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Thinkpad X210

geoff.greer.fm

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Re: Thinkpad X210

#261

Post by villedepommes »

manmal wrote: post #224
ggreer wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't lie about battery life numbers. People like to say, "I get 9 hours of battery life." when they mean that they get 9 hours if they do doing nothing but let their computer idle with the brightness at minimum. 4 hours with a 55Wh battery is an average consumption of 13 watts. That's because my typical workflow involves running a VM containing cassandra & postrgres (among other services) and recompiling go and ja…

Having a MacBook Pro Late 2016, I can only dream of 4h battery life with the workload you describe. It has a bigger screen though.

My work laptop is a mbp 2018 (i9, 32GB). The battery life is abysmal. I typically get a little bit over 2 hours. I'm not going to lie though: I'm always running Atom or VSCode and there's lots of opened tabs in Chrome.

Re: Thinkpad X210

#262

Post by mbell »

saagarjha wrote: post #6

> Battery life is a little over 4 hours with the flush battery (55Wh) and 6-7 hours with the extended battery (80Wh). Not going to lie, that’s pretty horrible. > Battery life would increase by 50% if I got PC6 or PC8 idle states. The fan only turns on if I’m doing something intensive like compiling go or scrolling in Slack. lol. One of the things that really drives me nuts is my computer’s fan turning on when I know…

If your fan is spinning up when scrolling in Slack it's likely an indication that Electron (Chrome) is refusing to use the GPU for rendering acceleration. This is likely either due to a driver issue or the driver/gpu being on chrome's blacklist. I had this problem once on a hackintosh and as I recall starting Slack from a terminal with the `--ignore-gpu-blacklist` option fixed it.

Re: Thinkpad X210

#263

Post by opan »

hopler wrote: post #98
ekianjo wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A standard form-factor means components would be re-usable between upgrades We don't even have to go that far. Just ensuring that laptops can be serviced by their own users would go a long way to reduce e-waste. i.e. not soldering RAM chips to the motherboard, making it feasible to remove every single part (not gluing the keyboard to the MB for example), etc... instead of pursuing an ever thinner laptop design, whi…

Consumers prefer super-thin soldered machines, sadly. The proof is in the shopping.

It makes sense to think this when looking at modern consumer tech, but I haven't met people who actually want that sort of thing. It always seems like people are having to settle.

Re: Thinkpad X210

#264

Post by linguae »

epanchin wrote: post #152
hopler wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consumers prefer super-thin soldered machines, sadly. The proof is in the shopping.

Has Apple offered an upgrade able laptop alongside a non-upgradeable one? Would be possible to draw that conclusion if they sold a new style MacBook Pro alongside an older style one with similar specs.

Yes. Between 2012 and 2016, Apple sold a version of the 2008-2012 unibody MacBook Pro that had an optical drive and upgradeable RAM, while simultaneously offering the Retina MacBook Pro, the first to solder the RAM to the motherboard. Arguably from a specifications standpoint the Retina MacBook Pro was the superior model due to its high-resolution display and its use of a fast proprietary flash drive (replaced with standard NVMe in later versions) instead of slower SATA flash drives. Eventually the unibody MacBook Pro would get long in the tooth due to lack of updates compared to Apple's annually-updated Retina MacBook Pro models, but it was still sold until it was quietly discontinued in 2016 upon the announcement of the controversial touchbar MacBook Pro.

Re: Thinkpad X210

#265

Post by admax88q »

jjeaff wrote: post #259
emiliosic wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My office decided to move from Jabber (Pidgin / Adium) to Slack. Much of the office upgraded computers. Whether Jabber is negligible, Slack used más two to three Gb RAM. It’s simply the most inefficient software I have to Tun continuously on that PC

They have raised so much money and have so many engineers. Is performance of their app so low priority that no one is working on that?

They have too many engineers to make a small efficient program.

Re: Thinkpad X210

#266

Post by SteveNuts »

jjeaff wrote: post #259
emiliosic wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My office decided to move from Jabber (Pidgin / Adium) to Slack. Much of the office upgraded computers. Whether Jabber is negligible, Slack used más two to three Gb RAM. It’s simply the most inefficient software I have to Tun continuously on that PC

They have raised so much money and have so many engineers. Is performance of their app so low priority that no one is working on that?

Their priority was probably shipping a cross-platform app as quickly as possible and gaining adoption. My hunch is they will eventually make native apps for Windows and Mac and drop Linux support.

Re: Thinkpad X210

#267

Post by admax88q »

mbell wrote: post #262
saagarjha wrote: post #6

> Battery life is a little over 4 hours with the flush battery (55Wh) and 6-7 hours with the extended battery (80Wh). Not going to lie, that’s pretty horrible. > Battery life would increase by 50% if I got PC6 or PC8 idle states. The fan only turns on if I’m doing something intensive like compiling go or scrolling in Slack. lol. One of the things that really drives me nuts is my computer’s fan turning on when I know…

If your fan is spinning up when scrolling in Slack it's likely an indication that Electron (Chrome) is refusing to use the GPU for rendering acceleration. This is likely either due to a driver issue or the driver/gpu being on chrome's blacklist. I had this problem once on a hackintosh and as I recall starting Slack from a terminal with the `--ignore-gpu-blacklist` option fixed it.

Why should I need GPU acceleration to read irc messages.

Re: Thinkpad X210

#268

Post by mjg59 »

saagarjha wrote: post #6

> Battery life is a little over 4 hours with the flush battery (55Wh) and 6-7 hours with the extended battery (80Wh). Not going to lie, that’s pretty horrible. > Battery life would increase by 50% if I got PC6 or PC8 idle states. The fan only turns on if I’m doing something intensive like compiling go or scrolling in Slack. lol. One of the things that really drives me nuts is my computer’s fan turning on when I know…

>Not going to lie, that’s pretty horrible.

The stock firmware is, uh, not good. I ported Coreboot to the second batch boards (https://github.com/mjg59/coreboot/tree/X210_good ) and things improved significantly - I wrote it up at https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/50924.html

Re: Thinkpad X210

#269

Post by EdgarVerona »

I'm sold on 3:2 aspect ratio, and wish there was a wider variety of modern laptops available possessing that screen ratio. I hate looking for laptops and finding the only ones with reasonable specs to have widescreen aspect ratios. I feel noticeably constrained using them for anything other than playing games and watching videos.

Re: Thinkpad X210

#270

Post by firmgently »

GordonS wrote: post #119

Is anyone happy coding on such a small screen, even if it is high-res? I have a 2016 13" MBP, and find the screen too small for coding. It's high-res, but that means everything is super-small unless you increase the scaling, which of course reduces the available screen real estate. The screen is annoyingly reflective too, but that's another problem entirely. My daily driver is a 15" HP Zbook G3 with a 1080p display,…

I moved to a 10.1" display as a winter (low power) necessity. There's more sun now so I have enough power for my larger laptop but am not using it, I prefer the ergonomics of my current setup.

My tablet is on an arm suspended at eye height about 15-20cm away from my face. At the same time I can have my ThinkPad BlueTooth keyboard+trackpoint in an ergonomically sound position (not possible to do both of these things solely with a laptop due to the keyboard and display being tied together).

I had a 15.6" laptop display and a ruler within reach so I just measured... at 35-40cm away from my face the visible area of the 15.6" screen is occluded by the visible area of the tablet screen at 15-20 cm away. The aspect ratios are different (my preferred 16:10/1920x1200 on the tablet vs 16:9/1920x1080 on the laptop lcd) but this is roughly correct. Admittedly 35-40cm is probably a little further away than most people have their laptop screen but it's in the ballpark.

I've had setups with multiple/larger monitors in the past. It's hard to compare properly as so much has changed for me. I move towards spending more and more of my time in the terminal and have learned to make good use of tmux for workspace management (and i3 workspaces when I'm using a WM). I don't miss the multiple/larger monitors (but am not suggesting anybody should be the same as me).

I can say that this is my favourite of my personally-owned setups ever, for its lightness, silence, low power usage and minimal space requirements. These requirements of mine are very specific of course but you asked for a subjective measure. I am very happy (and on a 10.1" screen)!

Next time I upgrade I'll be looking for a nice rootable tablet... possibly something x86 which can run linux so I can get VMs to work. I think I'm done with laptops.

[ To repeat stuff I've mentioned here before but which might help make sense of the above:

+ the 'display' is an Android tablet running termux (as it's the fastest and nicest terminal I could find)

+ I just use termux for its terminal and work in Debian Stretch via Linux Deploy

+ Termux is very good on its own but in my experience the best armhf packages are on Debian. I'm comparing to termux and Arch which are all I have experience with - they are both great but I've found some packages to be either missing or had problems due to termux's clang vs gcc... or that Arch uses Armv7 binaries whereas my tablet seems happier with Debian's Armhf in some cases. I specifically had trouble getting a working binary for Chromium which is essential for me as I need the developer tools but achieved it on Debian.

+ I run Debian GUI apps via local XSDL server and/or VNC

+ So far the only thing I've been unable to achieve is VMWare emulation of X86 OSes but as I don't have an X86 CPU in here I can't be surprised about that ]

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