My Pyra review


adhrain said:
I received my Pyra with the second batch. After two weeks of daily
usage this is my review:

First of all, it is a gourgeous little gadget. Every single person
that has seen it (from Boomers to Zoomers) has said this: "Wow! That's
so beautiful! What is it?"

The (hard won) case is wonderful, the plastic is sturdy, the coating
feels amazing; mine has little to no imperfections.

The keyboard has a very good feeling and is pretty usable for fast
edits, the backlight is also extremely useful. Only thing I noticed,
the "Compose" key is mapped to be a "Menu key", I didn't bother to
remap it for three reasons:
1. All the common accented letter I need are already mapped to a key
2. For writing or unusual languages I use Emacs with its native
set-input-method
3. I hadn't time to ponder if I need to do an xmodmap for the Compose
Key or if it's more useful as a Menu Key
There is also a "Usr1/Usr2" key that is not bound to anything(?),
maybe I will bind that to Menu and Compose to compose. Can someone
confirm me that "Usr1/Usr2" is free?

I am not a gamer so I can't give a good review of the gaming controls,
but they feel better than my (sporadically used) Logitech generic game
controller. Let's say that my subpar Doom gaming has mysteriously
improved.

The screen looks like a retina display. The touch doesn't work edge
to edge, but that was very well known since the beginning of the
project.

I didn't try the microhdmi port. USB is even capable of giving power
to a 2.5" disk, and that's just great. USB (kernel handling) is also
the only thing that gave me a good scare: after removing a (semi bad)
disk the USB port was disabled, even removing the battery and
tampering with some system files didn't work. I was sure I bricked
the USB chip. Then I tried to remove the SD Card and everything just
started working again. Not a good evening.

The battery is huge, lasts a lot, but being big it is a bit tricky to
remove (sometime it's necessary to remove it to reset the machine).
To close the lid I found out that you need to put the battery ON the
lid, and then close the lid as if the battery were part of the lid.

Audio quality seems good and this little thing can be very loud.

I tried video with mplayer, mpv and vlc. Mplayer and mpv with the
default codec are fast, no visible frame dropping, BUT all the images
have a blue tint, people look like smurfs XD. Vlc is a bit slow with
some videos, but is fast with others. Changing options for mplayer
(vo=gl) and mpv (vo=sdl) removes the blue tint problem but gives the
sporadic sluggishness.

I installed my day-to-day editors. The terminal version of vim for
quick edits, works well, no problems. Graphical emacs has some weird
X11 issues (the frame is grey, can't see anything), I didn't bother to
find a solution, I just installed the emacs-nox version and I use it
from a fullscreen-no-menus Mate Terminal window in a dedicated
Workspace. I even installed all the sbcl-quicklisp-slime shebang, so
now, even if I am a very very very bad and noob lisper, I still have
the smallest (and probably fastest :-D) Lisp Machine ever created.
Feelsgoodman.jpg
I will probably end up creating a SD card with a full perl (my most
beloved language) toolchain (perlbrew, minicpan, Task::Kensho and so
on), but only in the future, maybe if I manage to put the whole home
in the SD, or if I will have enough time to find a way to configure
all the toolchain to work from an external filesystem.

I tried Firefox, it more or less works, sometimes it freezes or
crashes. Very heavy on the battery, I haven't tried it with online
videos or music, only quick searches and basic surfing. Lynx works
great tho XD.

I tried some games, prboom-plus from the debian repos works perfectly,
the very recent N64 emulator from the pyra dpb repo works (for what I
can understand, I only tried it with Super Mario), while some older
games from the dpb repo (Wolfenstein, Supertux) have a graphic issue:
they occupy only the bottom half of the screen, so the bottom half of
the game is invisible and the game cant't be played. Dosbox from the
dpb repo works, but the ":" key is not registered by the dosbox
console, so in order to bind my "C:" drive I had to put the mount line
in the config file; also I can't make it fullscreen. Wolfenstein in
dosbox works, Prince of Persia doesn't. I tried only those two.
Dosbox-staging doesn't start. I didn't have time to find why.

I know someone is already working on the graphics front, so that will
probably solve a lot of the small hiccups. I think that an easy way
to reconfigure buttons and keys and a more thourough wiki/manual/user
guide will be a huge help to the normal user.

TL;DR The hardware is essentially perfect, the device looks and feels
premium tier. The software is obviously immature in some aspects, but
the machine is usable for a lot of things (I think 70-80% of my use
cases are satisfied and the Pocket Lisp Machine aspect is the sweetest
thing ever). I silently followed this project since its inception,
the result is well beyond what I expected. I wish to thank ED and all
the active contributors, you did an excellent job.

PER ASPERA AD ASTRA
Click to expand...

Great review, thanks for taking the time. Perfect level of detail.
 
superatarian said:
Good to know. I guess I have a lot to learn about using a Debian-based computer. Synaptic is something I have not used or heard of before. Is it included on the Pyra or what. Should not be hard to use.
Post automatically merged:


Thanks. I went to the site, but could not find it. However, I have not been there before so I feel I need to explore it.
Click to expand...

You don't need to go anywhere. Keep reading about synaptic and apt (the cli tool for software), you will see how easy and convenient is installing software in debian.
 
Askarus said:
It does.
However I prefer Firefox, as Vivaldi sends data "home".
Firefox is the only big browser I know of that does not.
Click to expand...
Only if you setup the settings such that it doesn’t - and you have to actively do so as they appear to be enabled by default :-||
 
Phlyra said:
Only if you setup the settings such that it doesn’t - and you have to actively do so as they appear to be enabled by default :-||
Click to expand...

I used that site to make my FireFox profile.
My security settings are too strict, so I can not do voice calls any more.
The rest works and I can use an other browser for my calls.
 
Askarus said:
It does.
However I prefer Firefox, as Vivaldi sends data "home".
Firefox is the only big browser I know of that does not.
Click to expand...
Does anyone know what data it sends? Does it send this data if you have no Vivaldi account?
 
The options under your privacy and security preferences are:
Code: 
Allow Firefox to send technical and interaction data to Mozilla
Allow Firefox to make personalised extension recommendations
Allow Firefox to install and run studies
Allow Firefox to send backlogged crash reports on your behalf

There's also an option about querying OCSP servers to check the validity of https server certificates. I've left that on, even though it emits a record of every different site you visit (at least those using https).

Edit: Those are the Firefox options. I don't know much about Vivaldi.
 
Silent-Hunter said:
Does anyone know what data it sends? Does it send this data if you have no Vivaldi account?
Click to expand...
https://vivaldi.com/it/privacy/browser/ said:

Type and purpose of data collected by Vivaldi AS​

When you install Vivaldi browser (“Vivaldi”), each installation profile is assigned a unique user ID that is stored on your computer. Vivaldi will send a message using HTTPS directly to our servers located in Iceland every 24 hours containing this ID, version, cpu architecture, screen resolution and time since last message. We anonymize the IP address of Vivaldi users by removing the last octet of the IP address from your Vivaldi client then we store the resolved approximate location after using a local geoip lookup. The purpose of this collection is to determine the total number of active users and their geographical distribution.
Click to expand...
 
I don't see anything wrong with that, they aren't collecting browsing data or anything personally identifiable I suppose.
 
Yes, it does default to using the google search, but it also ships with a couple of alternatives, I think they are bing and ebay. But to add other searches to your browser it's often as easy as typing in the address of that search site then using the inbuilt features to add it in. Now firefox does go through phases of forgetting all of your added browsers and defaulting to google every time it gets updated, but it's not done that to me for a while, so I don't mind the odd since searches I've accidentally sent off to google every so often which were fairly innocuous as it goes.
 
I don't know what firefox actually does with data collected by telemetry, but knowing that google is a major source of income, and we don't know the exact specifics of google-firefox deal, I can't be sure that user data is not shared with google.

On that note, just to share something good, I found a new browser based on qt5-webengine (basically same engine as in chrome), developed by trusted person ( Trilby from archlinux community ). The browser is quite minimilastic but can be extended using userscripts. More info can be found here
and here

Weaver: qt6-webengine browser w/ minimal UI / Community Contributions / Arch Linux Forums

bbs.archlinux.org bbs.archlinux.org
 
What do people here make of Epiphany? I only ask because Purism moved to it from Firefox as their default browser in PureOS

Edit: apparently this is AKA GNOME Web?
 
Last edited:
Apparently Epiphany is the old name for Gnome Web, changed in 2012. It's a webkit based browser, which has code from Apple in it but nothing especially smelly. My only complaint is that it's not as easy to extend s firefox is, which I use the strap firefox down and stop it executing or downloading things I don't explicitly want.
 
Only problem with webkit2 based browsers like epiphany is that they don't support every modern website, webkit2 engine lags behind engines like blink( as in chromium) and quantum ( in newer firefox)

levi said:
Apparently Epiphany is the old name for Gnome Web, changed in 2012. It's a webkit based browser, which has code from Apple in it but nothing especially smelly. My only complaint is that it's not as easy to extend s firefox is, which I use the strap firefox down and stop it executing or downloading things I don't explicitly want.
Click to expand...
If you are happy with webkit2, I suggest trying vimb, it is in arch repos.
 
I use umatrix origin. I set it to block everything but pure html then added in first party images and most css (except for advertisers who I block entirely). I disabled the use of suggested permissions and rolled my own. Here for example I needed to enable cookies and it worked for me.

The only complication is the behaviour between umatrix and firefox's own tracker blocking settings, which I set to block everything as well. I generally disable that blocking at about the same time I start enabling scripting on sites.
 
levi said:
I use umatrix origin. I set it to block everything but pure html then added in first party images and most css (except for advertisers who I block entirely). I disabled the use of suggested permissions and rolled my own. Here for example I needed to enable cookies and it worked for me.

The only complication is the behaviour between umatrix and firefox's own tracker blocking settings, which I set to block everything as well. I generally disable that blocking at about the same time I start enabling scripting on sites.
Click to expand...

The problem is, the more anti tracking you use the more unique your browser fingerprint becomes.
So either way you're screwed.
 
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