What is a computer price calculator?

As most of my readers know I’m a proponent of simple and reproducable installation as the best form of disaster recovery. What they might not know is that right now my POPOS desktop has failed in a not so nice way. Something in the AMDGPU code is causing some very bad memory allocation errors that have been hanging and crashing my desktop. Luckily I have loads of spare backups systems.

Even more lucky is that I really wanted to push my OpenBSD desktop to my desktop. So I powered up an older Intel NUC which already had OpenBSD 7.1 installed. I upgraded to OpenBSD 7.2 and then started configuring X. The X installation was pretty much out of the box but there were a few customizations I needed to add. Also, while I try on the Chrome browser is was rev’d back far enough that I wanted move to a current FireFox. DONE.

One thing that stings is that I need a laptop. I have plenty of Android and ChromeOS devices but because of the quirkiness of my work VPN I need something more robust. And while Linux does work (see hpdevone.com) I still want a more professional solution. Also the hpdevone has a related amdgpu error that has yet to be repaired.

I’ve been pricing a number of Lenovo models like the T14, T490, X1 Carbin and X1 Nano but all of them seem to be expensive. Also as many OpenBSD developers have gravitated around Lenovo … Lenovo has reused the model number and now it’s nearly impossible to determine which model actually works with OpenBSD.

It seems to me that “we” should be able to determine the wholesale or manufactured price of the system based on the hardware components [a] to decide the liklihod that the combination with work [b] whether the markup is something you’re willing to accept.

I like my hpdevone. I also like the choice of POPOS. I think I would have added a fingerprint scanner.

In the coming weeks or months there might be a dragonfly pro (ChromeOS) released… the formfactor and keyboard is very similar…. One bit of quirk is the “support” button. That’s just weird.

PS: the lenovo experience app on my tab P12 is a weird waste of time.