that’s for Fedora, for Ubuntu it’s toram I think? or was that for older versions… Esc during boot to verify, if it goes “loading to RAM” then you know it’s working.

to add to what others already said, the work from linux-surface is being adopted in the mainline, so it is possible that your hardware is already supported in a modern distro, like Fedora. boot it off a live USB image and poke around, you’ll get a better feel for it.

pro tip, at the GRUB menu press ‘e’ to edit the first item and then add rd.live.ram and that should load the image to RAM. you can then remove the USB and it’ll be way faster to navigate and it won’t touch your existing SSD install.

all Apple devices are part of a covert peer-to-peer network and its primary purpose is to facilitate the Airtags and find-my-shit apps. it runs on desktops, laptops, phones, ipads, watches, etc., including when they’re supposedly off. you can’t turn it off or opt out of it and what that crap additionally does and how secure it is is unknown.

having said that, if you run linux on an old intel-based macbook or similar (say, up to 2015 models) you’re out of that racket and similarly all Apple or iCloud based crap. they do have a permanently enabled IME but that’s true for the majority of devices sold and, dependent on your threat model, isn’t an issue per se.

not sure about the “credit card” angle as you can’t buy a new Apple device that runs linux, the asahi mess is limited to M1/2 models which are like 5 years old at this point.

using laptops as a forever-plugged-in device (regardless if workstation or server) isn’t the greatest idea. as an intermediary solution, like until you have something more permanent in place, sure. otherwise, look elsewhere.

limiting battery charge isn’t available on all laptop models and is aimed at preserving the battery’s functionality; it doesn’t solve the issue of a forever charged and never emptied battery. on the other hand, removing the battery on a lot of models limits their performance, significantly.

what is a viable solution is if you get a laptop board that runs at full power without battery, you can remove the board from the laptop, retrofit it with better cooling and additional storage (mini-PCI or M.2 to SATA adapters) and you end up with an energy-efficient server. but that requires a lot of work and is not something recommended for non-enthusiasts.

in short, sell it or swap it for something more adequate.

“the egg glides freely…”

the egg does not, in fact, glide freely. it’s also fucking burned to a crisp and there’s like an ocean of oil in there. terrible, terrible video.

so, like torify up until now? tried it on a couple of apps as a replacement, works fine. the rust build chain though, madonn’…

I run all three of those (delta on hosted IMAP servers, matrix synapse, prosody for XMPP) for various clients and each has its own issues that need work. with deltachat there is no fallback if the project stops or gets taken over or whatever. with XMPP at least you have options, this client, that client, etc. as well as decades long development. based on that, some free advice (worth what you paid for it) - don’t give up on XMPP just yet. good luck.

it’s a super-shitty experience, both on XMPP and Matrix, and you touched only on one of the aspects. and that’s not even the bad part. the bad part is nothing better is on the horizon.

so what you gotta do is put on your big boy pants, sit down and figure this shit out. here’s where I made I misstep, let’s figure out how to do redundant backups and seamless restore accross devices. etc.

because, this is it. there is nothing better coming, you gotta learn how to make do with the tech we have. offloading your shit to benevolent dictators and hoping everything will be fine is not a strategy,

yeah, that’s not possible to the extent described; it’s no macbook but that doesn’t jive with modern thinkpad touchpads. either you got a defective one or it’s caked in some spilled juice or something on the inside. add to the mix the idea that motherboards shouldn’t break when impacted, the humanity!

borg + vorta. borg is the undelying tech, vorta is the UI. the UI is a little bit rough around the edges but it’s immensely powerful for a wide array of use cases.

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.

the RX 570, a midrange GPU, launched at $170 in 2017. the timeline is moving the wrong way, shit is supposed to get better and cheaper at the same time! $500 for an 8 GB GPU - get fucked!

some dudes assemble a PC from off-the-shelf components! absolute madmen! the skillz! breakthrough! extra extra read all about it!

wtf?!

does it have coreboot or sumsuch, as it says it was “designed” for this and that? the “article” doesn’t say any of them things. try to look it up on their website, but it’s hosted on a potato on the far side of the moon, so no luck there.

marketing fluff.

there’s this thing: STAR WARS GRINDHOUSE

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.

that’s the part that’s bothering you? not evil corp doing evil things in the charge of its evil overlord?

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.

thanks. looks easy enough to implement on other distros. this was my primary issue on why I wouldn’t use it, it just seemed bonkers to me to have the game I’m playing on my other device simultaneously being blasted on the main monitor.

the only thing missing would be runtime on/off/reconfigure, as I abhor rebooting.