Over the weekend I was given a crap 2in1 notebook. It is 10 years old and even by standards back then had low end hardware (MSRP was 300 Euro according to some googling).
The Atom CPU is 64bits, the UEFI 32bits – a combinaon I completely forgot existed and many distributions no longer support.
Not only does postmarketOS support 32bit UEFI, thanks to its smartphone focus it comes with zram preconfigured. Installation was easy using the graphical installer for generic x86-64.
So now I run a fully featured desktop, KDE Plasma, on it. None of that “lightweight” stuff that sacrifices features and usability for a few megabytes of RAM.
I only tweaked it a little bit. Firefox ran like shit. Chromium was better in that regard but for whatver reason YouTube specifically kept logging me out. Also RAM ran out once and Chromium was force closed by the OS.
I ended up installing KDE’s Falkon browser which offers the benefits of Chromium’s rendering speed without the logging out of YouTube part. It’s also a bit less resource intensive, yet comes wih an ad blocker and support for user scripts which relieves the lack of proper extensions.
pmOS doesn’t come with swap by default. I added a swap file which is quickly done. It’s barely used since switching to Falkon, currently only 100MB.
YouTube video playback at 1080p is smooth. Zero problems with suspend so far.
I’m not sure if it’s the result of defective hardware or just driver incompatibilities but Bluetooth is not recognized (bummer) and the camera isn’t either (don’t care for it).
Long story short:
I rescued a crap PC from the scrap pile. It’s now genuinely usable, albeit with the aformentioned caveats.
These low end computers are always a fun challenge. You end up trying a bunch of programs you have never even heard of, and you can also learn something along the way.
pmOS / Alpine Linux is definitively a bit outside my comfort zone. The
apkpackage manager is so weird with itsaddanddelcommands instead ofinstallandremoveeveryone else uses.I can see they were aiming for shorter commands. Makes sense if you have to type them using a mobile phone.
zypper on openSUSE has aliases “in” and “rm”: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Pacman/Rosetta#Basic_operations
How’s the hardware support? Track pad, wifi etc?
In essence it’s not much different than regular Linux distributions. There are some quirks related to pmOS being a derivative of Alpine Linux. It uses musl instead of glibc, so don’t expect meaningful NVidia support. Other than that, it’s regular kernel, regular Mesa. (Native package selection is much smaller than anything mainstream, Flatpak works, though.)
I couldn’t get a stable WiFi connection using WPA3 Personal. Not sure what the fault is. Switching the connection over to WPA2 in Plasma’s Network settings did the trick. This PC’s trackpad and touchscreen work absolutely fine but – and I think that’s how the hardware is designed and nothing to do with pmOS – the trackpad doesn’t show up as trackpad but as a mouse. So I cannot reconfigure it to use two finger scrolling. Scrolling is always on the left edge.
Websites claim that this PC supports bluetooth but the adapter doesn’t show. As I wrote in another comment, I suspect a hardware defect, given how abnormally unstable Windows 10 was. I need to get my hands on a USB Bluetooth dongle. I use my headphones via USB in the meantime which physically tethers me to the device but works fine.
Interesting, I got almost the same hardware, (not a 3735F but G and only 1gb of ram )but I couldn’t get good performance with linux , video playback was limited to 720p using freetube with Debian and with lubuntu it was even worse.With windows ( a lighter version ofc) however playing 1080p was really smooth with no hiccups during a whole movie with vlc, same with jellyfin, I just wasn’t able to find a working driver for the touch panel.I know that with only 1 GB of ram I can’t expect much but I find the graphical part somewhat lacking on Linux… The Bluetooth was working on mine with Linux, but was a real pain to get to work on windows , no cameras ether on Linux but recognised on windows. For now windows does the job but for the 64 bit support I kinda miss Linux . thanks for sharing your experience , this might motivate me once again !
ultra-low end Z3735
It’s not “low end”, this chip was obsolete 12 years ago on release, let alone now.
How do I report self-harm on lemmy?
Well it’s Ultra low end. Hyper low end is an Intel 8088
How do I report self-harm on lemmy?
They way it ran Win10 was definitively infuriating. Firefox, too.
pmOS + Falkon is fine.
As a ultra low end user, you caught my interest here! Definitely gonna try
I have an old Asus 2-in-1 I might try this with. I had it running Linux Mint then messed it up with Fedora somehow. I know it has a 64-bit Intel CPU and a 32-bit UEFI like yours does. Thanks for the write up!
If it has a replaceable drive you could check the bluetooth by putting in a new drive and installing somwthing like windows 7 just to see if it is in fact a driver error
It came with a factory reset version of Win10 but that ran so insanely bad, it kept crashing which to this degree isn’t normal even for Windows which is why I suspect faulty hardware.
I tried and tried to get postmarketos running on my 2013 Nexus 7 but never could get it to work.
I’m in the same boat, have a 2012, can’t even get through the instructions.
Curious, which part do you get stuck at? I get all the way to the point where I flash the rootfs and it fails complaining that there isn’t enough space even though I specify the userdata partition as the target partition which has ~12GB of free space.
I didn’t read much about phones and ARM tablets but I got the impression it’s like flashing a custom Android ROM.
I have a similar machine that was no longer usable after Windows 10 EOL. I installed Mint on it and it works fine.
Might have to give it a shot, I tried a couple different lightweight OSs on my old Chromebook, maybe this one will feel right.
The graphical installer is a it bare bones but easy to use. Setup is slow because in the background it generates a disk image of packages that are being downloaded and the write speed of my USB drive was a big bottle neck. Selection of native packages isn’t the greatest but pmOS comes with Flathub configured out of the box. (I’m usually a proponent of Flatpak but being so memory constrained, I refrain from the overhad of loading Flatpak runtimes into memory.
I don’t mind a long install. I tried bazzite on it to match my desktop, just to see, and loading up the Bazzar(app repository) crashed itself, never actually opening. Mostly I just want an Internet/media machine that’s cheap, maybe with a few other program options, but really the 2gb Ram is tough to deal with.
Great job. As I see it the real problem is that low-end Wintel laptops seem to be going away, replaced first by Chromebooks and soon probably by Android laptop edition, which presumably will have the non-Intel architecture and weird blobs and locked bootloader of any smartphone. Or is this too pessimistic?
Nah mate, it’s hard to be too pessimistic these days. That’s probably just the right amount of pessimism.
I think devices like the Framework 12 continue to be available but RAM and SSD costs won’t necessarily mean that lower end performance will not necessarily mean afforable, at least all the way through 2026.
Hmm. Having trouble parsing your negatives but I think you’re saying “expensive”.
What bothers me is that a decade ago there were loads of Linux-compatible budget netbooks on sale at every big-box retailer, whereas there seems to be nothing today under 500 bucks/euro except Chromebooks, and nothing at all with a smallish screen except mega-expensive ultrabooks. It’s becoming a problem.
Luckily the second hand laptops from that era are still usually perfectly usable if you install some FOSS OS on it (Linux, BSDs, the various more obscure ones, tend to work fine on old computers). You can pick them up for quite cheap on ebay and the like, and then you have a perfectly usable daily driver (plus from before the era of seemingly trying to get rid of all the ports on a laptop).
Yeah, all surely true and it’s always the solution given and it’s even the greenest one. But I just don’t think this is a real solution for normies, who tend to buy computers new (to the extent that they even buy them any more). And in this respect I’m like them, personally.
I’ve an old eeepc Ive been wanting to resurrect. Maybe I’ll try this on there.
And a clamshell MacBook with a power PC processor. But that one doesn’t seem to ever recognize a boot disk.
I’ve an old eeepc Ive been wanting to resurrect. Maybe I’ll try this on there.
Other than the installer wiping all the data, there is little to lose.
Boy do we have different definition of ultra low end. I find that machine low end but not extremely so.
I’d say your definition is an odd one, then.
OP’s hardware is extremely low end.
While in windows world that might be so, that hardware is in no way an extreme case to run a linux distro on. Just a normal walk in the park.
It really isn’t. It’s extremely low end.
It’s already established that we disagree. There’s no point continuing this conversation.
Then why are you continuing? I’m not saying that you can’t disagree, you’re free to disagree.
I’m just saying it’s extremely low end, and it’s true.
that hardware is in no way an extreme case to run a linux distro on. Just a normal walk in the park.
“The Atom CPU is 64bits, the UEFI 32bits – a combinaon […] many distributions no longer support.”
So no
I agree to disagree
Support for 32 bit UEFI on 64 bit Linux is a matter of facts, not a matter to come to an agreement.
Yes, but it being super niche with extreme support is.
Mainstream distributions no longer support my setup, so it’s niche.
