glitching

some dudes assemble a PC from off-the-shelf components! absolute madmen! the skillz! breakthrough! extra extra read all about it!

wtf?!

does it have coreboot or sumsuch, as it says it was "designed" for this and that? the "article" doesn't say any of them things. try to look it up on their website, but it's hosted on a potato on the far side of the moon, so no luck there.

marketing fluff.

there's this thing: STAR WARS GRINDHOUSE

skip the T470, T480 with 8xxxu cpu is the lowest you should go; the hardware is practically identical (and interchangeable!) but the CPU is a huge difference. also if you find them for cheap, there's T490 (refresh), T495 (AMD Ryzen), and T14 (newer variants of the T4xx series with Intel and AMD CPUs).

the 12" version would be the X280, again single-channel RAM only. in the 12" space you also have Dell Latitude 7290/7200 (just the latitude series, no inspirons and friends) as well as HP Elitebook 820 (and 830) with 8xxx and newer CPUs. Elitebooks and Latitudes are Thinkpad T-series equivalents with similar build quality and features.

T480 can take 64 GB (2x 32 GB); no idea if more is possible. I imagine newer models could but I struggle to remember seeing 64 GB SO-DIMMs... P15 can fit four sticks so that should be possible, but them things have beefy CPUs, are rather large, and also have Nvidia graphics so dunno how low-power you can make those.

you're kinda outside of the intersection of cheap and still capable with that spec. do make a write-up if you succeed, that sounds interesting.

that's the part that's bothering you? not evil corp doing evil things in the charge of its evil overlord?

I'm referring to semi-modern laptops you're most likely to get out of some corporation's dump of obsolete tech, but that's still usable - let's say T480 and onward. you can retrofit those with tons of RAM, cheap storage, they have capable quad-cores, etc. you can get something like a T14 Ryzen 6-core with 32 GB RAM and a 1 TB SSD in the $200 region, if you do everything yourself.

everything before that is proper old tech, with predominantly anemic dual-cores (the ones you mention have single-channel RAM) and as such are a fun tinkering project, similar to the cyber deck projects - costs a lot of money, doesn't do much. on the other side of that fence are power-hungry haswells and friends that can't be wrangled into single-digit Watt/Hour territory however hard you tried.

so if you get one of those for free, or close to it, and you have parts laying around, by all means - this is as close you can get to the bespoke PC build in the laptop world. but ixnay on bying a decade old laptop for work and/or education.

edit:

X260 vs T14, negligible size difference

first off, "lenovo" is not the thing to get, it's just a subset of those - thinkpads. and even then, not all of those - just the T and P series. those are the "pro" lines, durable, dependable, expandable, serviceable, and widely used. so when corporations swap out their fleet for new models, they flood the market and hence can be had for cheap. multiple generations of the same model are cross-generation compatible, so they share the same peripherals, like docks, have interchangeable parts, like keyboards, displays, etc.

don't get used ideapads, thinkbooks, thinkpad E/L series, etc. those are either consumer-class models, have substandard features, are incompatible with each other, etc. don't get the yogas and S-suffix models, as you'll have a removed time servicing and/or upgrading those.

the whole point of getting something used, i.e. something that was touched and rubbed and spat all over, is if it's a) in good enough shape and b) you get it for cheap. you took care of of item A when going for thinkpad T-series and you're compromising on item B if you're going through an intermediary.

them dudes you mention are skinning you alive - 500 EUR for a T14 G1 is insane, it should be less than half of that. I also like how they're including none of the tech specs which just ups the ick factor.

thanks. looks easy enough to implement on other distros. this was my primary issue on why I wouldn't use it, it just seemed bonkers to me to have the game I'm playing on my other device simultaneously being blasted on the main monitor.

the only thing missing would be runtime on/off/reconfigure, as I abhor rebooting.

a distribution is just an assortment of packages, it's the same linux + driver underneath. nvidia on linux is a headache. are there people who made it work? sure. is that a worthwhile waste of your time? it is not.

get hardware that's linux supported and you'll have plenty of challenges during the transition, you don't need the additional "self destruction in..." countdown timer booming from the speakers.

if you still wanna have at it, pop_os (however it's spelt), bazzite and nobara are some od the distros that have dedicated nvidia install images and are thusly more likely to work OOB and work better afterwards.

if you trust mozilla, firefox sync handles most of that - bookmarks, history, passwords, extensions and some of their settings, etc; cookies and localstorage aren't copied over, for e.g. logged-in sites and such.

do you have a ballpark figure of potential savings in $/€ per annum? and for what hardware? I remember calculating something similar and I don't think I broke $20 in total, so promptly forgot about it.