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Fucking-laptops.md (3552B)

    

  1. ---
  2. date: 2020-02-18
  3. layout: post
  4. title: Fucking laptops
  5. categories: [rants]
  6. ---
  8. The best laptop ever made is the ThinkPad X200, and I have two of them. The
  9. caveats are: I get only 2-3 hours of battery life even with conservative use;
  10. and it struggles to deal with 1080p videos.
  12. The integrated GPU, Bluetooth and WiFi, internal sensors, and even the
  13. fingerprint reader can all be driven by the upstream Linux kernel. In fact, the
  14. hardware is so well understood that I have successfully used almost all of the
  15. laptop's features on Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Minix, Haiku, and Plan 9. Plan
  16. fucking 9. It can run coreboot, too. The back of the laptop has all of the
  17. screws (Phillips head) labelled so you know which to remove to service which
  18. parts. User replacable parts include the screen, keyboard (multiple layouts are
  19. available and are interchangeable), the RAM, hard drive (I put a new SSD in one
  20. of mine a few weeks ago, and it took about 30 seconds) — actually, there
  21. are a total of 26 replacable parts in this laptop.[^1] There is a detailed
  22. 278-page service manual to assist you or your local repair tech in addressing
  23. any problems that arise.
  25. [^1]: Which just means you can basically take the entire thing apart and replace almost any part.
  27. They're quite durable, too. Mine still looks like it just rolled off the
  28. assembly line yesterday. In fact, it was built 12 years ago.
  30. The X200 was made in 2008. In the time since, the modern laptops' battery life
  31. and video decoding performance has improved. In every other respect, the market
  32. is regressive, half-assed garbage.
  34. I am usually near power, so I've been reasonably happy even with the pithy
  35. battery life of the X200. I also have a T520, which sucks in its own way[^2],
  36. but can decode 1080p videos just fine. I generally don't need a lot of power -
  37. compiling most programs is fast enough that I don't really notice, especially
  38. with incremental compilation, and for any large workloads I just SSH out into a
  39. build server somewhere. However, I've been planning some astronomy outings
  40. lately, and the battery life matters for this - so I was looking for a laptop I
  41. could run [Stellarium](https://stellarium.org/) on to drive my telescope into
  42. the wee hours of the night.
  44. [^2]: It barely gets an hour and a half of battery life on a good day. And there's an Nvidia optimus GPU, which is just, ugh.
  46. It has since come to my attention that in 2020, every laptop *still* fucking
  47. sucks. Even the ones people pretend to like have crippling, egregious flaws. The
  48. Dell XPS series has a firmware so bad that its engineers should be strung up in
  49. the town square for building it - if yours works, it's because you were *lucky*.
  50. System76 laptops are bulky and priced at 2x or 3x what they're worth. Same goes
  51. for Purism, plus a company I have no desire to support any longer, and they're
  52. out of stock anyway. Pine64 requires nonfree blobs, patched kernels, and booting
  53. up ARM devices is a fucking nightmare, and they're out of stock anyway. The Star
  54. Lite looks promising, but they're out of stock too. Huewei laptops are shameless
  55. Macbook ripoffs with the same shitty keyboards, and you can't buy them in the US
  56. anyway. Speaking of Macbooks, even Apple fanboys are fed up with them these
  57. days. 
  59. The laptop market is in an atrocious state, folks. If you work at any of these
  60. companies and you're proud of the garbage you're shipping, then I'm disappointed
  61. in you. Come on, let's get our shit together and try to make a laptop which is
  62. *at least* as good as the 12 year-old one I'm stuck with now.