jcarax

joined 1 year ago
[–] jcarax@beehaw.org 1 points 2 months ago

Honestly, I never really use it untethered enough to give you a good answer. But I can say that notebookcheck's battery tests are pretty good, and they test enough laptops to compare well across a large number of models and generations.

[–] jcarax@beehaw.org 3 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I'd say if you get a Ryzen, yeah. I have a P14s gen4 AMD that I use for my primary machine, and game on successfully. But I also have an old T14s gen1 AMD that work let me keep when I got refreshed. Right now I have Windows on it, to play some games that don't work well in Proton, but it works fine in Linux as well.

If you can swing it, the T14s gen3 with a Ryzen 7 6850u was a truly excellent machine, it's what I have for work right now. But we won't see it coming off lease for another couple years, so it's a bit early for good prices on the used market.

[–] jcarax@beehaw.org 2 points 2 months ago

Just grab a 3-4 year old 13" business class laptop, like a Thinkpad X13. When they come off lease at 3-4 years, they hit the used market at pretty great prices. Some are in rough shape, but use trusted sellers who sell at reasonable volume, and their condition grading tends to be pretty reliable.

Be careful about upgradable RAM, or getting at least 16GB. It sounds like you'd be fine with 8GB for now, but 16GB will get you better life out of the machine.

You may want to replace the SSD straight away, depending on the write cycles. I'd probably just grab one with 256GB, and get a replacement straight away. Lenovo has all their hardware maintenance manuals online, to make checking compatibility and performing the upgrade pretty easy.

[–] jcarax@beehaw.org 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Hopefully they plan to stabilize what they see as core functionality, and then build out features. Some people won't consider it ready until this or that feature is added, but many of us who just want a WM+ can start using it once it's relatively stable.

[–] jcarax@beehaw.org 1 points 3 months ago

Yeah, as a Graphene user, there simply aren't any other options. I could switch to Calyx or e/OS, but none of the phones they support are really worth it.

Unless I decide I need whatever satellite SMS support Google brings with the 9 (I live very remote, and rely on wifi calling 95% of the time), I'll probably target the Pixel 11. My Pixel 8 should be fine until then, and I imagine they'll work through most of the issues their first fully in house SoC has in the Pixel 10.

And hey, maybe they'll decide to make the regular small Pixel smaller than the small Pixel Pro, by then.

[–] jcarax@beehaw.org 2 points 4 months ago

Instructions unclear, YouTube Messages begins active development.

[–] jcarax@beehaw.org 2 points 4 months ago

If you add the Calyx repository to F-droid, you can install their shim that will allow you to use a different gallery app.

[–] jcarax@beehaw.org 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

So you're paying $19 for 1GB and unlimited text/voice, plus another $15 most months for overages?

You can get 2GB with unlimited text/voice for $10/mo or $96/yr ($8/mo paid upfront) through US Mobile. You get your choice of Verizon, T-Mobile, or I believe they're adding AT&T very soon. You can add a rollable GB for $2 a pop, but I'm not 100% sure you can if you pay up front for a year of the $8/mo price.

They also have a 10GB and unlimited plans for less than you're paying, if I'm understanding your statements correctly.

[–] jcarax@beehaw.org 1 points 4 months ago

We're not on the right track for much of anything.

[–] jcarax@beehaw.org 1 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Sure, but that's irrelevant to the point being made.

That said, I'd love to have expandable storage. Functionality out of the box aside, we need to start taking e-waste seriously, and upgradability is a major part of that along with long term software support, durability, and repairability.

[–] jcarax@beehaw.org 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Ok, but you're still dealing with the guest desktop as a windowed container. Unity mode in VMware presents individual windows to the desktop environment, not the entire desktop.

https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-Workstation-Pro/17/com.vmware.ws.using.doc/GUID-8C477788-7700-4030-8C4A-039C02AABB74.html

Things like Distrobox will obviously be better for most Linux on Linux workloads, but for BSD or Windows, it's pretty damned cool.

[–] jcarax@beehaw.org 1 points 4 months ago (2 children)

But they don't break windows from within the guest, into the host desktop environment. You see the entire desktop as a container.

 

I got the 21K5001JUS, which has the R7 Pro 7840u, 64GB LPDDR5x 6400, and OLED 2880x1800. Ordered it August 20th, shipped expedited on September 1st, and arrived in the upper Midwest this afternoon, September 5th.

I updated to the latest Windows 11 Pro patches, no Lenovo updates in the Vantage software. My first impressions were:

  1. The fan spins up and gets quite loud when installing Windows updates, but not nearly as loud as my P52s. Substantially louder than my T14s gen 1 AMD. Unfortunately I don't have my T14s gen 3 AMD just yet, I'm not sure of an ETA on that yet.
  2. The OLED scaled to 1.5x really doesn't bother me. I think it's well worth the absence of backlight quality issues, and IPS glow. We'll see once I get into assessing battery life, especially coming from an M1 MBA for personal use.

It feels a little less premium than the T14s gen 1, with a little bit of flex in the lid and wrist rest. But it's crazy how far we've come since my T450s, which is like a workstation by today's size and weight standards.

Running Prime 95 with 8 cores and SMT, the fan can get a good bit louder than I would prefer, and than I would expect the T14s gen 4 will. But running GeekBench on Best Performance profile in Windows, the fan does spin up but is nearly silent.

In my experience of years with Thinkpads, especially the P52s, I expect the fan noise to be much less aggressive in Linux. I'll be assessing that next in Fedora 38, with and without a Windows VM running. Then, before truly assessing if I'm going to keep this or trade it in for a T14s gen 4 AMD with less RAM (opting against the VM workload), I'll do the same in Arch with the latest kernel and such.

Here are my GeekBench scores:

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