I think that’s more than fair. But then there’s companies like linuxpusher selling laptops at a 100% price markup (refurbished business machines). Also thinkpenguin calls it something else and linuxforlaptops sells it by its real names so looking for parts is easier.

But that is awesome that PCSpecialist did that for you.

Honestly, that laptop is probably better than you’d think. A lot of laptops have really poor performing thermal compounds. Repasting to even when new will improve performance. My personal laptop got repasted and it dropped 10C under load. Mind you this is a 5825u laptop so not much power draw.

Hard agree. Even getting something like a p53s it’s still slower than an m1 base.

Thinkpenguin is just rebranded clevo stuff. Most small company laptops are like that. Everything from system76, to sager, to eluktronics. Basically if you find a laptop you like through a Linux hardware company, maybe find the chassis model and save a bit bc there usually isn’t much different between them. If you play your cards right, you can get software support through another vendor bc they sell the same laptop. (Bios updates etc)

Like the Thinkpenguin t4 is just a clevo nj50.

A new laptop with a dvd drive? Sign me up. Not a fan of the ath9k wireless card (I know why they did it, Ive never had particularly great performance from the one I have, even accounting for the fact that mine is 1x1 )

Now I want to know who makes their hardware.

Edit: it’s a clevo nj50. Well good to know that.

It would not meet OP’s requirements and honestly they are not worth it in this day and age.

Did you get anywhere with this?

820M is Fermi and Kepler. Same with the 810M. As if that makes any fucking sense.

I remembered it being stupid, I didn’t realize it was that stupid.

800M is weird. It’s Fermi, Kepler and Maxwell. You need to look up your specific gpu to see what architecture it uses.

Edit: It’s even stupider than I thought. Some of the 800M series are either Fermi or Kepler. Like the 820M is both. You need to make sure the GPU family is Maxwell or Kepler.

I know there is a surface specific kernel. I wonder if that would work for you.

https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface

I highly doubt it though.

Also if it’s that similar to the surface, maybe something related to the Intel ISP module? Only thing I can think of. All my Intel stuff is ancient and/or properly supported.

Edit: best I can tell, if it’s truly based on surface hardware, the camera issues are due to the intel image processing unit (IPU3). So whatever you’re missing lies here. It’s not a true camera issue. Basically your camera isn’t really USB, It goes into the blackbox that is the intel processing thing. Since there’s a skycam driver on the Lenovo driver page for your tablet, it’s probably along those lines.

Most cameras on windows are just USB. My 7th/8th gen Intel laptop is USB.

This is just me googling.

https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface/discussions/1352

This is the discussion for it on that same GitHub. Good luck with this.

I feel like I’m getting gaslit with the “this is a compact phone guys” knowing full well that is a normal sized current gen (or last gen) phone that most phone manufacturers are selling.

True but there aren’t that many compact phones. And the phones that are being advertised as compact used to be the normal size. I’m genuinely considering getting a Zinwa Q25 or Q27, which is a gutted blackberry.

Edit: q25 is a gutted bb classic. Q27 is a custom designed phone.

You’d need be able to relock the bootloader while allowing any properly signed OS to be installed, even custom ones. There’s a few phones that let you do this that aren’t Pixels but not really documented well. Apparently the bootloader relock is an advertised feature and not an oversight like other phones¹.

That and google has the titan m2 chip so I’m assuming Motorola will incorporate something similar as well along with proper hardware support.²

If you want to have a cheap phone that runs a secure os securely, you’d need to build it (like Lineage os)and sign it yourself with your own keys.

And then with this you’d have to find a phone that supports lineage os, has an unlockable bootloader, has an unlockable bootloader that will let you use your own keys, and have the patience to build LOS yourself. I’ve tried this once and it’s hard.

My last Android phone was a moto e2 LTE running lineageos and I was running around with an unlocked bootloader. I was a teenager so no banking apps and nothing was really looking for root or bootloader state. This was a $40 smartphone in 2015 with 1 gb of ram. Anything was an improvement.

¹: Documented phones that had self signed copies of LineageOS are the Pixel 4, OnePlus 7 pro and OnePlus 8t. https://xdaforums.com/t/guide-re-locking-the-bootloader-on-the-oneplus-8t-with-a-self-signed-build-of-los-18-1.4259409/

²: Im used to old Lenovo owned Motorola with ill supported phones. The aforementioned moto e2 lost support less than a year after launch (but that was more due the handover to Lenovo and that was a Google designed phone). A lot of their E line phones would get one version and then a new phone would drop with basically the same hardware. E4 and E5 were like that. The more expensive ones had a bit of improvement but not much more. Supposedly they want to get better with support but I won’t be surprised if that promise falls short.

I’m not sure if I’m going full Luddite but phones are getting way too damn big.

6.7" is insane. My own phone is a 6 in 18:9 screen and it’s too big. (I did not get a choice in my phone purchase at the time).

I use bunsenlabs Linux and it reports as the version type, which in this case is boron. There’s a lot of scripts that see boron and not oslike which is debian. I have to manually edit a lot of install scripts for them to work as boron isn’t a valid debian version.

5825u laptops are like $300 for the same amount of ram and storage as a T480. They are much faster and quite efficient.

T480s are around the $200-300 range. I will be honest, it’s not worth it at that point.

Also true. It’s currently my media ripping machine. If I find a cheap 2 GHz pentium m I might put it in.

What’s your budget? T480/580 are still good but they’re getting expensive.

Some of those atoms use weird powervr graphics that aren’t supported by anything. Mine has an ati gpu which is helpful.

For HP laptops you can just a flash drive now. You can extract the bios file and signature file from the bios updater.