubuntu. The printer wasn’t actually on fire. If I recall it was caused by the network attached printer losing connection during a job