The uConsole has been my main computer for more than a year at this point. I feel qualified to answer some of the questions here given the amount of hours of use I have put on this thing, so here are my honest opinions, good and bad. I still have the stock CM4-Lite with 4GB RAM.
Yes, the introduction of other OSes besides the godawful Raspbian distro supplied by ClockworkPi, which has repositories full of broken packages and is so terrible for C development that I had to run OpenBSD in Qemu to get any work done. Arch has made life easier but compared to the stock OS I’d even take the Debian or Debian-with-five-more-packages images that pop up here.
I find your point valid, but in an enthusiast forum perhaps not as relevant. Here is where you are more likely to find people burning a couple kilos of coal an hour (or getting people paid a tenth their salary to do it, through enough layers of indirection to not have to think about it) in order to render “AI frame interlacing” or “reticulated splines” or whatever combination of polysyllabic buzzwords has been advertised by some bald e-celebrity. This is entertainment, yes, but not harmful except when considering circumstances outside the users’ control. It’s a bit unfair to discredit someone’s escape from the awfulness of the world because it happens to be powered (literally and psychologically) by the same conditions that lead the world to become awful. Also, people make livelihoods out of pushing buttons to get those blinkenlights to flicker in nicer patterns, and it’s harder to get paid to do something nicer to the environment.
With that aside, I run, regularly and often simultaneously:
- Firefox (which I’m using to write this)
- KeePassXC
- Nicotine+
- two foot terminals multiplied by four tmux windows (currently open)
And they all get along well, except Firefox, which doesn’t get along with anyone (don’t blame her, she has bad parents). I don’t have any problems with anything other than battery life, caused by my own power consumption and remedied by ARM’s boot times which are almost as good as my Commodore 64’s, and lack of Internet, for which I just ordered a USB LTE modem, because HackerGadgets’ SDR board is too good to live without.
Not only did my uConsole replace my laptop, it also does much of what my phone used to (music and media), and through the SDR board, it has replaced my radio as well. And it fits in my purse!
This depends. I’d call this roughly equivalent to my T420 from 2012, and better than my X200 from the late 00s. Years are misleading; the T420 would still be a comfortable daily driver for me, it would just take at least six times as much electricity to do so.
Yes, this sucks. There is no way around it; the uConsole keyboard holds up well, is very hackable, has a great mapping, and feels like trying to thumb commands into an older person’s forehead. The travel is terrible and the mushiness makes it even worse. Over time the silicone or whatever has worn at the skin on my thumbs, too, which is weird but I guess I do use my uConsole way more than is reasonable. Also, the keyboard backlight is uneven and doesn’t illuminate the Fn chord notes.
I can watch the Star Trek remasters at 1440p or so with mpv like this, and often do. I don’t think I’ve been able to get it working with any other player. For me it takes --gpu-sw
as well, otherwise I get weird errors I didn’t care to debug.
For me the hardest part is the unwanted attention. Everyone wants to know what the uConsole is, and wants to buy it, or mine specifically. It draws eyeballs on the bus and people sometimes get worried about me “hacking them”. I guess it’s one of those simple concepts that addresses a need well; the portability of the phone and the flexibility of a laptop.