supermarkusDec 29

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

Show threadHamartiogonicDec 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.
Show threadsupermarkus
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.
Dec 29 at 10:30pmWeb