> 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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