Stuff like a pretty case with slots for optical drives, a laptop with a shitton of ports and all-day battery life or anything else that seems to go against the trends.
This thread is for complaining about how you can’t find it and (maybe) finding it thanks to someone else.
- remember netbooks? yeah so i would love a 10"-ish laptop (with current hardware) for taking notes etc.
why not use a tablet you might ask? i love the handling of a solid, non-detachable keyboard.
- also a smartphone that reacts quickly to user input with an OS that doesn’t look like the love child of windows mobile (remember that?) and the first iphones. looking at you iOS18 settings menu (among others)
I have a GPD laptop with a tiny screen, it’s good enough to run most games. I changed the no name NVMe to a Samsung and it’s way more reliable and faster. Also runs Linux now. Built in game controller works well for most games (shows up as Xbox controller or a mouse using a switch).
last i looked at them (some time ago now) they either:
- had very out of date hardware
- were incredibly expensive for what they offered
- the only middle ground model that seemed fitting for my purposes (gaming wouldn’t be on that list but linux indeed) was nowhere to be found.
i should probably have a look at their models again in the near future, thanks for reminding me. are you happy with yours (and willing to share which model you use)
As I’m getting more and more into keyboards, I’ve realised I dont want a laptop anymore.
I want a powerful phone (16GB RAM, 8-cores) that I can:
- a) use as a phone (smallish, please)
- b) use as a dockable workstation
That is, I can come home from work, slide my phone into a USB-C dock and start typing away on my Linux desktop with my fancy keyboard
Don’t quote me on this but I’m quite sure you can run Linux on Samsung phones with termux/prootdistro
Edit: I specifically mentioned Samsung because of their Dex mode but it seems plenty of other phones also allow video out via usb these days. I can’t say for sure they work well with Linux but I do know it’s doable on Samsung.
I remember the Ubuntu Touch had a feature like that that kinda worked, but they never fully commited to it.
As for doing it through Termux, I’m not convinced that X11 works terribly well in Android for it to reliably extend a display to another screen. I’ve never tried though, so I could be we way off
I haven’t used a laptop for many years now, I mostly code from an android tablet, into a remote machine. You can find ones with great battery life and keyboards.
Oh wow, I’m always surprised to hear about the coding habits of prolific devs. So you dont use a local IDE? You run termux and the code in vi/emacs on server?
Yep, I’ve coded remotely for many years now.
I used to use vim, but now helix, as my main rust and javascript/typescript IDE. So I mainly use termux+ssh .
Unfortunately for android dev you pretty much have to run android studio, so I use an android VNC client for that.
I want physical media that is not sold on optical disks. Sell me content on SD cards for example.
Little retro games handheld with a clamshell oled display
Just wait for Anbernic Rg45XXV, which should be a few months away given the rate they put out devices.
The catch: it still uses H700 chipset
A SBC with SATA ports, to use as a Plex server. I’ve only ever found one (the Zimaboard), but it’s a bit pricey for something that I’d still have to find some way to house with an external HDD.
The ODROID-HC4 has two SATA ports. Alternatively, you can get one with an NVMe slot and stick a NVMe to SATA card in it that will likely get you four ports.
I hadn’t looked at any ODROID stuff, and the HC4 is a cool looking solution! I’m actually even more impressed with the M1S, which has a built-in M.2 slot. Can’t use my existing spinny drives, but for the price of the M1S, I could pick up an NVMe drive to go with it.
Another option would be to get a RPi and throw a hat on it:
I had looked at those, but the hat alone is over $70. Plus they need an RPi5, because earlier ones don’t have a PCIe interface. For that much, I could get a Beelink or something similar.
The hat is a cool idea, though.
Ive heard some people use usbC connecting drive enclosures, could probably rig something up with the backplane from one of those, but yeah a finished product like that would be neat.
I think ive seen a mini-PC with a hotswap m.2 bay built in though?
There are plenty of portable second screens for laptops now. But it seems weird you can’t just hardwire a second laptop without having to resort to internet based screen sharing solutions.
some cheap all-in-ones i’ve worked on have hdmi in and out.
one of 'em i have here is an old atom celeron dell aio with 1600x900 native screen but on its hdmi input, it’ll run at 1920x1080. and yea, running that instead of its true native res sucks about as bad as you think it would–but it is still ‘usable’. the real sucky bit, though, is the pc has to be on in order to switch it to hdmi in.
a lenovo aio that went through here a couple years ago had to be rebooted to switch it from hdmi input mode (acting as a standalone monitor) back to pc.
if you’re saying what i think you’re saying you may be interested in something like a nexdock
Basically a laptop with no internals that acts as an external monitor, battery bank and peripherals for another device
the battery thing is real. I basically can not find a laptop with weak/low power cpu and igpu, but a huge battery. I get that we can not do more than 99whr, but for weak stuff, I can not find anything above 50 practically.
well, if you carry around a bag anyways a battery bank could alleviate that
yes, but that is a separate investment
A cheap ARM laptop.
Pinebooks have been sold out for ages, and then it’s a massive leap up to MNT Reform or Copilot+.
I just started watching eBay for used Pinebooks, but nothing has popped yet.
This is adjacent, but it’s worth pointing out that framework has recently started selling risc-v motherboards for their laptops for adventurous folks.
Direct replacement for the wonderful Facebook PortalTV unit. Its digital pan and zoom tomorrow a speaker is excellent. It could start and end calls completely hands-free before meta killed the service to which voice control was tethered. It sits on top of the TV, it does its job, and does it well.
Now that it’s abandonware by Facebook, I need something else before its hardware dies. I have 4 of these in the field and some of them are with remote geriatrics who have no tech support, and it has to work.
I’m gonna miss it.
I’ll join the ranks asking for a perfect phone.
Mine would have:
- Unlocked bootloader
- All week battery (or at least 3 days) I don’t care if it’s super thick.
- User replaceable battery
- Headphone jack
- Very high specs (like at least 16 GB RAM and 1TB storage)
- SD card slot
- Probably more I’m not thinking of right now.
Excuse me, waitress… I’ll have what SHE’S having.
I’d like to add some strength too. I don’t give a shit about the latest AI fuzzy on any phone, but if it would please last at least a year without cracking the screen or the back that would be amazing. And a record for me. Doesn’t have to be razor thin either. Just make it beefy.
i don’t even need good specs or sd card, just a good camera, foss rom and good battery
the pixel line is what you’re looking for. Sounds odd but they’re the easiest to degoogle.
i know, but i in my right mind can’t give any money to google
Then buy second hand
And then install graphene OS
Payment with NFC without google play services.
Only thing I could figure out (except maybe looking into Chinese payments systems which… No. Just no) is Garmin Pay.
Once set up, works with the smartwatch and does not use the phone, or the internet, at all.
I know it’s not exactly what you asked, but its what I managed to do. Garmin watches also work pretty great with Gadgetbridge :-)
I don’t wear a watch but if it fixes the problem, might be worth looking in to.
Do bear in mind that not all banks and/or cards are supported. Out of my 6 payment cards, over 3 banks (I know, ridiculous), only 3 are compatible. One bank is not compatible at all, the other one supports the debit card on Garmin Pay but not the credit card.
I knew that before hand. Garmin has a list… Somewhere.
You just made me consider a smartwatch… I haven’t wanted a watch that can become obsolete because of its tech but if that helps me degoogle it might be different
but that depends on the vendor. highest chance to do it is with Monero, even considering that basically no one knows it
Global Xperias (Xperia 1 VI [XQ-EC72]) fits most of this.
A decent brand of tws with multiple lights to indicate the amount of charge left. Also bigger battery.
All the branded stuff have single led with different colours to indicate charge percentage and also if paired or not.
I don’t want to remember fcking rainbow to know all the features.
Data cassettes using current LTO tech, but in standard compact cassette format
LTO cartridges are shaped so much more efficiently, for so many reasons, so why specifically compact cassette format?
Although I’m also just realising now that LTO is specifically optimized to be used linearly from start to finish (It’s even in the name) and is pretty inefficient if you’d want to use it a bit, remove it and using reading it later.
A high-quality laptop without any branding.
I’m currently using a 9-year-old, woefully underpowered laptop made by Xiaomi. Full aluminium unibody, and NO logo. Not printed on, not etched in, not glistening only in the right light. NO LOGO.
I’m not a billboard. I’m not responsible for your brand recognition. Ironically though, far more people have come up to me and asked “hey, what laptop is that” than ever would have cared if there was a logo on it.
It also just looks and feels fantastic, all-aluminium-no-logo just looks so sleek.
So yeah. I will not be upgrading until I find another laptop of the same build quality, with no logo. Tuxedo has that option for most of their laptops, but for some reason not for their only current full-aluminium body -.-
Oh, and don’t come at me with stickers.
Oh, and don’t come at me with stickers.
Well then. Maybe you could wrap your heart in duc-ta-a-ape! *runs away sobbing*
Fully agree with the sentiment, and at the same time I think it’s a lost battle. Even more so with more niche tech like cameras (where one is usually invested into an ecosystem instead of having just one piece like a laptop that can be sold on its own 5 years in).
I’ll extend that to every product as well. I hate branding specially in clothing.
A Linux phone with colour e-ink screen and writing capabilities like the reMarkable.
I’ve realized that for a lot of things that a phone does, e-ink is too slow to refresh. Even web browsing becomes painful to navigate sometimes. Maybe a dual-screen approach would work with e-ink on one side and a regular screen on the other?
I’m reminded of something I saw recently where a guy had a mini old screen for typing, but an e-ink main screen. It was a DIY cyberdeck, and weird enough that I don’t think it’s useful for you or OP, but I figured you’d find it interesting to hear that your suggestion seems to be on the right track
My unicorn phone would be one that is both small enough to use with one hand (currently have a Zenfone 10 largely for this reason) and has a secondary camera lens that’s a telephoto rather than an ultra ultra wide.
It bugs me that phones with a long lens are so comparatively rare, it’s always just wide (verging on ultrawide) as default and when a second lens is added it’s even wider again because people love distortions or taking photos in tiny rooms or something. Sometimes I just want to take a photo of something further away than a few metres and actually have it visible without zooming in, I’d even take a normal lens FoV as an improvement over ultrawide. Those phones that do have one tend to have it as a third lens and also tend to be huge, so get disqualified by the ‘usable with one hand’ criteria even before I reach the massively expensive part.
I’d also like an Instax back for the Hasselblad V series that was cheap enough that I could actually justify the cost of buying (say ~$200 AUD or less) though I will admit that’s a pretty niche thing to be after.
