• 10 Posts
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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: April 26th, 2025

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  • I’m gonna be the problemXY guy and suggest you get a normal laptop, like a thinkpad T14 and friends, without a discrete GPU and get an EGPU setup; you can get a DIY rig in the $50-100 region, dependent on the interface, and you get a ton of benefits:

    • you’re not limited to gaming laptops. you can get a laptop that’s portable, has a long battery life, and widely available on the 2nd hand market, is easy and cheap to upgrade, fix, repair, etc. everything gaming laptops fucking aren’t
    • your options for GPUs rise dramatically, including reusing shit you already got laying around
    • way, way more powerful than laptop discrete graphics with practically unlimited vertical upgrade options

  • it bothers me immensely that javascript backed Gnome that I can’t make run fluidly and jerklessly on competent desktop hardware is the default on underpowered mobile hardware, making Android and iOS level fluidity practically unattainable in the foreseeable future.

    edit: I run pmOS on a SDM845 with 8 GB RAM and fast storage, tried em all on edge (gnome, plasma, phosh, plasma mobile) and it’s a 5 fps stuttering mess. that’s before I load something to said RAM, like a browser or (dog forbid) an electron app.




  • a few points to consider for the usual “get a refurb pixel” crowd:

    • a “refurbished pixel” is often a channel for the manufacturer to sell old stock and returned merchandise. so, yeah, you are giving money to google
    • an “independent refurbish thing” is such a brain-strain concept. just visualize them getting the phones (where? how?) and analysing the issue (really?) and fixing it (lol) and thoroughly testing it (double lol) and (hopefully) cleaning the filthy thing and reassembling it in a way that looks good and maintains some water resistance and… give up? yeah, it’s that likely that’s a thing
    • the falsely stated fact that the only way to be safe is to use pixel + graphene is a pet peeve of mine and I use every opportunity to shit on the concept’s head. you’re perfectly safe using lineageOS or one of its many derivatives and up your security and safety dramatically
    • you’re buying an used, easily breakable/stealable/losable thing, that was spat on, got sweated on, rubbed all over, taken and used in the shitter and dogknows what else. bear that in mind when they ask for a “reasonable” $200 or whatever

    my view is - yeah, get an used phone, unlock bootloader, flash lineageOS. but do it for $50, and not a fucking multiple of that.

    e.g. here’s one of my sub-$50 acquisitons: Poco F1 - SDM845, 8 GB RAM, 120 GB storage, excellent LineageOS support as well as postmarketOS, mobian, Ubuntu Touch. on top of that, plastic back that’s easily removable and the battery swap takes like two minutes.

    so, the usual answer to your question was to a get an Xiaomi/Mi/Redmi/Poco Snapdragon phone, unlock it, and flash whatever LineageOS variant you like - you get very competent hardware, very good battery, and they are widely available. plus, they ship with a dogawful skin (MIUI/HyperSomething) that’s bloated and shitty and makes the very competent hardware sluggish - a lot of people sell them because they’re dissatisfied.

    however, they’ve progressively made unlock process as hostile as possible - waiting periods, windows-only unlock tools, artificial limits on number of phones you can unlock, etc. also, they have been dicks about releasing source code (apparently, the one guy who did that got fired or sumsuch) and this limits the alt ROMs you can get.

    so, my advice - go to LineageOS website, and filter for “LineageOS Version” which is 22.2. as of now. that will show you all the devices that are officially supported and based on that you can pick a model that is available for cheap in your region.

    happy hunting and let us know what you ended up with.




  • so what you’re saying is that the firmware powers off when on battery and just suspends if on AC? I have to say I’ve never heard of such a thing. could be a setting in the DE; e.g. Plasma has a buncha stuff to set up separately for when on battery and when on AC, maybe your issue is there. does it behave the same when you power down from terminal (sudo shutdown -h now)?

    also, not to hamper your impressive research, but what’s with the powering down of things? all my hardware (desktops and laptops) get powered down or restarted like never or rarer. when it’s time for bed, they get suspended and then woken in the morning, ready to go as I’ve left em. the one laptop that spends days without power, ready to go when I have to leave, has the suspend-then-hibernate thing implemented so its power drain iz zero.



  • why would swiping away an app not kill it? why would you do that? leave it be until it’s done wtf

    how much RAM you got? on my two A15 phones with 6 and 8 GB RAM nothing extraordinary happens in that regard, whereas my A15 4 GB RAM tablet can’t handle a lot of open apps and OOM kills some in the background.

    edit: you seem to be trying to run android apps like desktop apps. that doesn’t work here. how things work is most apps are dormant when they don’t have focus and when they receive a push message e.g. “you have a new message”, their handler wakes up, fetches stuff from the server and updates local state (and then optionally displays the notification).

    so you either need to install unified push and get apps that support it or have e.g. microG implement a subset of Play services so that GCM/FCM works with “normal” apps. the third option, what you may be doing, is having every app excluded from sleep and doing their own updates checking.

    the example where you close an app and then go “why app closed” is unrelated.


  • glitching@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.worldNeed help saving an old laptop
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    24 days ago

    off to recycling with that thing, that SSD is worth more than the whole machine. get a skylake or newer laptop with busted screen or malfunctioning keyboard or whatever that’s not a hindrance for your use case and it’ll have full hardware acceleration and consume WAY less power and be future proof.

    if you’re adamant about running it, try mpv without DE/WM by way of framebuffer. I think Arch has some mpv build that enables that.


  • gOS threat model is “everything everywhere all at once” - nation state actors et al - and from that standpoint, yeah, eOS and lOS and whoever else is lacking.

    but the vast majority of users have a threat model that can be boiled down to two things:

    1. a lost/stolen device doesn’t compromise me - the fucker can’t get at my stuff and/or impersonate me, and
    2. free from apple’s/google’s reign - I control what stuff runs on my phone

    both easily accomplished with lineageOS and derivatives running on a $50 phone. if you truly want to spend four digits annually on Newest & Best, you do you, I’m good.


  • holup - you shut down the laptop and in such a state it drains the battery?! I mean, that’s so outside of the OS’ functionality, it don’t matter which one you got. the only sensible conclusion is that shutting down the laptop in debian doesn’t turn it off, there are no other explanations.

    fedora is more modern by way of kernels and DEs and whatnot, but I’ve looked up your hardware, that’s an 8th gen i5/i7, that’s plently supported even in old bookworm.

    one thing to lookup is in BIOS, my T480s (same generation) had a power management setting in BIOS that was either Windows or Linux, so make sure yours is set correctly.

    edit: to add, the other issue, standby, blows on any hardware I’ve tried so what you need to do is implement suspend-then-hibernate by setting up a swap file that’s RAM + 4 GB (or RAM * 1.5, if you run zram) and then enabling first hibernation and then configuring suspend-then-hibernate. so in that setup, your laptop sleeps normally, and if you don’t touch it in say an hour, it dumps the RAM to the SSD and powers off. when you power it on, it restores from swap and that’s faster than cold boot and your shit is how you left it.

    naturally, alla that’s pointless until you fix issue #1, the drain when it’s supposedly off.


  • “rebooting” is not a thing ova here. yeah, you can accomplish that but that’s not what you want. utilising something like InputRemapper + e.g. Plasma shortcuts, you can launch a big-picture UI, like steam or plama-bigscreen when it’s ready or somesuch, when you press a key combo on the controller or mouse or keyboard or any combination thereof.


  • glitching@lemmy.mltoFrugal@lemmy.worldFrugal Flagship iPhone
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    1 month ago

    first off, there is no spyware shipped with iOS, iOS is the spyware. aside from apple being repeatedly caught lying about the extent of its spying, the convoluted and cumbersome iCloud decoupling with the unencrypted backups and the fact that you have a covert peer-to-peer network running on your own hardware that you can’t turn off or opt out of should be more than enough to give those fucks zero benefit of doubt.

    second, if you’ve been on iOS since the iPhone X days, you have no idea what’s possible on this side of the fence. that’s why I’m suggesting getting a cheap, yet capable, used phone and figuring out things without breaking the budget. you could get a flagship pixel or whatnot for the same purpose, but this is the beauty of android - a $50 phone runs the same software as a $1000 one.

    I assure you, you’re plenty safe and secure with a regular, supported lineageOS build, unless you’re pursued by nation-state actors and such. the postmarketOS and friends note was to illustrate the plethora of options you got with the same piece of hardware; none of them are ready for prime time.


  • glitching@lemmy.mltoFrugal@lemmy.worldFrugal Flagship iPhone
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    1 month ago

    I like the list, it purports you got a lot of things in there.

    I guess you missed the 85% of my post that lists actual, actionable information pertaining to OP’s question, that in addition to my take on it (which, in case it’s not visible from orbit, is HELL NO) offers a solution to OP’s problem (“unsupported phone”) for a twentieth of their budget.

    I also see you contributing dick to said question.


  • glitching@lemmy.mltoFrugal@lemmy.worldFrugal Flagship iPhone
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    1 month ago

    I guess there’s your mistake - there has to be a right and wrong and we should all be on one side of it.

    this is my take on “should I spend a THOUSAND+ bucks/pounds/feathers” on an easily breakable/losable/stealable slab of glass. in a community called “frugal”.



  • glitching@lemmy.mltoFrugal@lemmy.worldFrugal Flagship iPhone
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    1 month ago

    so you got a phone that works for you but you still want to replace it because… idk, just 'cause.

    you could spring for an used, ex-flasgship phone that was abandoned by its brand but still has lineageOS support. e.g. Poco F1 or Oneplus 6T fit that bill. I can get em locally in the $50-$100 region. that thing has a fast SDM845, 8 GB RAM, full LineageOS support and even postmarketOS, Mobian and Ubuntu touch support, you can swap the batteries, etc.

    so for like 5% of your budget, you get a new toy to play with and test what life is like on the other side of the fence and possibly gradually ween yourself off the corpo spyware. so, if it scratches your itch for that kinda money, I’d call that frugal.