Originally Posted by immi.shk (Post 1538845)

Currently by the end of 2017, there are a few Linux/win machines which are pretty nice and compact.
and
"which really exist"

1 GPD Win
https://i.imgur.com/e8SOJqt.jpg
64 GB internal
4GB Ram
full qwerty + gaming keys which acts as mouse
1 usb 3.0
1 full hdmi
1 micro sd
full windows 10
Ubuntu working

Originally Posted by endsormeans (Post 1539738)

Thanks for that Ken...
I was considering getting a GPD
now with your findings...
I won't even bother.
.

Originally Posted by Ken-Young (Post 1539737)

I was given a GPD Win for Christmas, and though Ubuntu and Arch Linux do indeed run on it, many, many things such as:

1) WiFi
2) Battery charging
3) Sound
4) Screen brightness
5) Screen orientation
6) suspend/resume
7) Battery monitoring

etc, etc don't work if you just install a distro from an ISO image. To even get the ISO image to boot from a thumb drive, you must downgrade the BIOS because the BIOS shipped with new units is dumbed-down to the point of uselessness. There are fixes for many of these issues posted here and there on the web, but except for the WiFi fix they involve building a custom kernel, along with lots of other tweaks. I'm still piddling around with it, but I can tell that this will be a device that will never completely work when running Linux.

Also, on my unit at least, the backlight is quite nonuniform, so there are areas of the screen which are significantly brighter than others. The touch screen is not very responsive. Graphics are very slow compared to what you get on a modern mobile phone. Overall, the Atom processor seems about 1/2 as fast as a Snapdragon 821. It's quite an indictment of Intel that a fan is needed to cool this processor.

*sigh* I wish I believed I would live long enough to see the Pyra shipped.

Originally Posted by Ken-Young (Post 1538840)

Sadly, Android version 8 (Oreo) broke gnuroot Debian (see https://github.com/corbinlc/GNURootDebian/issues/206). It looks like the issue may be "seccomp filtering" which was added in Oreo. This problem was noticed immediately upon the initial release of Oreo, a couple of months ago, and it has not been fixed yet. I get the feeling that gnuroot Debian has fewer people working on it than Termux does.

I've used both, and gnuroot Debian seemed to give a more "fully gnu/linux" feeling than Termux does. It felt like a regular changeroot environment. gnuroot Debian has an integrated X11 server, which Termux does not.

However, gnuroot Debian is a 32 bit Arm environment, and Termux is 64 bit. Even if you disabled wakelock and wifilock on gnuroot Debian, it still occasionally drained significant battery power even when you weren't running any code with it. Termux doesn't do that. Also, Termux supports setting up scripts that are run whenever the handset is booted, and also can be integrated with Tasker.

Termux only supports passwordless ssh logins to the handset; there is no concept of a user account, so you have to copy your public ssh keys onto the handset if you want to allow logins via sshd, and since there's no password then, it's a bit less secure than logging in using sshd under gnuroot Debian.

Originally Posted by Ken-Young (Post 1542019)

From Hacker News today:

https://www.giantpockets.com/?p=5615