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Linux on the Fujitsu Lifebook U729

borretti.me

71–80 of 173 posts

Re: Linux on the Fujitsu Lifebook U729

#71
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Things I learned to look out for: Don't buy any recent Intels. Some Intel ThinkPads have accelerometers built-in just to throttle your PC to oblivion when it moves. Basically unusable in any moving vehicle such as a train. It's basically anti-portability baked-in. When it doesn't throttle, it just has abysmal battery life compared to AMD Ryzen ThinkPads of the same generation. Both lose horribly to Apple's ARM chip…

ThinkPads used to have accelerometers to protect the hard drives, so if you dropped the machine or treated it roughly, it could park the drive, protecting it from data loss. People used to write Linux utilities that read these accelerometers, allowing for example to switch virtual desktops by physically smacking the machine on either side.

That’s horrifying.

Re: Linux on the Fujitsu Lifebook U729

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can buy refurb M1s for $379 at Walmart.

Has a proprietary bootloader that Apple can lock in an OTA update. Also doesn't support Linux as well as Intel or AMD chipsets, unfortunately.

i don't think either of those is really true?

https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/open-os-interop/

Re: Linux on the Fujitsu Lifebook U729

#73
post #71
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ThinkPads used to have accelerometers to protect the hard drives, so if you dropped the machine or treated it roughly, it could park the drive, protecting it from data loss. People used to write Linux utilities that read these accelerometers, allowing for example to switch virtual desktops by physically smacking the machine on either side.

That’s horrifying.

i think these also existed for macs with HDDs, i recall seeing some very fun demos on youtube

Re: Linux on the Fujitsu Lifebook U729

#74
post #59
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14 has a M2 equivalent ARM CPU/GPU (Mediatek Kompanio Ultra/Mali Immortalis G925), and comes with an arm64 Linux VM (Debian Bookworm) ready to go out of the box that supports most regular Linux apps built for ARM (including VSCode, Cursor, Claude code, etc). I use it for my software development daily driver. Battery life is amazing as you'd expect. I've even run local LLMs and have gotten 30…

"If ChromeOS's Linux VM doesn't suit you, you can replace ChromeOS with Linux with a bit of work:" "Installing ubuntu on arm laptops is usually not easy, and the GPU drivers are unavailable in most cases (so, the performance is not great unless you use XFCE/LXDE/LxQt)" I do like to use the GPU, though.

The built-in Linux VM supports the GPU (you can enable it in chrome:flags), and Linux GUI apps work fine.

Re: Linux on the Fujitsu Lifebook U729

#75
post #48

It's kinda old though

Is that necessarily a bad thing? I have older laptops than the U729 that still see some use. If you're not locally compiling a big codebase, running some AI/LLM thing, playing GPU-intensive games, etc., you really don't need much.

Re: Linux on the Fujitsu Lifebook U729

#76
post #71
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ThinkPads used to have accelerometers to protect the hard drives, so if you dropped the machine or treated it roughly, it could park the drive, protecting it from data loss. People used to write Linux utilities that read these accelerometers, allowing for example to switch virtual desktops by physically smacking the machine on either side.

That’s horrifying.

Look, my setup works for me.

Re: Linux on the Fujitsu Lifebook U729

#77
post #71
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ThinkPads used to have accelerometers to protect the hard drives, so if you dropped the machine or treated it roughly, it could park the drive, protecting it from data loss. People used to write Linux utilities that read these accelerometers, allowing for example to switch virtual desktops by physically smacking the machine on either side.

That’s horrifying.

HDAPs

Hard drive active protection system parked the heads in Ms, fast enough to handle a hard drop off a desk

Re: Linux on the Fujitsu Lifebook U729

#78

If you want portability on something premium, I can't recommend enough the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7. Specwise I've got the one with the Core ultra 5 125h. It also has an option with the 155h, but it battery and thermals can take a hit that I don't think it's worth it. It's got 16gb spread across 8x2gb modules and 512gb of ssd, both soldered, both extremely fast. Build quality that rivals MacBooks, but with superior keyboar…

Do you know what the oled screen resolution is on your device? One of my family members has what I believe is the same laptop, and while I appreciate the build quality, the OLED clearly isn't RGB (in its subpixel arrangement - or some other such major aspect), because the 1080p screen looks so bad for text I initially thought it was broken.

1920x1200

It's awesome for text though. The only issue I found was the overblown reds.

Re: Linux on the Fujitsu Lifebook U729

#79

If you want portability on something premium, I can't recommend enough the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7. Specwise I've got the one with the Core ultra 5 125h. It also has an option with the 155h, but it battery and thermals can take a hit that I don't think it's worth it. It's got 16gb spread across 8x2gb modules and 512gb of ssd, both soldered, both extremely fast. Build quality that rivals MacBooks, but with superior keyboar…

16gigs soldered seems like obsolete on arrival for a windows PC.

I briefly owned a Slim 7 32gigs but sold it because it felt too heavy for a 14incher. Got an M1 instead.

Re: Linux on the Fujitsu Lifebook U729

#80

In my opinion, touching anything made by Fujitsu is not ethical. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal

I would say buying used Fujitsu from a third party seller is still better than letting it become e-waste. It's not like Fujitsu is getting any of that money.
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