Re: [gNewSense-users] [OT] Lemote Yeeloong 8101B

[Michał Masłowski]

> Are there any users of this machine?

There are.

> Could you share your experience?
> I'd like to hear about practical disadvantages.
> (Yeah, I know that freedom is more important.)

Practical disadvantages I experienced:

- reducing the screen brightness makes it flicker
- touchpad: no middle button (my other laptop has different layout
  making simultaneous left and right click possible), limited driver
  without xf86-input-synaptics support
- very loud fan
- I spend too much time hacking Parabola (it uses a rarer and more
  efficient ABI, is not based on a portable distro like Debian)
- it has only 1 GiB of RAM and a single process can use only 2 GiB in
  all free distros supporting it (it's a problem when debugging big programs)
- it's slow for GCC or GHC builds
- the SMI712 graphics chip has no 3d acceleration and without
  non-upstream driver patches has quickly degrading performance (and
  hangs on various settings)
- the VGA output has low quality and poor GPU support
- the disk interface is slow

You probably know the advantages like free BIOS, no need for nonfree
drivers or OS-provided firmware, small size, friendly free software
hackers using it and interesting MIPS-compatible CPU.

> I've heard that it's not very fast and its battery discharges quickly
> (less than 2 hours).
> Do you use something like this [1] to fix the battery issue?
>
> [1] http://www.xpalpower.com/us/products/xp18000/

A Parabola hacker uses a different external battery.  I don't need to
leave it unplugged for long.

The speed is not a problem unless compiling distro packages or using
Java (although its problem is also missing JIT).  Video players are
usable with non-upstream driver patches.

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