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Cake day: April 26th, 2025

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  • you’re running way too old a distro for what you want. debian 12 has its merits as a server, you install it and leave it be and it just works.

    what you want - fluidity with power management, dock/undock, etc - although achievable with tweaking this and that isn’t being worked on, not on X, not on debian 12, so it’s not like those things will eventually get there. so you need a semi-modern distro, like ubuntu or fedora or even trixie.

    wayland isn’t new, it’s default on a lot of distros since 2021 or so, so you can be sure that your use case was previosly met and solved. costs you nothing to boot e.g. F42 off a USB and try it out (has to be 42 as earlier live sessions default to X11). if you have lots of RAM, add the rd.live.ram switch so it copies the image to RAM and everything is super-snappy for testing and it doesn’t touch your SSD.




  • we had the centralised model (big corpos hosting all of the stuff) because our devices were shit and internet access was rare and precious. nowadays, with ever-present internet, when my $50 pocket computer has 8 cores and 8 GB RAM, the laptop many times that, let alone the desktop, we should be moving to Pied Piper’s vision of a decentralised internet and dedicate all of our resources to that goal.

    I’ve been a part of the fediverse some while now and I admit, I didn’t understand it fully. I operated under the premise that whoever put this thing together and then spent their time and energy promoting it has thought this through and then seeing more and more people jumping on, I took it as validation of that idea.

    a few years down the road, I have a better understanding, and I don’t really like it. it’s wasteful and disorganized and I don’t see a way where some order out of this chaos emerges.

    I thought it’s a sort of fail-over distribution of content. so if lemmy.bing is offline/gone, you can interact with lemmy.ding or lemmy.bong and access all data and post and comment and whatnot. not so, when ding is gone, it’s gone. its radiated content may be present on other instances, but still there’s a ton of issues that way.

    instead, I believe a decentralised and distributed system, with no single point of failure, no admins spending their hard earned cash on maintaining lemmy or mastodon instances or, god forbid, dedicated hardware in the vein of i2p or similar, should be the end goal.


  • raspberries were viable while those were cheap. I think I got a 3b (plus?) in pre-deficit years for like $25 second-hand AND I got some shitty case AND a microSD card AND it could run off of a somewhat normal USB phone charger. so using those instead of a 10 year old decommissioned desktop was an awesome value proposition.

    nowadays, those devices are encroaching on trip-digits territory and the power adapter is like $30. the computing power you can buy for a third of that designates raspberries exclusively for niche use cases where footprint and power consumption are primary considerations.

    not to mention fake Jason Statham just rubs me the wrong way, like all them “visionaries”. he makes this sound like he’s the head of Feed Africa or something, on a noble mission to save humanity and whatnot.


  • buncha clowns ITT laughing at a dude trying to swim for the first time. OMG how does he not know how to X and Y lolz why don’t you flatpak bust a cap in they ass…

    this was an exceptionally excellent writeup especially with the “day 7: can’t do thing. day 10: here’s how to do thing” from the perspective of someone who used windows for ever and invariably looks at the thing from that point of view. dude pulled of transitioning a laptop with a buncha esoteric peripherals and an nvidia desktop and made almost everything work!

    also, major ups for using the single most excellent solution for beginners, Ubuntu, and not getting lost in “no true scotsman” garudas and arches and atomic thisandthats.




  • every mobile device I ever owned is encrypted and protected with a reasonably secure pass-phrase so losing it is no big deal. it is conceivable someone could forensic the shit out of my setup but that is highly unlikely; it’s far more likely it’ll get wiped and sold or parted out.

    I’ve done no benchmarks but I haven’t experienced any issues ever. the oldest linux device I own is a 2011 MBP (i7-2635qm, so quadcore) and I don’t perceive any speed degradation; it’s possible 1st gen Core i5/i7 could have issues as those don’t have AES-NI in hardware or sumsuch plus they’re SATA2 only, but those would be 15+ years old at this point.

    with btrfs that has on-the-fly compression, copy-on-write, and deduping, everything works seamlessly, even when I have database-spanking applications in local development.

    so the only thing I’ve changed recently is encrypting every device I have, not just the mobile ones. the standalone devices get unlocked with a key-file from the local filesystem so they boot without the prompt. selling/giving away any of those drives, mechanical or SSD, is now a non-issue.






  • those things were designed to run off mechanical drives. so whatever you fit it with will be screaming fast. the bottlenecks you’re concerned with arise with workstation-class machines with fully implemented PCI lanes and such, which are pretty rare in laptops. HMBs also require a beefier CPU as all that buffering introduces overhead; not noticeable on a 6-core Ryzen, noticeable on a dual-core decade-old i5.

    summarum: whatever SATA SSD you fit it with is more than adequate. obviously, don’t go with no-name “brands”. also, save yourself the bother and don’t dick around with adapters, just fit a regular SATA 2.5" SSD in there.


  • skip the T470, T480 with 8xxxu cpu is the lowest you should go; the hardware is practically identical (and interchangeable!) but the CPU is a huge difference. also if you find them for cheap, there’s T490 (refresh), T495 (AMD Ryzen), and T14 (newer variants of the T4xx series with Intel and AMD CPUs).

    the 12" version would be the X280, again single-channel RAM only. in the 12" space you also have Dell Latitude 7290/7200 (just the latitude series, no inspirons and friends) as well as HP Elitebook 820 (and 830) with 8xxx and newer CPUs. Elitebooks and Latitudes are Thinkpad T-series equivalents with similar build quality and features.


  • T480 can take 64 GB (2x 32 GB); no idea if more is possible. I imagine newer models could but I struggle to remember seeing 64 GB SO-DIMMs… P15 can fit four sticks so that should be possible, but them things have beefy CPUs, are rather large, and also have Nvidia graphics so dunno how low-power you can make those.

    you’re kinda outside of the intersection of cheap and still capable with that spec. do make a write-up if you succeed, that sounds interesting.


  • I’m referring to semi-modern laptops you’re most likely to get out of some corporation’s dump of obsolete tech, but that’s still usable - let’s say T480 and onward. you can retrofit those with tons of RAM, cheap storage, they have capable quad-cores, etc. you can get something like a T14 Ryzen 6-core with 32 GB RAM and a 1 TB SSD in the $200 region, if you do everything yourself.

    everything before that is proper old tech, with predominantly anemic dual-cores (the ones you mention have single-channel RAM) and as such are a fun tinkering project, similar to the cyber deck projects - costs a lot of money, doesn’t do much. on the other side of that fence are power-hungry haswells and friends that can’t be wrangled into single-digit Watt/Hour territory however hard you tried.

    so if you get one of those for free, or close to it, and you have parts laying around, by all means - this is as close you can get to the bespoke PC build in the laptop world. but ixnay on bying a decade old laptop for work and/or education.

    edit:

    X260 vs T14, negligible size difference