Coydon Wallham wrote:
I think if you read back through the thread you will find most are concerned about the ability of the machines to provide a long service life. The energy used by a device is usually trivial compared to that used in manufacturing it's various parts, depending on the period of comparison. Computers also contain various parts that will not biodegrade and are more toxic than normal waste.
Gotcha. That's how I perceive our 20 year old vehicles. Not the most efficient but most of the environmental and labor costs were in them the day they rolled off the assembly line. Buying a new 'efficient' vehicle would create all of those costs (and more in the case of EVs) again.
It's a difficult thing to measure though. Running an old old Pentium 5 or Athlon you found in a closet would avoid production costs of a new PC but unless you also need a space heater, maybe not the best choice. LOL (of course there are plenty of used laptops on ebay and govdeals.com has tons of Chromebooks that school districts are dumping)
Coydon Wallham wrote:
The fact that the Evolve will run Windows 10 fine but not an Ubuntu distro would be a flag to me that it probably includes various proprietary parts so will not work well with open source OSes. This means when Windows bloat renders it unuseable in a future release and Microsoft discontinues support for 10, it might as well be discarded, even if the parts hold up to the test of time.
I think you may have come to the wrong conclusion. Everything WORKS in Ubuntu. It is just a little laggier than Windows. It might be happier with a lighter Linux distro like Mint.
Windows updates would render the little 64gb emmc useless pretty quickly. Windows 10 edu includes gpedit so I used it to turn off windows updates. I also turned off Windows defender realtime protection but that might be unwise for most depending on what you're doing with it.
Rather than installing apps on the main disk, I added the portableapps.com suite of apps to the m.2 disk. You can run these from a thumb drive (or the microSD card in this case) but I often run them directly on a PC/laptop just because they tend to be lightweight, only run when you want them to, and you can control when they all get updated from one spot. Many of the apps you already use are in there. Libreoffice, VLC, FileZilla, GIMP, Blender, 7zip, Chrome, Firefox, etc.
This laptop even runs ultimaker cura reasonably well! (3d printing slicer)
Coydon Wallham wrote:
For someone on a budget in an off grid situation, that sure is one hell of a bargain though...
True. I travel to an off grid location often and having a laptop that can run directly from DC without any inverter is nice. But I think this laptop would be good for anyone who is travelling light.
The laptop is small and lightweight. Feels sturdy enough for its weight. Has 4 cores, usb 3, a mini hdmi port (for a second monitor or to connect to a TV). Display is only 1366x768 but that is plenty for its size. One downside is I think it only does 2.4GHz wifi but if you really need 5GHz you can use a USB dongle.
It does not have a fan but does not get hot. So I expect the CPU is very energy efficient. I'm using the laptop now, and have not charged it in about 8hrs. Battery gauge says 29% remaining and estimates 3h10min left. I've mostly been using the web browser (Brave), not videos.
