Nex Dock 2, turn your SBC into a laptop

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I think this shipped Mar 1st but for anyone who missed it… (like me)

It turns a phone or SBC into a 1080p laptop accepting HDMI or USB-C* to display to the screen.

*If your device supports DisplayPort over USB-C.

Site: https://nexdock.com/
ETA Prime Review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZbEwWcO1hE

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Cool project :grinning: So many thought are colliding in my head now… :sweat_smile:

Would be a nice cheap pairing with a Pi 4. I know there’s the Pinebook Pro but it’s only available with a qwerty keyboard which is a no go for me.

I also read a test of the Huawei P40 the other day and it would be a nice pairing too :thinking: it would get perfect with another OS than Android.

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I believe the Pinebook Pro has both ANSI and ISO keyboard variants.

https://www.pine64.org/pinebook-pro/

Personally i’d pair the dock with a rockpro64 board which I think is the SBC version of the Pinebook Pro. It’s way more performant then a RasPi 4 but it’ll cost a bit more.

ROCKPro64 | PINE64

This may help your decision… i’ve been playing around with both Rasbian and Armbian this month and there’s zero competition. Rasbian (for the RasPi) is superb for ultra fast flash-n-go prototyping but falls apart as a general use desktop. It gets out of it’s comfort zone pretty quick when you start applying basic layers of OS security that are defaults on most distros and there’s a lot of quirkiness like out of the box WebRTC is broken on Firefox-ESR (before and after dist-upgrade) but Raspbian handles it fine and i’ve had no luck fixing the RasPi problem in Web searches. Probably because only crazy people use it as a desktop. :stuck_out_tongue:

Armbian however has a more traditional setup but it’s a true general use desktop experience which i’ve loved so far, i’m even flirting with the idea of testing it out as my main. Armbian doesn’t support RasPi and Rasbian doesn’t support Pine64 products though so it’s worth factoring that into the decision.

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The Pinebook has a ISO keyboard option but it’s a UK qwerty and I need a french azerty. I tried to work with a qwerty before and with the french accented letters it’s quite hard :crazy_face:

I was thinking about the Pi because I have already one for LibreElec and I’m already thinking of trying stuff on it like Ubuntu :shushing_face:

The more I think about the New Dock, the more I think a great smartphone running a linux would be ideal for me. Guess I’ll have to wait a little longer :slightly_smiling_face:

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I’ll admit I can be pretty conservative with wanting official support. Sounds like good project!