Since I decided to stop maintaining the L406 because it eats batteries, the fact that it needs a new keyboard really grated on me. So last week I impulsively ordered an L210KA-ES04, "new open box" on ebay for $160. It's approximately the 12" version of my previous laptop, with similar specs but now upgraded to Celeron N4500. The new one was manufactured in July 2024. I'm gambling that churn will address the few but significant problems that I had with the L406 (battery glitches), I guess.
The first thing is, as always, the struggle to figure out how to get to the BIOS. Hold F2 while powering up the laptop.
The Devuan Daedelus netinstall image on a USB stick is working. It even recognized the wireless effortlessly.
First challenge, the Devuan installer asks if I want to make symlinks for /bin to /usr/bin. The usrmerge conundrum. The default is 'no', reflecting a split where some significant Debian developers do not believe in usrmerge even as everything now requires it. I picked 'yes', and it did not honor my request! So upon booting the first time, I immediately run into a lot of 'needs usrmerge' sort of errors from dpkg. I reinstalled with 'no', and it gets the same result! It's just buggy. Someone needs to explain to a few key Debian developers that democratic centralism is gospel.
On rebooting into the new install, I find that the wifi driver sometimes fails to initialize in the same way it did when I tried to do usrmerge manually. So there is something glitchy...I took it down and brought it back up, and it works, but it's spamming "failed to send h2c command" in dmesg (which is the console now, natch). dmesg -n 1
It's always amazing how you start with a laptop and *nothing* works and then you just bang on it for a while and before you know it, it's indistinguishable from the last one.
The screen has maybe slightly blacker blacks than the L406, which was about the worst contrast LCD I've used in a long time. The screen seems to get a lot brighter, though.
Well, this is kind of dumb. The Fn key has a light that is always on under it. I figured out, it's the Fn-mode lock light, which you can toggle with Fn+Esc. But you need it on, otherwise the Fn keys send (or silently intercept in the firmware??) the media events instead of F1-F12 events.
Oh, I was going to complain that the keyboard is gobbling Alt-PrintScreen events (I use the useless keys for other features), but actually it's the kernel "Magic SysRq" that is doing that!
The keyboard is at least marginally better. It doesn't seem to generate spurious repeat key events nearly as often, and its rollover is *much* better. I can type "VT" now, even if I don't release the V until after pressing the T.
It's probably too early to tell, but so far I really like this trackpad too. It just always works. One-finger move, two-finger scroll, palm rejection, it works every time without any configuration or pawing ineffectively at it. The L406 was very prone to getting confused and going unresponsive when there was something like my belly or my other hand nearby. I wonder if it's just better because it's slightly smaller.
I still don't know if I prefer the 12" or 14" formats. 12" is comically small. But this laptop is so much higher quality than its larger twin. It's like when they stretched everything out, they just added jankiness to fill the space...the keyboard, the screen, the trackpad, even the flimsy plastic case...they all suffered from getting larger.
One thing I did not expect that I really love about this new laptop is the speakers. For a decade, I've been saying that every cellphone has an amazing loudspeaker, why don't they put cellphone speakers in a laptop??? I feel like that's finally happened for me. They're a little bit louder, they don't get hot, they sound great, and the bass is even vaguely detectable.
The wifi is a huge trouble spot. It works well when it's connected, but sometimes it doesn't come up on bootup. It generates a ton of error messages. It takes a little longer (like 10 seconds instead of 5) to re-connect after a disconnect. And worst, it sometimes crashes requiring a full power down (shutdown -h) to come back!
Battery life is another huge trouble spot. It's got nominally 38Wh, which is about the same as my worn-out L406 (which originally had 56Wh when it was new). I would hope that with a smaller screen, it should get roughly the same or better life, which is just 'good enough' IMO. But it seems to draw a lot more than the other laptop. I don't know if that's because I sat outside all day so it had the backlight on full, or if it's because one or more drivers isn't entering a proper sleep mode, or does this laptop just suck?
I built a new kernel because that's my tradition (I don't like / trust initrd). I decided to include everything except the wifi (rtw88_8821ce) driver, so that it wouldn't rely on modules. Configuring the kernel is getting harder every time. Just so many numerous settings, and the '/' option in 'make menuconfig' isn't as useful as you'd hope, and there's a lot of nested options and so on too.
It apparently has not one but two M.2 slots inside of it (one short for wifi, and one long for SSD), so I could presumably swap out the wifi card, if I get bored of fighting with the rtl8821ce.
So I'm now properly using the /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/power_now to monitor power consumption, which wasn't available on the L406, so that's nice. And I also am finally loading the i915 firmware correctly, which required adding statically it to the kernel with CONFIG_EXTRA_FIRMWARE. (Even with the stock Debian kernel, it was loading the i915 driver in a context where it couldn't access /lib/firmware? Did it not have the firmware in the initrd??). I don't know if that had an effect but now when it's 100% idle, it drops to around 2W, which is the same as the L406. But if I do anything at all, then it jumps to 3.5-4W right away.
I've verified, it's the wifi. Wifi seems to draw about 1.5W even just sending a few kB/s! The good news is, it's no longer spamming a bunch of error messages...maybe just from upgrading the kernel (6.1.129 to 6.1.131)?
So if I have any more instances of wifi crashing hard, or if the battery life seems crappy, those are both indications to swap out the wifi board?
I do remember a laptop from 2010, there was just some command I typed, roughly "iwconfig wlan0 enable powersave", and suddenly the battery life doubled. iw dev wlan0 get power_save shows that power save is on. But iw phy shows that "SM Power Save" is off...but I think it would be a no-op on this board because that just controls powering down some of the MIMO channels, but the RTL8821CE only supports "MIMO 1x1" anyways.
Ugh, that was 2.4GHz. I tried 5GHz and instead it seems the wifi draws around 1W idle and up to 3W active! This is a disaster of a wifi card.
So the question is, do I want to use the ath10k that would require a laptop-suspend sometimes to reset it, the Intel ax200 that drops connections fairly frequently (sometimes in a poo loop), or should I buy a new wifi card with an unknown set of glitches?
Is it worth trying the other (remedial?) rtl8821ce driver??
I went ahead and installed the Intel ax200 ("iwlwifi") from my spare L406. It has essentially the same ridiculous power usage! I guess I just never split it out from the other power usage before, because the L406 battery monitor only really gave me an average consumption over some long period of time.
Kind of a bummer.
Anyways, the good news is, the L210 is the easiest laptop I've ever taken apart. All 10 of its main screws are visible -- none are hidden under the feet.
I think it's the first laptop I've owned with USB-A ports on both the left and right sides. I didn't think much of that in principle but just now I was mildly upset by the cabling mess I was creating by plugging something in on the wrong side, when I noticed the second port! Neato!
I don't really mind the reduced battery life. At worst, I plug it in during lunch or when I leave the house. But I do think it's dumb to go back in time a full decade to the era of a less-than-12-hour battery.
The one thing that really bugs me about it is the keyboard hurts my left wrist. I like the small keyboard in general, but the modifier keys (ctrl/alt/fn) are too close to its center, I think. I've gotten in the habit of using my left hand for both the modifier and the 1-6 and F1-F7 keys, which I use a lot to control my windowing environment. And it's just an uncomfortable contortion.
On top of that, the home row is decidedly left-of-center on the laptop as a whole. I'm not sure in what way that matters but I suspect it does.
To cope with it, I am slowly retraining myself to use the left hand and right hand together more often even if it means the right hand reaches across the keyboard. And the other coping mechanism is I use the L406 intermittently, to allow me to heal as my body gets used to it. Basically, breaking it in. Which is something I've had to do with shoes for years now, and I guess I just need to accept that sort of pattern into my life more deeply now.
So anyways, the keyboard is something in favor of the 14" laptop, and everything else is against it.
One thing that is a mixed blessing is the keyboard's basic functionality...it's better in every way, except its bounces that are less frequent are at a greater delay. So it's not as imperative to filter out the bounced (duplicate) keypresses, but it's also a lot harder to do it. Because the duration of the bounce is almost as long as the fastest I intentionally double-tap a key.
On the L406, I could just eliminate all key press events that come less than 25ms after a release of the same key, and that almost flawlessly eliminated bounces and never harmed intentional presses. But now I have to futz with the heuristic to try to get it 'just right', or accept a repeated key once every few minutes.