Where? The article mentions $399.

Compared to the Celerons found on some Chromebooks, it still counts.

…but there were already plenty of i3 (or even i5, or even R7) Chromebooks with 8 or 16 GB RAM on the market, even at the price point. I don't know what the news is supposed to be here.

Ever since the Core 2 product line, intel’s CPUs have all been fine for stuff like office use (browsing, editing files, reading email).

Well other than atoms obviously.

A Thinkpad X200 - not wiped in 13 years (since installing Arch). Truly a frankenstein’s monster of a machine now. Hardware mods are so easy on this thing - I switched to an SSD probably 10 years ago, some RAM upgrades. Upgraded Wi-Fi card a few times (mostly based off mainline kernel driver support). Touchpad a couple times, keyboard at least the same. Keeping Arch running on this machine without wiping everything is the only think keeping my Linux skills sharp in the era of company-issued macs.

I had to replace the charging port in my x220, but I did not use this usb-c one, because I didn't know at the time that it existed. It's a lengthy job (the power port is one of the first parts put into the chassis / last parts to come out) but satisfying.

I installed to an SSD in an enclosure with the hopes that it could become an eternal install that I just bring from machine to machine (perhaps DD-ing over to a new drive as SSDs advance). So far is has gone fine for like 5 or so years, but I haven’t really found the need to upgrade since then, so it is really just living as a single desktop.

Actually, this may have inspired me to try plugging it in to another machine tonight just to make sure it hadn’t gotten too dependent on that hardware. What kind of Frankenstein would I be if my monster was constrained to a single body?

One of these days, it will actually have good UX...

This... is NixOS. Immutable root. It isn't glamorous, or cool, or kid's stuff. It's the most addictive kind of package manager, and it can kill your motivation to work on actual packages. What's really bad is, nobody knows how much you'll need. Every time you use it, you risk your sanity. It isn't worth it.

Look: everybody wants to be cool. But doing it with NixOS doesn't just take long, it could be dead long.

(Disclaimer: I love Nix and couldn't leave it if I tried)

Where is it written that steam-run will magically execute most binaries without patching them? Certainly[1] not in the article that tells you how and why to patch binaries!

[1] I see now that it's linked to at the bottom "See also" section. Still awful, IMHO.

Somewhere in here: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-runtime

:p

But I do get what you're saying. Once Flakes are default, I hope people start a proper push to clear up documentation and streamline the development process. The end-result is amazing, and the perfect OS/packaging system for my needs. The means of getting there... need a lot of work. I'm along for the ride either way.

Sadly, once most laptops went over to NVME 2280 pcie cards, it got a little too tedious to constantly swap out drives any more, and I started worrying about accidentally breaking them. Also had some weird issues with very poor write speed which I thought was overheating necessating a heat sink, but it turns out nvme speeds are actually just as slow as anything else under real workloads.

Actually, it is kind of funny, I’ve got an NVME drive inside the actual computer. When I want to do something that requires fast drive speeds, I make a RAM drive. When I want more memory, I swap on the internal NVME drive.

Hypothetically could I end up writing to a file on the RAM disk, and then get it swapped to the internal drive? Mayyybe. I’m not sure if Linux will just call that too silly.

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/4746vs4754vs4765vs4104/...

1215U (accounting for the overwhelming majority of "12th gen i3" laptops) is about 75% of the performance of the lowest-tier M1, so I suppose that's in the ballpark.

Performance-per-watt is still night and day, though, with both i3 laptop chips ranging from 15W base to 55W turbo, and M1 ranging from 7W to <30W.

It doesn't seem that far from an apple m1 in benchmark I can find for the i3 12100 which is the low tier of i3s

Definitely nothing to scoff at for the market they are aiming for.

[0] https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/series/...

For example an i3-12100 is faster than a i7-9700F

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i3-12100... https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-9700F...