alt Hacker NewsI'm buying up broken screen old Android smartphone instead.
For example I got several broken screen Huawei P20s from 2018, they were 10€ each. 128GB storage with 4GB RAM https://www.gsmarena.com/huawei_p20-9107.php
They boot up, you can install termux and then whatever is your choice of Linux software. I run several copyparty instances for friends and family
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.termux/
https://github.com/9001/copyparty
The only thing I'm not a big fan of is the charging. Non-removable battery, already 8 or so years old, obviously the phone needs power to work. So I'm a bit worried about the fire hazard.
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Doesn't Android have rather aggressive battery saving features which kill processes and put the phone to sleep after so long of being idle? Is there an easy way around that?
The battery is a free built-in UPS and isn't a fire hazard unless the charging electronics were designed spectacularly poorly. The BMS knows to stop charging the battery when it's full. All of these phones probably use the same set of well-known BMS chips, I would imagine.
Android TV boxes are also great.
Slightly more expensive but you won't have to deal with battery health and the new ones come with a 1GB NIC and USB 3 ports!
To add onto this for others.
There is Android TalkBack (for poor vision) which is available on first boot/factory reset that narrates the menu. Even with a completely broken screen you can get ADB set up.
Was considering doing the same until I found a couple old pine64 on eBay for ~$25 (2016, 4 core allwinner CPU, 2gb ddr3)
Sometimes there are pretty good deals on laptops, especially off lease. I've seen some $400-500 w/ 32GB RAM pop up on Slickdeals every few months.
You can get plenty of mini PCs, used computers and used phones in that price range. They aren’t a substitute for owning a raspberry pi though.
are you running an EOL OS with an unpatchable kernel? phones have a lot of limitations as general purpose computers
Or buy used laptops with defects like broken screen or keyboard from FB marketplace.
this is the way. samsung dex is pretty awesome to turn them into pseudo desktop computers.
>Huawei P20
>The only thing I'm not a big fan of is the charging. Non-removable battery, already 8 or so years old, obviously the phone needs power to work. So I'm a bit worried about the fire hazard.
My family (n=3) owned the Huawei P20 Pro (acquired at the same time in the same promo, perhaps the same batch?). This product line seems to have serious issues with battery swelling. Each phone had spicy pillows at some point within 2 years of ownership. Even outside the warranty period, Huawei was willing to replace the battery at their cost, at their contracted Toronto repair centre. Each of the repaired phones had their spicy pillows return within 6-9 months. Huawei was still willing to repair the phones, but at that point I'd rather have recycled it. I strongly suspect Huawei was avoiding doing a voluntary recall and triaging it through their RMA process, given how little resistance their customer support put up (they immediately sent back an RMA label without requiring any pictures).