it bothers me immensely that javascript backed Gnome that I can’t make run fluidly and jerklessly on competent desktop hardware is the default on underpowered mobile hardware, making Android and iOS level fluidity practically unattainable in the foreseeable future.

edit: I run pmOS on a SDM845 with 8 GB RAM and fast storage, tried em all on edge (gnome, plasma, phosh, plasma mobile) and it’s a 5 fps stuttering mess. that’s before I load something to said RAM, like a browser or (dog forbid) an electron app.

anyone who missed it, add “zero zero zero” and “gomorrah” to you watch list

off to recycling with that thing, that SSD is worth more than the whole machine. get a skylake or newer laptop with busted screen or malfunctioning keyboard or whatever that’s not a hindrance for your use case and it’ll have full hardware acceleration and consume WAY less power and be future proof.

if you’re adamant about running it, try mpv without DE/WM by way of framebuffer. I think Arch has some mpv build that enables that.

my annoyance with his output aside, can we make it so that you can’t use “beautiful” on your own shit? others can say your stuff is, you can’t go “I created a beautiful xy”.

don’t know about that latitude, but for the thinkpad you’d do well to disable the nvidia graphics in BIOS setup. intel graphics is adequate for daily stuff and you can actually use the thing as a mobile device i.e. on battery,

thanks. just bricked mine :( will see later if I can resurrect it. which sailfish port are you running?

anyone running UT on a SDM845 or similar? I’ve got pmOS with Plasma Mobile on a OnePlus 6T with 8 GB RAM and it’s hella slugish; recent edge versions are way better than the ones from only six months ago, but it’s still nowhere close to the fluidity of Android.

so might consider trying this, but the install process puts me off as I must first restore the factory OxygenOS in order to install and I’d very much like to not do that.

those things were designed to run off mechanical drives. so whatever you fit it with will be screaming fast. the bottlenecks you’re concerned with arise with workstation-class machines with fully implemented PCI lanes and such, which are pretty rare in laptops. HMBs also require a beefier CPU as all that buffering introduces overhead; not noticeable on a 6-core Ryzen, noticeable on a dual-core decade-old i5.

summarum: whatever SATA SSD you fit it with is more than adequate. obviously, don’t go with no-name “brands”. also, save yourself the bother and don’t dick around with adapters, just fit a regular SATA 2.5" SSD in there.

skip the T470, T480 with 8xxxu cpu is the lowest you should go; the hardware is practically identical (and interchangeable!) but the CPU is a huge difference. also if you find them for cheap, there’s T490 (refresh), T495 (AMD Ryzen), and T14 (newer variants of the T4xx series with Intel and AMD CPUs).

the 12" version would be the X280, again single-channel RAM only. in the 12" space you also have Dell Latitude 7290/7200 (just the latitude series, no inspirons and friends) as well as HP Elitebook 820 (and 830) with 8xxx and newer CPUs. Elitebooks and Latitudes are Thinkpad T-series equivalents with similar build quality and features.

T480 can take 64 GB (2x 32 GB); no idea if more is possible. I imagine newer models could but I struggle to remember seeing 64 GB SO-DIMMs… P15 can fit four sticks so that should be possible, but them things have beefy CPUs, are rather large, and also have Nvidia graphics so dunno how low-power you can make those.

you’re kinda outside of the intersection of cheap and still capable with that spec. do make a write-up if you succeed, that sounds interesting.

I’m referring to semi-modern laptops you’re most likely to get out of some corporation’s dump of obsolete tech, but that’s still usable - let’s say T480 and onward. you can retrofit those with tons of RAM, cheap storage, they have capable quad-cores, etc. you can get something like a T14 Ryzen 6-core with 32 GB RAM and a 1 TB SSD in the $200 region, if you do everything yourself.

everything before that is proper old tech, with predominantly anemic dual-cores (the ones you mention have single-channel RAM) and as such are a fun tinkering project, similar to the cyber deck projects - costs a lot of money, doesn’t do much. on the other side of that fence are power-hungry haswells and friends that can’t be wrangled into single-digit Watt/Hour territory however hard you tried.

so if you get one of those for free, or close to it, and you have parts laying around, by all means - this is as close you can get to the bespoke PC build in the laptop world. but ixnay on bying a decade old laptop for work and/or education.

edit:

X260 vs T14, negligible size difference

first off, “lenovo” is not the thing to get, it’s just a subset of those - thinkpads. and even then, not all of those - just the T and P series. those are the “pro” lines, durable, dependable, expandable, serviceable, and widely used. so when corporations swap out their fleet for new models, they flood the market and hence can be had for cheap. multiple generations of the same model are cross-generation compatible, so they share the same peripherals, like docks, have interchangeable parts, like keyboards, displays, etc.

don’t get used ideapads, thinkbooks, thinkpad E/L series, etc. those are either consumer-class models, have substandard features, are incompatible with each other, etc. don’t get the yogas and S-suffix models, as you’ll have a removed time servicing and/or upgrading those.

the whole point of getting something used, i.e. something that was touched and rubbed and spat all over, is if it’s a) in good enough shape and b) you get it for cheap. you took care of of item A when going for thinkpad T-series and you’re compromising on item B if you’re going through an intermediary.

them dudes you mention are skinning you alive - 500 EUR for a T14 G1 is insane, it should be less than half of that. I also like how they’re including none of the tech specs which just ups the ick factor.

try it with a live USB with Gnome as it is way more touch friendly. Fedora latest recommended because the live USB has a Wayland session (older versions default to X11 and a buncha touch and transition features are Wayland-only).

as to seamless transition, no DE on linux is there yet. Gnome is way better than it was a year or two ago in that regard, but flakyness is still present, expecting the polish and reliability of Android or iPadOS isn’t realistic.