[Linux-aus] Inexpensive laptops (was: ARM laptops)

[Russell Coker]

On Tuesday, 24 October 2023 13:39:10 AEDT Les Kitchen via linux-aus wrote:
> > Buying a new laptop for $300 every time an important part breaks is
> > cheaper
> > than E1,199 for something that can be repaired easily.  MNT are ARM based
> > laptops which are good for developing portable code, but I think a
> > PineBookPro is better for that as you can run phones in the same way.
> 
> Well, yes, but that's not the whole story.  Sure, there's the
> immediate cost.  For the price of one MNT Reform I could buy
> half-dozen Pinebook Pros.  But there's the broader issue of the
> costs to the environment and to future generations of the mining of
> raw materials and the manufacturing of new electronic devices.

Ideally the costs to the environment would be in line with the cost to 
purchase.  I know that isn't the case, but with some suitable taxes it could 
be.

> A lot of the minerals and resources are likely to be worth much
> more in the future, and are sold off too cheaply now, IMHO.
> Same for petroleum and coal, hundreds of millions of years in
> the making.  They'll be worth more in decades to come as
> chemical feedstocks, and it's a waste just to burn them for
> energy (even aside from greenhouse-gas emissions and global
> warming).

As a general rule you can make anything chemically if you have enough energy.  
There is algae to make bio-Diesel, electrolysis making hydrogen and then the 
haber process to make ammonia (for fuel cells and for other reactions), long 
chain hydrocarbons can be cracked and short chains can be joined to make any 
length you like.  Not as cheap and easy as just mining coal and petrochemicals 
but not impossible.

> If you think of it as an optimization search problem, the unruly
> processes of capitalism are probably pretty good at finding
> local optima, but can get stuck in a local optimum that is far
> from any more global optimum, and need some external push to get
> out, I guess by governments.

One problem we have is late stage capitalism where rich people and 
corporations don't seek local optimums they seek changes to laws to give them 
money.

> If I spend some money and effort to upgrade an old machine, or
> pay (possibly a lot more) to get a machine that's repairable and
> will have a long life, then that's at least showing that such
> things are possible.  Voting with my wallet as I can afford it.

Another option is to buy second hand.  Windows users generally aren't 
interested in systems with 8G of RAM but they run Linux nicely.

> It depends on what your use is, but short of demanding things
> like high-end gaming and bioinformatics, etc., fairly modest
> computing machinery can handle well enough what most people do.

Yes and ebay has a lot of it going cheap.

> And given human visual acuity at usual viewing geometry, there's
> little or no benefit from going beyond FHD screen resolution.  I

I think that perhaps the limit is the DPI that phones are at.  Which would 
mean that a 13" laptop could usefully have a 4K screen - as some of the 
Thinkpad X1 Carbon series do.

> might be wrong, but I feel that we've reached something of a
> plateau in real everyday computing requirements, and will likely
> be there for a while.  A fair bit of my laptop use is
> essentially as an X-terminal (via VNC) to my main home server.
> For that, not so much is demanded of the laptop itself.

Yes, for most of what I do (apart from Chrome and compiles) a PinePhonePro is 
almost at the level of satisfying all my needs.

> > My Main Blog         http://etbe.coker.com.au/
> > My Documents Blog    http://doc.coker.com.au/
> 
> I really should read your blog more often.  Thanks for putting
> it up.

https://planet.luv.asn.au/

I'm running the latest iteration of Planet Linux Australia.  There don't seem 
to be a lot of posts, so it would be good if more people started blogging and 
sent me their feed URLs.

-- 
My Main Blog         http://etbe.coker.com.au/
My Documents Blog    http://doc.coker.com.au/