Mastodawn

postmarketOS is genuinely amazing on ultra low end PCs (details in the post)

https://feddit.org/post/23629322

postmarketOS is genuinely amazing on ultra low end PCs (details in the post) - feddit.org

Over the weekend I was given a crap 2in1 notebook. The PC is 10 years old and even by standards back then had low end hardware (MSRP was 300 Euro according to some googling). The Atom CPU is 64bits, the UEFI 32bits – a combinaon I completely forgot existed and many distributions no longer support. Not only does postmarketOS support 32bit UEFI, thanks to its smartphone focus it comes with zram preconfigured. Installation was easy using the graphical installer for generic x86-64. So now I run a fully featured desktop, KDE Plasma, on it. None of that “lightweight” stuff that sacrifices features and usility for a few megabytes of RAM. I only tweaked it a little bit. Firefox ran like shit. Chromium was better in that regard but for whatver reason YouTube specifically kept logging me out. Also RAM ran out once and Chromium was force closed by the OS. I ended up installing KDE’s Falkon browser which offers the benefits of Chromium’s rendering speed without the logging out of YouTube part. It’s also a bit less resource intensive, yet comes wih an ad blocker and support for user scripts which relieves the lack of proper extensions. pmOS doesn’t come with swap by default. I added a swap file which is quickly done. It’s barely used since switching to Falkon, currently only 100MB. YouTube video playback at 1080p is smooth. Zero problems with suspend so far. I’m not sure if it’s the result of defective hardware or just driver incompatibilities but Bluetooth is not recognized (bummer) and the camera isn’t either (don’t care for it). Long story short: I rescued a crap PC from the scrap pile. It’s now genuinely usable, albeit with the aformentioned caveats. Operating System: postmarketOS edge KDE Plasma Version: 6.5.4 KDE Frameworks Version: 6.21.0 Qt Version: 6.10.1 Kernel Version: 6.18.2-0-stable (64-bit) Graphics Platform: Wayland Processors: 4 × Intel® Atom™ CPU Z3735F @ 1.33GHz Memory: 2 GiB of RAM (1.9 GiB usable) Graphics Processor: Intel® HD Graphics

domdanial Dec 29

Might have to give it a shot, I tried a couple different lightweight OSs on my old Chromebook, maybe this one will feel right.

supermarkus Dec 29

The graphical installer is a it bare bones but easy to use. Setup is slow because in the background it generates a disk image of packages that are being downloaded and the write speed of my USB drive was a big bottle neck. Selection of native packages isn’t the greatest but pmOS comes with Flathub configured out of the box. (I’m usually a proponent of Flatpak but being so memory constrained, I refrain from the overhad of loading Flatpak runtimes into memory.

domdanial Dec 29

I don’t mind a long install. I tried bazzite on it to match my desktop, just to see, and loading up the Bazzar(app repository) crashed itself, never actually opening. Mostly I just want an Internet/media machine that’s cheap, maybe with a few other program options, but really the 2gb Ram is tough to deal with.

@domdanial @supermarkus
I've been running postmarketOS on an old 32 bit ARM chromebook (Asus C100P) for almost a year. It works well using KDE Plasma desktop. Firefox runs smoothly and streaming videos, including YouTube, play w/o issue. Installation was trouble free following the steps in the Wiki.

Hamartiogonic Dec 29

These low end computers are always a fun challenge. You end up trying a bunch of programs you have never even heard of, and you can also learn something along the way.

supermarkus Dec 29

pmOS / Alpine Linux is definitively a bit outside my comfort zone. The apk package manager is so weird with its add and del commands instead of install and remove everyone else uses.

WIZARD POPE💫Dec 29

If it has a replaceable drive you could check the bluetooth by putting in a new drive and installing somwthing like windows 7 just to see if it is in fact a driver error

supermarkus Dec 29

It came with a factory reset version of Win10 but that ran so insanely bad, it kept crashing which to this degree isn’t normal even for Windows which is why I suspect faulty hardware.

JubilantJaguar Dec 29

Great job. As I see it the real problem is that low-end Wintel laptops seem to be going away, replaced first by Chromebooks and soon probably by Android laptop edition, which presumably will have the non-Intel architecture and weird blobs and locked bootloader of any smartphone. Or is this too pessimistic?

supermarkus Dec 29

I think devices like the Framework 12 continue to be available but RAM and SSD costs won’t necessarily mean that lower end performance will not necessarily mean afforable, at least all the way through 2026.

JubilantJaguar Dec 30

Hmm. Having trouble parsing your negatives but I think you’re saying “expensive”.

What bothers me is that a decade ago there were loads of Linux-compatible budget netbooks on sale at every big-box retailer, whereas there seems to be nothing today under 500 bucks/euro except Chromebooks, and nothing at all with a smallish screen except mega-expensive ultrabooks. It’s becoming a problem.

communism Dec 30

Luckily the second hand laptops from that era are still usually perfectly usable if you install some FOSS OS on it (Linux, BSDs, the various more obscure ones, tend to work fine on old computers). You can pick them up for quite cheap on ebay and the like, and then you have a perfectly usable daily driver (plus from before the era of seemingly trying to get rid of all the ports on a laptop).

Boy do we have different definition of ultra low end. I find that machine low end but not extremely so.

TheGrandNagus Dec 30

I’d say your definition is an odd one, then.

OP’s hardware is extremely low end.

While in windows world that might be so, that hardware is in no way an extreme case to run a linux distro on. Just a normal walk in the park.

woelkchen Dec 30

that hardware is in no way an extreme case to run a linux distro on. Just a normal walk in the park.

“The Atom CPU is 64bits, the UEFI 32bits – a combinaon […] many distributions no longer support.”

So no

I agree to disagree

woelkchen Dec 30

Support for 32 bit UEFI on 64 bit Linux is a matter of facts, not a matter to come to an agreement.

Yes, but it being super niche with extreme support is.

supermarkus Dec 30

Mainstream distributions no longer support my setup, so it’s niche.

There is a distribution made exactlt for low end computers that natively support it. Niche but not very extreme.

supermarkus Dec 31

There is a distribution made exactlt for low end computers that natively support it. Niche but not very extreme.

The hardware is on the ultra low end and mainstream distributions do not support it. Nobody but you talked about it being an “extreme niche”. You just made that up to distract from your claim that my setup is “Just a normal walk in the park” which clearly it is not.

I tried and tried to get postmarketos running on my 2013 Nexus 7 but never could get it to work.

supermarkus Dec 30

I didn’t read much about phones and ARM tablets but I got the impression it’s like flashing a custom Android ROM.

De Lancre Dec 30

ultra-low end Z3735

It’s not “low end”, this chip was obsolete 12 years ago on release, let alone now.

How do I report self-harm on lemmy?

supermarkus Dec 30

How do I report self-harm on lemmy?

They way it ran Win10 was definitively infuriating. Firefox, too.

pmOS + Falkon is fine.

brygphilomena Dec 30

I’ve an old eeepc Ive been wanting to resurrect. Maybe I’ll try this on there.

And a clamshell MacBook with a power PC processor. But that one doesn’t seem to ever recognize a boot disk.

supermarkus Dec 30

I’ve an old eeepc Ive been wanting to resurrect. Maybe I’ll try this on there.

Other than the installer wiping all the data, there is little to lose.

@supermarkus Oh cool, I had no idea that PostMarketOS supported x86_64 devices.

supermarkus Dec 31

Not only that but since last summer there is even a graphical installer. Most tricky part about resurrecting this PC was to find out about the 32bit UEFI (not like any of the mainstream distributions printed out a meaningful error mesage).

Installing pmOS itself was not much different than any mainstream distribution: download the “installer” image, write the disk image to a USB drive, boot from that drive and do a few mouse clicks. Installation is just slow.

@supermarkus it is! Tried it on several 10-15y old laptops (including MacBooks) and was amazed by how well it all runs, including up-to-date browsers

How’s the hardware support? Track pad, wifi etc?

supermarkus Dec 31

In essence it’s not much different than regular Linux distributions. There are some quirks related to pmOS being a derivative of Alpine Linux. It uses musl instead of glibc, so don’t expect meaningful NVidia support. Other than that, it’s regular kernel, regular Mesa. (Native package selection is much smaller than anything mainstream, Flatpak works, though.)

I couldn’t get a stable WiFi connection using WPA3 Personal. Not sure what the fault is. Switching the connection over to WPA2 in Plasma’s Network settings did the trick. This PC’s trackpad and touchscreen work absolutely fine but – and I think that’s how the hardware is designed and nothing to do with pmOS – the trackpad doesn’t show up as trackpad but as a mouse. So I cannot reconfigure it to use two finger scrolling. Scrolling is always on the left edge.

Websites claim that this PC supports bluetooth but the adapter doesn’t show. As I wrote in another comment, I suspect a hardware defect, given how abnormally unstable Windows 10 was. I need to get my hands on a USB Bluetooth dongle. I use my headphones via USB in the meantime which physically tethers me to the device but works fine.