postmarketOS

Over the weekend I was given a crap 2in1 notebook. It 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 combination 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 usability 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.

OC by @supermarkus@feddit.org

How to get started in postmarketOS?

The main website suggests "getting a second-hand SDM845 or MSM8916 device".

While I am fine with getting a second hand phone for this (as long as it doesn't cost as much as a new one) I see many devices with those chipsets that only partially work.

I am fully expecting this, but due to having been in the Android modding community in the past I know it is extremely common to abandon devices completely at random times. Since for this project I am willing to spend money on a dedicated device, I don't want to make a purchase I'll regret because they decided to move on to a newer device (or disappear from the internet completely).

I am not looking for a device with "perfect" support, as I feel like that would be useless. I want a device that works already well enough but that I can actually contribute with.

My own Poco X3 NFC seems good for this, but I don't think I want to commit my main smartphone yet. My older smartphone, the ASUS Zenfone 3 Laser, is completely unmentioned (but the base model is). Maybe I should simply use the latter and contribute by adding this extra device, or is it better to get something like a Google Pixel 3 or Motorola Moto G4 first?