[beretguy]

My concern is that a lot of laptops come with soldered in, non replaceable hard drives and all these sandboxed programs take up a lot of space. So if you buy cheap laptop with 256GB storage and start installing snap/flatpak/appimage eventually you’ll run out of disk storage and won’t be able to upgrade it (storage, that is). And the only solution is to buy upgradable laptop or a laptop with a lot of storage upfront.

That’s just one of the things that is messed up and annoys me.

[microtonal]

It’s fine. I don’t know about Snap, but Flatpack uses shared runtimes. Sure, there is also vendoring, but sharing takes a lot of dependencies out already.

This model has been used on phones and Macs for ages, and for most people it’s not an issue. Photos, videos, and game assets are taking up all the space.

[michaelt]

Snap retains multiple versions of each package, following a setting called "refresh.retain" which defaults to 3.

Install Blender? That's 3x 323MB. Chromium? 3x 158MB Firefox? 3x 242MB

And don't think you're going to get away with just 3 copies of a snap like 'core' or 'gnome' - you're getting three copies of core18 and three copies of core20 and three copies of core22 and three copies of gnome-3-28-1804 and three copies of gnome-3-38-2004 and three copies of gnome-42-2204. At 497MB each.

You might think you could avoid that by reducing the setting to 1, but you're not thinking like the creators of snap - they've decided the minimum value of refresh.retain is 2.

[FirmwareBurner]

>is that a lot of laptops come with soldered in, non replaceable hard drives

Other than Apples, which are those "a lot of laptops" that come with soldered storage?

[mike_d]

New Dells are using fixed storage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPBk9sIK-PQ

Most (all?) Chromebooks use eMMC storage attached to the board.

Even laptops with M.2 connectors still require a hundred screws, guitar picks, heat guns, and other insane things to "replace" storage.

[FirmwareBurner]

>New Dells are using fixed storage

Meh, that's just one model out of dozens form one of a dozen manufacturers. Hardly conclusive to validate the "a lot of laptops" claim. I'm sure someone else in the comments will point out some other obscure laptop from Acer or Lenovo that's thinner than a razor blade and has soldered storage. Fine, but still not "a lot of laptops". Just don't buy those 3 models in the world that solder their storage and you'll be fine.

>Most (all?) Chromebooks use eMMC storage attached to the board.

Thanks but Chromebooks are just ChromeOS devices akin to your tablet or phone, not actual laptops, nor do I buy garbage laptops with eMMC, nor would I know where to find one even if I did want to buy a laptop with eMMC since I haven't seen one for sale since the Asus EEPC from 2011, so no issue there.

>Even laptops with M.2 connectors still require a hundred screws, guitar picks, heat guns, and other insane things to "replace" storage.

That's a gross overexaggeration. I fiddled with the innards of several models of laptops from several brands and all of them are easy to replace the M.2 SSDs without special fancy tools and pain, just a screwdriver. Only Microsoft glues their machine together but nobody buys them anyway so don't you do it either and you'll be fine.

Conclusion: Myth busted. Most laptops on the market DON'T have soldered storage, and they're also quite easy to replace. Keep calm and carry on.

[justsomehnguy]

> nor would I know where to find one

Surface Go is available in eMMC version.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpkT8JwgnAI

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=laptop+emmc

Basically anything under $700 has a chance to be an eMMC laptop.

Most? Nope.

Many? Yes, especially cheap and not so cheap ones.

[FirmwareBurner]

>Surface Go is available in eMMC version.

Yes I'm sure all the three Surface Go owners in the world will be devastated.

>Basically anything under $700 has a chance to be an eMMC laptop.

You must be joking. Maybe like sub 300 USD. I have a 700 Euro Laptop and it came with a 1TB NVME and most cheap sub 500 Euros laptops I find are all still with SSDs not eMMC.

SSDs are now so cheap you'll find them everywhere instead of eMMCs. You really need to go out of your way and scrape the bottom of the barrel to find them today in new products.

[justsomehnguy]

> Yes I'm sure all the three Surface Go

Thankfully for Microsoft you and your hate are not the ones who buys Surface Go

> You must be joking. Maybe like sub 300 USD

Did you even bothered to check that Amazon link? With laptops at $500 clearly labeled having an eMMC storage? You must be joking.

> SSDs are now so cheap

And eMMC is cheaper. If it wasn't there would be no laptops with eMMC.

[eternityforest]

eMMC is such a nasty invention! We could have just had microSD cards as core storage on all these tiny thin devices! They make cards with good wear leveling.

The tech is already there, no need for soldered on stuff.

Soldering is kind of a "Worst possible solution except all the other ones" kind of technology.

[otabdeveloper4]

I use a notebook with a 32 Gb soldered on eMMC for /boot and a 512 Gb microSD for /.

And you can't stop me.

[financltravsty]

Lenovo "ThinkPad" workstations, like the P16s.