Earlier quoted context omitted.
But there must be some with 32bit support?
Debian still supports 32 bit for the latest version and there are several small distros that are explicitly aimed at 32 bit.
Seems like Debian is all one would ever need.
I stopped buying new laptops (2020)
471–480 of 551 posts
Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)
#472Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yup. I have two working t420s (t420s is thinner than t420 and I think puts it in the realm of "acceptable" in modern standards. T420 I find is mostly a stationary laptop). They run upgraded ssd drives and ram. I also recently stocked up on 3 used t480 as it's the last generation with easily removable battery as well as drive and memory. Those should last me a while! My primary daily driver is the 6 year old t25 - bas…
Most of the newer business class laptops I've seen just have a few screws to pull the back panel and replace the battery. It takes about 5-10 minutes.
The T480 and older have two batteries; one fixed internal and one removable external. It transparently switches between them, so you can hot-swap the external with out any interruption. Fantastic feature!
Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)
#473Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve got a framework 13, and am in the “I wish I just bought the MacBook Air” camp. The battery life is terrible, the speakers are terrible, the thermals are terrible. It may be thin and light, but the different levels of R&D really show.
FWIW, I'm a recent owner of a Framework Laptop 13, 13th gen 1370p. I am extremely happy with it. w/regards to battery life, I'm doing ~4.5watts idling/text-editing, screen on, wifi on. That is more efficient that I got out of my 5850u I had before this. I get about 9ish hours of battery life. You do need to run things like thermald, tlp and set the lower tdp setting in the bios (max battery setting lowers the tdp afa…
We’re talking about 9 hours with a lot of faffing here. The M2 MBA hits 15-18 hours real world. The FW feels like a laptop from 7 years ago to me.
Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)
#474Earlier quoted context omitted.
So you're saying my neighbors and I should feel fine throwing old car batteries in the lake and switching back to leaded gas?
I'm saying that lakes don't get saved when people virtuously choose to individually stop throwing trash into it: they get saved when the entity in control of the lake forbids throwing trash into them, and enforces that ban. If leaded gas was still being legally sold alongside unleaded one, people like you would be passionately arguing for decades about why it's everyone's moral duty to pay extra for unleaded gas, and…
So your stance is feel free to keep doing things you know is overall bad for society until we bother passing a law and pushing enforcement to eliminate the activity?
I don't know about you, but if pumps had leaded gas and unleaded gas, I'd still be going for the unleaded every time along with trying to lobby for change. I'd absolutely be telling everyone I know not to use the leaded gas and try and change everyone around me to get rid of it. I would not just shrug and say "lots of other people are using leaded gas, I might as well as well, my use doesn't matter!" Meanwhile I guess your stance is to just use the leaded gas despite knowing how bad it is and telling everyone else to keep using it anyways until they finally tear the pumps out of the ground.
It's people thinking "my use doesn't really matter!" that is massive problem. Imagine how much easier things would be if people just did the right thing instead of assuming their actions don't matter.
Each rain drop isn't much water, they don't really matter. Yet floods destroy cities. Where does the flood come from?
Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)
#475For a lot if what I do, the CPU on an older laptop is just fine. So, I too use really old laptops. That said, I am upgrading laptops that sold with 2 - 4 GB of RAM to 16 GB, or at least 8 GB. Often I am replacing on old HDD ( maybe as slow as 5400 RPM ) with a faster SSD. That SSD also juices the battery life. So, what I am using is a lot nicer than what the original owner had to deal with. Many laptops today will no…
Compute power has never been an issue for me, but I generally try to max out the RAM as much as my budget allows. This is why I still have a 2010 Macbook that is more than fine. Started with 4GB and was barely usable for heavier even when it came out, but dropping 16GB into and it has been smooth sailing for over a decade now. That said my daily runner is now T420 from (2011-ish) that came with 6GB of RAM that is in…
> I swapped the HDD for an SSD and just threw Linux Mint on here - I disable the swap file so that it doesn't hammer the drive.
If that's for the longevity of the drive, I don't think that's really even necessary on a personal device, based on my limited experience. Unless you're aiming for a lifespan measured in decades or would expect to be swapping heavily if you had swap.
I have a basic consumer-grade Samsung 850 EVO SSD that I've been using daily in my laptop since ~2015 or 2016 or so. I've had zero problems with write performance so far, and the SSD reports a wear leveling count of ~140 which seems to indicate the (average?) number of writes per block so far. That value normalizes to a SMART value of 93 out of 100. While SMART may not be much of a reliable indicator of anything, if the number of blocks written is anywhere near realistic, that value seems to make approximate sense if TLC NAND lifetime expectancy is rated at ~1000 writes per block.
Samsung also seems to have a warranty of up to 5 years or 150 TB written for this SSD (depends on drive capacity). The drive reports a total of 23.7 TB written so far.
I haven't been doing a lot of data-heavy work on the device but I haven't really been particularly careful with the SSD either. I've got a swap that's seen some actual use (8 GB RAM), and I also hibernate semi-regularly. I've been trying to keep at least ~15 percent of the capacity free to help with wear leveling but that's about the only conserving I've been doing.
Of course it might be that my drive is just waiting to suddenly start failing writes but I'm not really expecting that.
And your disabling swap might be for some other reason, of course.
But if this is par for the course for consumer-grade SSDs in general, I wouldn't really be worried about the effects of swapping on life spans unless there's some particularly heavy hammering planned.
Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)
#476Earlier quoted context omitted.
18 hours advertised is usually running a locally stored video file on loop at medium to low screen brightness and some light web browsing. My 18-hour laptop is more like 8-10 hours of real work usage, which is still fantastic compared to the 2-3 hours I would get at similar tasks 6-7 years ago. Another big change is improvements to sleep and standby time. I can use half the battery, close the lid, and be reasonably c…
> My 18-hour laptop is more like 8-10 hours of real work usage, which is still fantastic compared to the 2-3 hours I would get at similar tasks 6-7 years ago. I’m not sure if you’re using an M1/2 MacBook but if you’re using windows laptops - 2 to 3 hours is pretty poor even for an old laptop (assuming it didn’t have an H series processor which is a whole another story). My (dad’s) HP Probook with its 6th gen i5 proce…
I’m comparing my experience with Macbooks with M1/M2 Max vs Dell XPS with Intel H-series and DGPUs.
Back in 2017-2019 3 hours of battery with visual studio, docker, etc. running was pretty standard for those as I remember it.
Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)
#477Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Linux is fantastic on older hardware I've been having a hard time getting Linux to work on older hardware ever since the majority of distros dropped 32-bit builds. Then again, "older" for me means stuff from the Pentium through the Pentium 4 era. Seeing as "older" today means Sandy Bridge and the like, the moral of this little tale is I am a fucking old man angry at the kids on my lawn.
But there must be some with 32bit support?
Slackware (http://www.slackware.com/) also still provides a 32-bit version as well.
Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)
#478ThinkPads are absolutely magic. Here's one I built for travelling: https://maxrozen.com/replacing-my-macbook-m1-with-thinkpad-t...
Which websites or store in Europe and UK would you suggest to get refurbished laptops and mobiles?
Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)
#479Earlier quoted context omitted.
The tradeoff is that the Framework's battery life is garbage . I had laptops a decade ago with 2x the battery life. I'm lucky to get 3 hours of battery doing web browsing, and standby/hibernate on the Intel processor in it is so bad that it'll fully discharge in less than 12 hours doing literally nothing. I really want to like it, but my Framework is literally a worse user experience than my old 2016 Macbook Air and…
Yeah, I'm with you on the battery life. Though I don't understand where you get the 12-hour figure for a full discharge while in suspend. In that time period I lose about 20%. (If you're running Linux, try changing from 's2idle' to 'deep' sleep; not sure if it's possible to change this on Windows.) The thermals are indeed terrible. My 12th-gen has this issue where it will sometimes overheat, and the firmware will loc…
Are you experiencing degraded performance when running on battery or is it happening at all times?
You might want to look into BDProcHot throttling.
I returned a HP laptop because of this crap.
Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)
#480Earlier quoted context omitted.
That soldered ram is indeed a killer, and the transition can be quite sudden. We have a 2014 macbook air with 4gb of soldered ram, and my kid was fine using it for office and browsing, until at one point he suddenly wasn’t. The ram footprint of that software together with macOS updates passed some threshold where it just became too slow, so now he’s using one of my other old laptops, a windows machine with an even sl…
Unfortunately soldered RAM consumes less energy and space.
Waiting for the data to be swapped in consumes more energy.