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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: April 27th, 2026

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  • got a busted Lenovo Ideapad 520ISK out of a dumpster, missing screen but otherwise perfectly functional. the thing has i5-7200u, 8 GB, two SATA ports inside and this prompted me to look up converting the thing into a server, specifically figuring out how to run 3.5" drives off it; I’m very anti-friendly towards using USB solutions for such a task.

    searching was arduous, both web and yotube, and except one lonely forum post (remember those?) didn’t find anyone attempting let alone succeeding in running it thus. the 2.5" and 3.5" connectors are identical (there are micro SATA to SATA adapters for the DVD port) but the drives will need 12 V that the 2.5" ports ain’t got.

    what I’ve concluded is that all that’s needed is a M/F SATA extension cable which I have trouble sourcing locally; the power will come from a separate ATX PSU for the time being, although I’m sure I can pull 12 V from somewhere on the board.

    don’t got no 3d printing nor fabricating options, so it’ll likely look super-janky, but that’s not a huge concern for me now. I’ll do a write-up if I succeed.



  • I’ve downgraded my server from 1st gen i7 10 GB RAM (don’t ask) to Core 2 Duo 4 GB with the same load and barely felt it. my entire infra including desktop, laptopS, tablet, phoneS, etc costs like a third of this “missed value”.

    not shitting on your choices, but positing that the price-gouging retail market is all there is, kinda disingenuous; there’s sooo much stuff being discarded although perfectly usable.

    like, I couldn’t bear the super-expensive raspberries while they were in the $50 range, let alone now. marketplaces are awash in busted laptops, with way better value and performance. discarded corpo desktops can house cheap HDD and run 24/7 for eons. etc.







  • ixnay on anything but the vanillaest of the vanillas and that goes triple for bazzite and friends. you don’t want “intriguing” shit left behind to take care of pops, that’s a thing for you to play and experiment with.

    your solution is already staring you in the face: the ubuntu you left behind persevered even under those circumstances. either fix it and update it or install a fresh one, with a tweak here and there. and don’t touch nothing else…


  • you can rest assured I know the difference; it was completely useless, I didn’t go “problem solved, let’s nuke the fucker”. I had posts that received a barrage of downvotes and I let 'em be. had posts where the conclusion differed from what was originally intended and I’d let them be as there was value in the resolution. this was none of them things, no chance anyone would find this useful.




  • I deleted my post here specifically. it was completely useless to anyone else and 0 chance anyone could find any part of it useful.

    I’ve done that a coupla times when I determine that the post itself and the replies provide no value to anyone whatsoever.

    I wouldn’t think of removing a post otherwise, if I made an error in OP or came off stupid or sumsuch, I’d edit it for posterity; even when it’s a pile-on downvote bonanza, I wouldn’t think of touching it.


  • buncha folks are running linux on macbooks, but their experience will be of little use to you as T2 macbooks are hella complicated in that regard.

    the wifi going away, unless it’s the published fix on t2linux (restart NetworkManager on resume via systemd), is something you need to describe in more detail.

    never had/heard issues wrt trackpad, I’d have to look into that.

    not waking after sleep promptly is due to softlocks on the CPU; it will wake eventually. if you’re not happy with that, there’s a short script that shuts all cores off prior to standby and reactivates them on wake; that puts the wake time to a coupla seconds.



  • my mistake, oneplus 6 is. was sure f1 was also there but now I see it isn’t.

    the thing with halium is you have better hardware compatibility as android can use the OEM blobs, whereas you have more modern kernels, software, etc. with postmarketOS/mobian but worse hardware issues, e.g. cameras mainly.

    so based on that, choose your fighter. good luck


  • are you looking to get a phone at this stage? then skip that one and go for a Poco F1 or Oneplus 6/6T. those run the way more powerful SDM845, have faster storage, available in 6 or 8 GB RAM, and most important, have the widest suport for other linuxes, postmarketOS and mobian, as well as UT. prices should be in the same ballpark, as all of those are close to 10 years old; if you can choose, F1 can be opened way easier for battery replacement.

    those two run native mainline linux whereas UT runs on Halium (that’s like android + linux in a VM). also [email protected]

    edit: haven’t answered the question - 6 GB is obv more than enough for normal use; 4 GB ain’t.