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Does this kind of device work as a simple tmux or screen device? The review sounds horrible, but I can run a terminal from a RBP reasonably at a much cheaper pr

Does this kind of device work as a simple tmux or screen device? The review sounds horrible, but I can run a terminal from a RBP reasonably at a much cheaper price point. With the screen it might make sense to compare?

mumblemumble 6y ago
Maybe read page 3 before you try. It doesn't sound like it fared too well running Fedora, either. Maybe a really stripped down Linux, without X, would work, though. Though, if your needs are so modest, why not go for an ARM-based linux laptop? You can almost certainly get something that will deliver a better experience at a lower price point. The only reason I can think of to choose something like this instead is if you absolutely need x86 for some reason.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  The standard Fedora install runs GNOME and comes with lots of unneeded packages installed. Debian running Xfce (or even the old-style LXDE) will be a lot leaner and meaner on these specs, though sometimes Fedora has better hardware support.
- eyerony 6y ago
  I trialed a 2GB memory, dual-core-no-hyperthreading low-clocked Celeron ("hacked") Asus Chromebox as a workstation a couple weeks ago. As long as you can avoid running electron or other webshit and don't mind doing some things on the command line it could handle light tiling window managers (i3, dwm, awesome) just fine, even at 4K. Actually the Web was even pretty OK as long as I only had a couple pages open at a time and used Surf (just trying to open Firefox took so long I gave up—Surf is almost instant) If you've got a remote machine for you VMs or Docker and maybe for some remote X sessions for heavier web browsing, it's viable. Really as long as I avoided web garbage and used light software the thing felt fast. Very responsive, low input latency. Hell it even booted much faster than the beast of a machine I replaced it with (that's Void Linux's doing, by having a minimal default boot environment so the boot process isn't doing very much that I haven't explicitly told it to do, so no useless-to-me daemons or scripts slow the boot). Which shouldn't really be that surprising since my primary development and gaming desktop at one time was a fraction as powerful and did GUI multitasking just fine (including Firefox—I maintain they really lost their way as the lightweight-but-still-featureful browser we all loved after the 1.x series and have never been as good since), but, it is surprising these days when we have single browser tabs that can just about fill 2GB of RAM all on their own and forget what modern computers can do when we're not using them to run the computing equivalents of 3-legged-races. Only reasons I didn't upgrade the RAM and keep going with the experiment were 1) it could only drive my 60hz 4K display at 30hz, and 2) manually dicking around trying to fix 4K scaling issues isn't my idea of a good time and you pretty much have to run a heavy desktop on Linux to eliminate those problems without tons of fiddling, it seems, and such a machine cannot handle Gnome3 or KDE and all their background crap and Javascript (ew) and such.
- catalogia 6y ago
  They tried it with Wayland/GNOME. I'm guessing something like X11/i3 would fair a lot better. I'd not buy one to test that theory though.
  - majewsky 6y ago
    Or rather Wayland/Sway to get a modern i3 experience without the dead weight of X11.
    - catalogia 6y ago
      My experience with that is that it runs hotter. X11 may be full of cobwebs but it doesn't run hot, at least in my experience.
neurostimulant 6y ago
With the dual core amd cpu throttled down to 1.5ghz, a cheap phone running termux is likely more performant than this laptop. For $140 you could buy a cheap android phone with a mediatek 2ghz octacore processor, 3gb of ram and 32gb storage. You can cast the screen to a chromecast, connect external/usb keyboard and launch termux, and you'll have a computing device much faster than this laptop. Heck, you can even run X via a vnc viewer if you want desktop linux running on termux.
- qqii 6y ago
  It would depend on what services you'd like to run though. A decent chunk of apps may need proot to run in pure termux and others for you to root your device. Mobile (proper) Linux support for devices is still not thst great even if arm support for most applications is there.
traverseda 6y ago
I hear the pinebook pro is pretty nice.

mumblemumble 6y ago

Maybe read page 3 before you try. It doesn't sound like it fared too well running Fedora, either. Maybe a really stripped down Linux, without X, would work, though. Though, if your needs are so modest, why not go for an ARM-based linux laptop? You can almost certainly get something that will deliver a better experience at a lower price point. The only reason I can think of to choose something like this instead is if you absolutely need x86 for some reason.

zozbot234 6y ago
The standard Fedora install runs GNOME and comes with lots of unneeded packages installed. Debian running Xfce (or even the old-style LXDE) will be a lot leaner and meaner on these specs, though sometimes Fedora has better hardware support.
eyerony 6y ago
I trialed a 2GB memory, dual-core-no-hyperthreading low-clocked Celeron ("hacked") Asus Chromebox as a workstation a couple weeks ago. As long as you can avoid running electron or other webshit and don't mind doing some things on the command line it could handle light tiling window managers (i3, dwm, awesome) just fine, even at 4K. Actually the Web was even pretty OK as long as I only had a couple pages open at a time and used Surf (just trying to open Firefox took so long I gave up—Surf is almost instant) If you've got a remote machine for you VMs or Docker and maybe for some remote X sessions for heavier web browsing, it's viable. Really as long as I avoided web garbage and used light software the thing felt fast. Very responsive, low input latency. Hell it even booted much faster than the beast of a machine I replaced it with (that's Void Linux's doing, by having a minimal default boot environment so the boot process isn't doing very much that I haven't explicitly told it to do, so no useless-to-me daemons or scripts slow the boot). Which shouldn't really be that surprising since my primary development and gaming desktop at one time was a fraction as powerful and did GUI multitasking just fine (including Firefox—I maintain they really lost their way as the lightweight-but-still-featureful browser we all loved after the 1.x series and have never been as good since), but, it is surprising these days when we have single browser tabs that can just about fill 2GB of RAM all on their own and forget what modern computers can do when we're not using them to run the computing equivalents of 3-legged-races. Only reasons I didn't upgrade the RAM and keep going with the experiment were 1) it could only drive my 60hz 4K display at 30hz, and 2) manually dicking around trying to fix 4K scaling issues isn't my idea of a good time and you pretty much have to run a heavy desktop on Linux to eliminate those problems without tons of fiddling, it seems, and such a machine cannot handle Gnome3 or KDE and all their background crap and Javascript (ew) and such.
catalogia 6y ago
They tried it with Wayland/GNOME. I'm guessing something like X11/i3 would fair a lot better. I'd not buy one to test that theory though.
- majewsky 6y ago
  Or rather Wayland/Sway to get a modern i3 experience without the dead weight of X11.
  - catalogia 6y ago
    My experience with that is that it runs hotter. X11 may be full of cobwebs but it doesn't run hot, at least in my experience.

neurostimulant 6y ago

With the dual core amd cpu throttled down to 1.5ghz, a cheap phone running termux is likely more performant than this laptop. For $140 you could buy a cheap android phone with a mediatek 2ghz octacore processor, 3gb of ram and 32gb storage. You can cast the screen to a chromecast, connect external/usb keyboard and launch termux, and you'll have a computing device much faster than this laptop. Heck, you can even run X via a vnc viewer if you want desktop linux running on termux.

qqii 6y ago
It would depend on what services you'd like to run though. A decent chunk of apps may need proot to run in pure termux and others for you to root your device. Mobile (proper) Linux support for devices is still not thst great even if arm support for most applications is there.

traverseda 6y ago

I hear the pinebook pro is pretty nice.