41–50 of 146 posts
Are there any $200 laptops like this one but x86 powered?
An "annoying touchpad" is likely a dealbreaker for me. It's the holy grail for Linux to me and I feel like it's never been solved by anybody but Apple (w/o Linux). That being said, I could exist in the command line most of the time...
I wish the author expanded on what "annoying" meant. Is it not responsive, too big, too small, jerky, etc?
The annoying touchpad doesn't work. It isn't accurate and difficult to click anything with any sort of accuracy. It also activates easily when you are typing.
It's honestly the biggest issue with the laptop and the primary reason why I stopped using it after a few days. I might give it another go with a different keyboard layout and disabling the touchpad. The screen and case are great. The keyboard I have is meh, but not too different from a mid-grade Chromebook.
Seeing all that empty internal space makes me wonder if they couldn't increase the device's appeal by fitting it with a bigger battery. 8-10 hours of charge time is good, but a $200 laptop that could go for (say) 20 or 30 hours on a charge would really turn heads. I suppose it's possible that would require some kind of custom battery, and this is just the most appropriate battery for this enclosure they could get off…
From the technical specs it looks like it is powered via a 5V port: "Barrel Power (5V 3A) Port" That would mean that you could plug in a battery powered portable USB charger (power bank) to increase its capacity perhaps. If 10000mAh at 5V gets you 8 hours then you you could easily extend the capacity with a couple power banks.
The Surface Pro X did not take off, but I suspect that's a combination of ARM not being competitive at the high end and needing a friendlier ecosystem. ARM might do a bit better once larger core designs and denser process nodes (RK3399 is 28nm!) filter down to lower-priced devices and there's great software to run, like a refined Windows/ARM or Chrome OS w/Android or something else.
(I've been hoping for ARM to make inroads into Serious Computers for some time, so who knows, but it does seem successful in lower-end Chromebooks, and Amazon and MS are publicly experimenting with it, so...)
An "annoying touchpad" is likely a dealbreaker for me. It's the holy grail for Linux to me and I feel like it's never been solved by anybody but Apple (w/o Linux). That being said, I could exist in the command line most of the time...
I wish the author expanded on what "annoying" meant. Is it not responsive, too big, too small, jerky, etc?
I haven't bothered checking TFA's complaints about Debian packaging, but npm certainly is available for arm. $ uname -m -p -i aarch64 aarch64 aarch64 $ npm --version 6.13.6
Enjoyed the article. Thanks for write up. 4GB RAM sounds terrible even for browsing and basic tasks. I'm looking to switching to one of those devices in future, so far on trusted Thinkpad x230 (no FHD, $150 USD) for travel purposes. Can anyone comment on "no NPM yet that I know of though" ? Does node development work normally ?
Is 4GB considered too little under Windows these days?
An "annoying touchpad" is likely a dealbreaker for me. It's the holy grail for Linux to me and I feel like it's never been solved by anybody but Apple (w/o Linux). That being said, I could exist in the command line most of the time...
I wish the author expanded on what "annoying" meant. Is it not responsive, too big, too small, jerky, etc?
This is a tad tangential but has anyone done extensive software development using an ARM device? I was able to get pretty far with a rooted Samsung tablet running Debian in a container (C++ development works great, you can install stuff like VSCode and Clang without too much trouble) but when it came to anything mobile, ironically it all fell apart because the Android toolchain isn't built for ARM64 (save the one in…
Now, there are some CPU differences here. 3399 has 2 A72 cores at 2GHz and 4 A53 cores at 1.5GHz. The pi 4 can be overclocked to 1.8-2GHz pretty easily which makes it about as fast. I believe the Pi 4 GPU is slower, but it's mostly not relevant for dev work. When Ubuntu finishes working out the bugs with their 64-bit OS, it should offer another big speedup. That is probably enough to boost JS performance (and general system performance) high enough to not feel especially painful.