Can uConsole be usable as a personal computer?

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.

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How have you been holding up with the keyboard? Is it really that bad, and is there any available membrane replacement?

what’s the best os to run on the uconsole, which doesn’t use too much ram, has a good DE/window manager and is smooth and works well with uconsole?

As 4gb on cm4, need an efficient os.

How’s the ClockworkOS that comes on the micro sd card with the uConsole? Is it based off any other OS, what’s its idle ram usage, does it have any issues?

part of the ship part of the crew

it’s a ‘debian with custom kernel which is not overwritten during update’ so it’s not an instakill on update, otherwise it’s a raspbian os

yep, browsers and electron based apps the main issue, but there is no way around it so I would prefer to have extra compute power only for browser

It’s a 2025 now, you can have T490S now for 300 EUR in the shop with warranty, even cheaper on ebay

Notebook Lenovo ThinkPad T490s Touch - Intel Core i5 8365U 1.6 GHz, 8 GB, 256 GB SSD, Intel UHD Graphics 620, 14" 1920 x 1080 px, Windows 11 Pro

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it’s really good, but tiresome if type hours per day

hmm, for me I would use it undocked for like 4 hours a day and docked for about 5 hours

1440p? --gpu-sw? Are you running the vanilla mpv? I wanna see if that improves my YouTube experience.

I whipped mine out while on a meeting with a Web developer. He asked me how I acquired it. :grin:

My bet’s on Arch. But it can be too much for you to handle. So, go for Raspberry Pi OS Lite. Start barebones, then work your way up so you can remind yourself what apps you loaded.

It too is Raspberry Pi OS. But loaded with a selection of apps and games. And overall severely outdated software. Avoid like the plague and search the forum for @Rex’s selection of Debian (and one Manjaro) images.

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I would gladly pay more than is reasonable for a better replacement but I struggle to imagine an ideal. Consider, for a moment, the upsides:

  • Firmware reprogrammable. (absolutely killer)
  • Durable, partly due to good keyboard design and partly due to good case design.
  • Reasonably mapped by default. It really feels like ClockworkPi took the time to make sure this is a keyboard that could be used as often as mine is.

I can’t really imagine what I’d want in an upgrade. Travel is bad but limited by the form factor, mushiness is bad but the membrane holds up really excellently (all of these legends are still legible), micro-USB is bad (I seriously despise micro-USB) but I can’t even blame the designers for that because it is physically a smaller port than USB-C and was probably necessary to fit the profile.

Oh, to add: I’ve never even needed to plug into the micro-USB port as the same interface is exposed on pogo contacts for internal use. It’s possibly the single most forgivable micro-USB application.

So, bad for me, great for my environment. Not as hard on my thumbs as classical guitar would be.

Oh, that is neat (edit: I realize now that the described change is just what’s required for the described functionality; I still have work-brain this evening). Debian’s not for me but Rex has put a lot of time into the images and I do trust that they are very useable.

The uConsole does not offer the performance-to-cost ratio that laptops do, nor does it claim to do so. While the T490S may be of a similar price, much less would still make a fine daily driver for most casual users, and the uConsole for its other qualities is an excellent, if costlier, alternative to those lighter options.

I have two rubber-banded bundles of cables that slot into the left (USB ports on the SDR card) and right ports to connect power, input, and video in a snap. I love it a lot.

To clarify, I am decoding 1440p video but playing it at 1600x1200 (on my desk) or the internal display’s native resolution of 1280x720. Despite the --gpu-sw it does use the hardware H.264 decoder, I just had to futz with it in order to get it to choose that over Vulkan. If this is still new to you I’d be happy to share more version and configuration information, it took me a while to figure it out.

I’d like to edit this to add that as I couldn’t use Firefox to watch YouTube, and got tired of copying URLs to my terminal, I made my own little YouTube client which you may find useful. Subscription is cumbersome and there is no list of related videos or anything, but it does work for browsing most channels and the code is purposefully written very simply to be easy to change.

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I truly miss a few extra empty keys to map them as MOD button for tiled wm or other meta things. can’t bring myself to sacrifice the right alt for it.

I would like to have all double buttons converted to 2 separated ones. but it’s like wishful thinking. quite good layout, i agree.

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I’ve wondered about modifying the QMK firmware so that, when the Fn+G layer (that remaps the cursor keys to register as a d-pad) isn’t in use, each button could correspond to a Sway workspace (read: map to Alt+[1..4]), or perhaps remap them to commonly used keys like Enter, Super, Escape, or whatever. However because I’ve seen the QMK firmware fritz out due to power loss, and because I keep throwing more stuff on the USB, I’ll probably be reverting to the stock firmware once I have time to sit down and read enough documentation.

Sometime I would like to just write some new custom firmware for the keyboard, independent of either stock or QMK, but I have enough projects even just for my uConsole to not be bored for quite a while.

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with QMK you can create as many layers as you want and quite simple, I don’t want to have two step combination just to switch workspace :slight_smile:

also seems like it can be easily fixed:Fixing uConsole power delivery limitations with CM5 - #16 by QuantumKraken