that’s radically different. although the serviceability is still nonexistent, that’s a very useable machine. just be prepared to toss the thing if anything breaks.

for me, that would be a deal breaker but I understand the itch to try it out. just make sure it’s not icloud locked.

the whole apple-bad thing aside, you’re getting a non-expandable 8 GB laptop, of which a significant portion goes to graphics. that’s pretty low today, and it’s gonna be worse down the road. speaking of graphics, although Asahi has basic functionality, the driver isn’t 100% yet.

I hope you don’t plan on torrenting a buncha stuff, as the SSD is small and non-replaceable and after years of use has an insane TBW number.

the battery longevity is a solid argument but you are buying a 4 year old battery that will show signs of aging.

I am all for repurpose/reuse/recycle, but unless you get it for free, or close to it, this thing s a bad idea. get a similarly aged business-class laptop (thinkpad, yoga, latitude, elitebook, etc.) that you can cram full of RAM and storage and replace practically every component if it fails.

got me a fake PS3 controller. looks the part and what’s more important - the PS button is detected!

however, I can’t get to load the update from the USB. possibly because I’m missing the BD…? I got the noBD CFW but how can I get it to load? after pressing the start+select combo it’s supposed to load the update from the USB but that’s not happening, it just says “Checking… Please wait.”. the USB drive shows no activity (it’s got a LED for r/w activity).

edit: after like a year and a half of just sitting there, it finally prompted me to press start+select for five seconds to format. upon complying, another decade or so passed before it began to install the OFW. fingers crossed!

edit 2: musta crossed those finger wrong, it’s now stuck in an update loop… starts installing and at 41% it stops with error 8002F114E. upon restart, it begins again.

CZ and dd and other “it’s 1998” tools copy the entire disk. like, you clone a 500 GB SSD with 50 GB used to another disk, guess how much data gets copied? correctomundo, the entire 500 gigs. that’s not super-healthy for the new drive and it recreates the same volume UUIDs on the target disk as the source drive, so you’re left with a mess if you keep both drives in a system.

you have a modern tool at your disposal, the mentioned btrfs send subvol | btrfs receive subvol that copies only what’s used. GRUB (you can use this opportunity to switch to systemd-boot) won’t pick up shit, you need to install it to the new drive (and remove it from the old one).

eons ago, macOS had the SuperDuper! tool, a free utility that clones the entire disk, resizing the partition in the process and copies only the data and it does that from within the OS, no booting off USB installers and such. sad to say, nothing close exists over here, you’ll just have to get good at doing things manually.

look up btrfs send and receive. you’ll be copying data from the old disk to the new. prior to that you create the same layout on the new disk (efi, boot, btrfs with LUKS, subvolumes root and home). sadly, there aren’t any readymade solutions that do this for you. big time NO on clonezilla and friends.

Thanks. Just did a check with a zip tie; the rim oscillates all over the place, it’s not like there’s just a small region that’s off and needs adjusting. I don’t think fixing it is feasible, so I guess a new wheel it is.

thanks. curse those evil bastards who didn’t have the decency to also throw away a functioning controller… I guess I’ll give up for now.

thought about maybe installing linux or something, but this thing has like 256 MB RAM, so not much point to it.

Vista. Tried to make Ubuntu work for a while but that was a shit show back then… Moved over to OS X and I was home - a beautiful UNIX where everything just worked. Stayed there for close to a decade (Lion-Mavericks-El Capitan-High Sierra-Mojave), mostly on non-Apple hardware.

Sadly, the iOS-ization ramped up so I had to rip tons of iCloud related stuff everytime I did a fresh install and then Catalina killed off 32-bit apps and brought other irritants, so I tried Fedora 35 and escaped with close to no issues.

And here I am, on Fedora 40 five years later.

thinkpads are interesting because they are heavy-duty machines that can be had for cheap on the used market. they are cheap because businesses buy them by the truckload and then offload them after three+ years and switch to Newest & Best. flooded market plus a buncha older models still around from earlier floods plus civilians selling their shit -> low price, otherwise nobody would buy them.

if you haven’t got access to such a market, either by being around where they’re being dumped directly or by having local businesses importing them in bulk and reselling them locally, then you should look elsewhere for value, as they’re only interesting if they can be had for cheap.

e.g. you have similar options from hp (elitebook) and dell (latitude), they are also business-class laptops with durability and serviceability in mind, perhaps you can find those locally.

as an aside, you should skip all AMD platforms up until 5000 series; many issues (power management, GPU performance, etc.) especially if you’re going to run linux.

first off, if you plan to scan the storage for bad “sectors”, that’s gonna take eons if the disk is of any considerable size. what’s more likely is you running the SMART self-test and that will work over any medium.

the cables absolutely can and do cause corruption, whether it’s plain SATA-SATA cables or the USB-SATA with their own controller on it; however, if you don’t have reason to suspect this particular cable/adapter is faulty, it’s not a worry vector per se.