If it's advertised as a case and it works, why is it a scam? I don't own a 3D printer, nor do I know anyone who does. If someone is designing, printing, and selling a useful product, why is that a scam?
I think they are saying people mislead customers into thinking they are getting a "$60 gaming pc" when they are actually just getting a 3d printed case with nothing inside.
If you are selling a product for way more than it should cost (like a $60 3D printed case), when that cost is the exact price that a popular blog says the computer costs, you are intentionally hoping to prey on people mistaking your listing for the actual computer.
You can make all sorts of arguments about possible reasons for charging that exact price for that exact product, but no reasonable person is going to buy that.
Automatically no 3d printed case is worth $300 because it's not possible to make it good enough quality.
A metal and wood case could be worth $300.
A good design is worth something, and a good printing job is worth something, and the convenience of a service is worth something, but no amount of good design and quality printing job and service convenience can make a 3d printed case worth more than about $50 before shipping, and it would need to be somehow pretty special design to overcome some basic material and process weaknesses and still be functional and look good to be worth that much.
$300 is too high, but $50 is too low. 3D print sellers aren't doing injection molded parts at scale, nor offshoring the labor. For GP's linked case file; between the filament, the compatible linked switch and fan hardware not purchased by the thousands, and someone paying themself at least minimum wage to print all 46 individual parts and then to partially assemble and package it up nicely (and not counting printer hardware depreciation or electricity), $50 for it is not a viable product to sell or to run as a business. That's the price I would budget for making it myself with the 3D printer I already own and not counting my time as a cost, not something I would waste my time with selling.
Because the sellers are categorizing them as computers on ebay and filling in all of the appropriate specifications as if it was the computer, and only putting in the description "CASE ONLY, DOES NOT INCLUDE ANY COMPUTER PARTS".
The M5 Max's GPU is slower than a single RTX 3090, though.
Both machines will be stuck in the 30-50GB model range, but the 3090 would have faster token prefill and faster decode speeds (614GB/s on M5 Max vs 936GB/s on 1x 3090).
> Both machines will be stuck in the 30-50GB model range,
That is not true.
3090 is only 24GB.
It will absolutely outperform the M5 on models that will fit in that space, but M5 will outperform with larger models as the whole 128GB is GPU addressable.
Well I had to move music off a 10 year old laptop and I can assure you things aren't slower in the ways that matter. It was borderline unusable. I am happy with SSDs and not getting viruses off of websites, personally.
Until recently, it was always cheaper to forego software architecture optimizations and rely on faster hardware, but now with AI I think this changes that calculus.
I've done that with mine. Worked great, and now I get around 30 hours of battery life with a lean linux distro, as long as I'm only like reading websites or writing on it.
>Which windows program are you looking for, specifically?
All of them, specifically.
I don't want to think about which windows program can or can't run with Wine.
This includes:
* Microsoft software, from MSTeams to Windows itself
* Audio production software (DAWs and VST plug-ins)
* Games
* Device-specific software (like drivers/software for portable thermal printers)
* CAD (nTop, only supports Windows, for example, and don't tell me I don't need it; same for many Autodesk products. NX and Rhino don't have Linux support)
The last one is the most fun, as I'm a CAD developer who worked on nTop in particular.
We'll have to see how the AI softwarepocalypse goes. If I only need 10% of the features of Photoshop, I really don't need to be spending money on the full software suite.
tbh audio might be the hardest fit here - low-channel sound cards on low-end devices is pretty common, last I looked, and it tends to be CPU-heavy (and these tend to use very weak CPUs). you'd probably be fine rendering it out and checking the result (slow but afaik not usually memory heavy), but it may struggle with scrubbing around.
hard to say without actually trying it tho. and depends on the device, of course - mine was like $250 when new, it's a very different beast than a $1,000+ chromebook. the higher-end ones are much closer to normal laptops.
Let's say, digital audio production and digital synths running on commodity PCs was a thing since the 1980s.
I'm OK with having computational limitations that musicmakers had in 2000s. Heck, some of my favorite softsynths are from that time (Superwave P8, 4Front and other romplers, Dexed, etc).
The weak CPUs today handle them without a problem.
Hell, I've produced plenty of music on Intel Atom-powered Asus Eee1000 netbook back in what was it, 2008-2010, and I'm still using the very same software.
>low-channel sound cards
What do you even mean by this?
In any case, a USB audio adapter that solves all the audio issues costs $20 these days.
Aside from Microsoft Office, the rest is workstation stuff, and Microsoft Office is pushing "web first" (at least if their pricing is to be believed, the lowest O365 subscriptions do not offer access to the native apps).
The netbook is a small and inexpensive machine that has enough specs to do the job.
And most computers today are beefed up enough to do the jobs I need them to do when I leave the house/office, even the cheapest ones.
Given the ability to run the software I use, my concerns are form factor, price, size, weight, ports, and battery life — in that order.
This little machine ticks all these boxes; very few others do.
Call it a "workstation laptop", and find me one in 10-11 inch size (with a screen that doesn't have 1 inch margins), has an amount of RAM that would be adequate 10 years ago (i.e. more than 4GB), has all the ports, and doesn't cost over $500 (so I won't have to care much when it invariably gets lost, stolen, dropped, etc).
That sounds like an opinion baked in 2013 and never revisited. A modern chromebook with Crostini can run basically any Linux desktop stack you want. Like, what exactly are the tasks you need from a "computer that you could use like a normal computer" that you aren't getting today?
As a data point: I'm 100% converted personally. A Chromebook is what goes into my backpack and the device I use for all my general day-to-day UI clickery, and it's a better fit for my needs than Windows (not nearly as bad as it used to be but still sort of a PITA to make work as a Linux-focused dev environment) or Linux (not nearly as much of a PITA for a connected consumer network device but still has the occasional wart trying to get something weird to run).
Crostini is a mixed bag; e.g. IIRC something in their stack breaks ptrace. I prefer to wipe and install a normal Linux distro. But, when it works it works, and I do use one Chromebook with Crostini.
ptrace works fine on crostini. The guest kernel has Yama enabled, which restricts it to root for boring security reasons. You can do your debugging at a root shell or turn the setting (yama/ptrace_scope) off via sysctl.
> A modern chromebook with Crostini can run basically any Linux desktop stack you want. Like, what exactly are the tasks you need from a "computer that you could use like a normal computer" that you aren't getting today?
Well... yeah. Likewise your post is clearly about your needs, which are different. But that's not what you said, you said it "wasn't a computer" and you couldn't use it "like a normal computer". Which is obviously wrong. But I guess "normal computer" means "windows" to you, which (especially given the forum you posted on!) is a little surprising.
So what you wrote (but apparently not meant) seemed mistaken to me, thus the correction. But if you want windows then just buy windows. Your market is well served.
You're losing me. Your first reply says "A computer that meets my needs must provide a choice of OSes", your second says "A computer that meets my needs must run one specific OS". To be blunt: your reasoning here is simply bunk and I don't understand it.
If you must use windows, then you must use windows and you don't have a choice. None of that has anything to do with the nonsense about Chromebooks not being "real computers" or whatever, that's just the rationalization you've decided on. Obviously they are real computers.
> Normal computer means a choice of OS to run on it without having to hack it to do that job.
That's too high a standard. When we consider MacOS along with Windows and Linux, there are basically no computers that let you freely choose between all three without hacks.
And even just considering Windows and Linux, a big chunk of the laptop market only supports Windows properly.
A laptop that runs any normal desktop OS is a normal computer.
That works great until you inevitably need to launch some streaming service that doesn't work on Linux Chrome or whatever. The needs of "general consumer junk we all deal with" are real. I spent decades on the "I don't actually need that stuff" hamster wheel too, and... yeah, it sucks and I'm too old for that.
A Chromebook is a first class consumer device backed by a Big Threatening Tech Giant that works on all sites everywhere because no one wants to piss off Google. And it's still Linux and runs great. I'll take it.
I was too, and then AI came out, and now Codex just makes my Linux work how I want it, no needing to fiddle with .config/gconf whatever crap. I just tell it to fix my two finger scrolling on my trackpad, and it does it.
AI can't make the Mandalorian or The Last of Us play, though. This may have been fixed or worked around now, but for sure Disney+ and HBO were holdouts that refused to work on a Linux Chrome, Widevine be damned.
I mean, sure, I can torrent a copy or whatever. But there's a point at which you just don't want to deal with that nonsense. ChromeOS is Linux, in all the ways I care to measure. But it codes as "not Linux" to all the corporate overlords afraid of the nerds and hippies, and that has value too.
A local abliterated AI model with computer use could totally do the drudgery of "torrent a copy or whatever". AI deals with "that nonsense" now.
> ChromeOS is Linux, in all the ways I care to measure.
It's Linux the same way Android is technically Linux. You get this little box called Linux, and /proc isn't actually the "real" /proc because it's inside a VM. To each their own, but it's not (GNU) Linux enough for me.
Back when Chromebooks and Netbooks were contemporaries, yours was a much harder proposition. I had an awful time getting Linux on my first gen Chromebook
I've heard that on the new ones they've illegally made it not possible anymore, but haven't experienced direct evidence of that yet. For mine I had to remove a screw from the motherboard but it wasn't that difficult. Not much worse than jumper for boot order in ye olde days
My suggestion? If you want a Chromebook to run Linux, look for surplus school laptops instead. My throwaround workshop laptop is an Asus that to me looks like it was clearly sold in an educational Chromebook format as well--partially ruggedized, partially waterproof, 12", N100, plastic blank where the camera should be, still only $120
Basically, if you're lucky, you can find Chromebook-class PCs with less restrictions. Admittedly I'm in a lucky locale for such things, but the one in question i bought from a normal retailer
What is there to be afraid of? Don't you have backups?
Also, debian/ubuntu systems can easily be setup to auto update and reboot on a regular basis, leaving you manual maintenance only for the larger version upgrades.
Yes because you can always do a dusaster recovery by reinstalling and restoring data.
A reboot doesn't break anything. Bugs do.
Any time I had a regression after a kernel update on a linux distro I could boot it on a prior version from the grub menu. Any time I had a regression with a software package I could rollback to a prior version. Rolling back updates is a problem that has been solved for decades, at least on linux systems.
The key with unattended upgrade is you want to have decent monitoring to make sure you never run out of disc space and do not figure it out weeks later if you have had an issue.
You might want to restart services after they or libraries dependencies get updated. On debian based distros, updated packages automatically take care of restarting the service but it might not happen when only a dependency has been updated.
In the end it is easier to schedule a weekly reboot window if packages have been updated. You aren't running a single server if you are interested in 99.99999990% of uptime anyway.
Imho a regular reboot is good practice: you are more likely to remember what you did a week earlier if an app/service fail to restart after you tweaked a config file than if it happens months later.
There is no reason to be afraid of reboot when they happen on a regular basis.
This post resonates. I recently built a little web service to scratch an itch I've been having and after discussing the options with Claude we settled on Go, and honestly it's been fantastic. Highly performant, native threading, dead simple to deploy with containers. And I don't even know how to read or write Go.
Oh man... I like go because it is compiled, performant, strong and statically typed. But "fun" is not something I would say about it. The ergonomics of error handling, lack of ternary operator and other stuff that compiled 30yo languages already had ...
Idk, I'm having fun with it. The good outweighs the bad for me, and idk why people get so bristly about handling errors, it's more straightforward to debug than nested try/catches
That sort of syntactic sugar goes against the Go philosophy. Don't get me wrong, I share your frustration, but I also see the value of consistency in their philosophy.
I'm starting to think all these languages having their own pet "philosophies" that is "totally better than X" is a shitshow and just personal preference masquerading as standards.
I did go through the Go tutorial many many years ago, but it's been so long I don't remember anything. I do remember it was an enjoyable process though, and I'd love to pick it up again.
