In 2011 after I released the TROM documentary someone who was helping me proofread parts of it suggested that I should run a donation campaign to buy a new computer that I desperately needed in order to redo the documentary with a proofread script and voice overs instead of the text-to-speech I had used.

Seemed like a crazy idea to me to ask for so much money. But I did. And I raised over 1.000 Dollars. I was shocked. I was sleeping in a bunkbed in the same room with my sister. I woke her up to tell her. I was so happy.

I had a super shitty computer but then I managed to buy a fantastic one. I remade the TROM documentary and released in 2012.

Even before this, from 2007 to 2010 I had a blog in the romanian language that had a decent traffic. I asked for little support to help me pay for the hosting, but only got a 1 dollar donation one time, despite so many considering my blog very interesting and useful. I did some video series like today's Daily Dose of Internet and such, that had thousands of views per episode, and was recommending movies, documentaries and more on my blog. So it was not simply a personal blog. Regardless no one helped me financially despite being broke as hell.

After I released the "remastered" version of the documentary I created the TVP Magazine. Monthly issues, digital, well made. I wrote for it, designed, all that. Did it 8 months for free then I had to go for a massive donation campaign to help me work for a full year. By that time I was so broke, yet I was doing a bunch of online projects that thousands enjoyed. I had to survive in this trade bullshit society.

The golden age of donations.

It was a period of time when websites like Indiegogo or Patreon started to emerge. Platforms where people were mainly asking for donations to support their projects. Looked genuine. Honest. Real. Not many were using them, I was one of the first to create an account with Patreon.

So we did an 18.000 Euros Indiegogo donation campaign for TVP Magazine:

To my shock we raised the amount. It was exciting.

It felt like a genuine help. We were doing THIS and to keep on doing THIS we needed THAT. There were no "perks", no bullshit, no special clubs for those donating. That's how donations should be. If you donate because you want a tshirt, or be mentioned on some page, or whatever other crap, then you are not genuine. You are not there to just support a project, you want a handjob too. A scratch on your back, a thank you so that you can feel a bit more special. It is about you, at least a bit. And that's awful.

We got support for some 3 years but in that meantime websites like Indiegogo, Kickstarter or Patreon started to become more and more scammy and full of prostitutes. The notion of "donation" morphed into pay-me-and-you'll-get-to-see-my-tits sort of thing. Plus the so many scams...so many "cool new tech" that will become reality, you just have to chip-in a bit and you'll also get a piece of the pie when we bake that cake. Then these projects disappeared. And people were angry.

But what angered me was the complete and utter rape of the action of donating. How can you call it a "donation" when you get something out of that? If I give you some money and then you'll give me something, but you'll only give me that something if I give you that amount of money, then that's a TRADE my friends. THAT is NOT a DONATION. So Patreon transformed into a marketplace where people were buying access to special clubs, merch, and all sort of "perks". Pretending to "support" the "creators". In fact they were buying shit from merchants.

SciShow, who joined later on than we did with our projects on Patreon, relies on subscriptions rather than support:

For 500$ a month you can have sex with one of their staff members.

Look at this:




Are you telling me that these are "creators" that others "support"? Fuck off, these are merchants like everyone else, and they sell shit. And people pay to access that shit. The same ol' trade game.

These are some of the most popular merchants on Patreon.

Hell yeah, even Mastodon sells shit:

Access to their select club and ads on their joinmastodon website for your "company".

This is a very very sad world.

Of course it does not work for me to rely on donations when I do not engage into these marketing tactics. If it weren't for 3-4 close friends who helped the project/me over the years, I don't know what I would have done. To give you an example I am trying to raise 250 Euros to pay for the backups for some 30 websites: like our Friendica instance, Nextcloud, Peertube, Matrix, SearX, Cryptpad, VideoNeat.com, TROMsite.com, TROMjaro.com and so much more. Currently only 35€ was donated.

At least hundreds of people are using these websites/services, if not several thousands. If only 100 of them would donate 3€ a year we could over the backup costs. But they don't and they won't.

In general a small fraction of people donate to the projects that they use. A few years ago when I looked into this, it was like 0,1% of those subscribed to some youtube channels who also donated to these "creators". Even when these "creators" (merchants) sell shit, the support is relatively small. But probably there are more such people supporting you if you also give them shit in return. After all, humans are used to this "I give you but you also give me" mentality. So now that TROM provides nothing but the TROM project, probably it is not as exciting to "support" as the other projects are.

Fuck me The Moneyless Society who are blabbing about how this monetary system is the cancer, has this on their front page:

The link leads to here:

The irony is astonishing.
Their Patreon is equally as bad:

You see I wanted to walk that talk. If I say this bullshit trade-based society is awful, then I won't play by its rules when it comes to TROM. Never sold anything, never inserted ads, collected data, provided special access to those who provided financial support for the project. That's the real way of doing this sort of work. I prefer that over selling shit. I'd rather see the TROM project dying than transforming into yet another trading practice, marketing nonsense, influencer-on-patreon whore.

TROM is not a popular project, maybe in part because of our content that's at times lenghty and upsetting for some. Maybe in part because we don't play by the marketing rules. I had the dignity to move from facebook, twitter and youtube, to the fediverse entirely, despite "losing followers". I had the courage to write/publish some 40 books and never sold any. I had the guts to provide 20+ services over trom.tf and treat everyone as equal. To me that's priceless, and I am so thankful to a handful of humans who still see that value in what I do, and follow the work, and some support it financially in order to keep this boat afloat.

Humans nowadays trade nonstop. For games, in games purchases, netflix, entertianment, crypto-investments, buying special access from the people they follow, and generally being consumed non-stop. Even if TROM gets more popular, it may not be exciting for these consumers since TROM gives you nothing but TROM. And they may want a handjob or some other stuff like that.

TROM is not a whore and never will be. It will stay honest, decent, humble, and non bullshitter. We are walking the talk until we cannot.

If I do not raise the money for the backups I will pay for them myself. If I cannot sustain some of the TROM.tf project I will discontinue them. As simple as that. To rely on donations, the real ones, is the only way to stay unbiased in this trade-based society. But it sucks that donations have transformed into purchases.

BUT:

I need to remind you that all of these whores and charlatans that I've been talking about, are like that because of the trade based society we live in. We are forced to be like that. At the end of the day I am NOT accusing any of them. Just pointing them out, as they are victims, nothing more.

This is it:

I needed a new laptop to get rid of my old one that was not portable. I made 3 posts already about this journey: 1, 2, 3 - so I will try not to repeat myself.

My mission: get a sturdy and powerful laptop that can last me for a decade. Upgradable and fixable in a reasonable manner. Big screen, yet portable. Do it!

After months of searching and thanks to Roma and Guil primarily, who donated 98% of the money for the laptop, I settled for the Dell Inspiron 7620 2-in-1 16 inches. It has a core i7-1260p - 12 cores 16 threads. An Nvidia MX550, 64GB of RAM and 4TB NVME. 4k screen, 16:10 aspect ratio.

I will tell you why I chose this one.

First let me tell you the negative parts of this laptop, since none can be perfect for me I guess. Then I'll tell you why overall it is a great laptop for me.

What I don't quite like.

The keyboard. You see I write a lot and I want a great keyboard. This one is too shallow. I miss the depth of the previous keyboard....but I guess I'll get used to it eventually. The keyboard is also in German....since I bought the laptop from germany, ebay, second hand but unused. Basically brand new.

The Y and Z are switched but I chose a QWERTY layout in TROMjaro so despite showing differently, the letters are in a QWERTY format. I will try to also manually switch them but I am affraid not to break them.

I also kinda don't like the arrow keys...

The up and down arrows are too tiny. This is a bad design on any keyboard.

To add salt to the injury... this layer:

It is a layer of some sort of plastic/glass on top of the metal chassis, that is great for the touchpad but the edges are a bit sharp so when I type my arms get cut a bit in these edges....that happens when I sit on my desk. Like 99% of the time....

SO the typing experience is not that great. Not awful, and I will get used to it, but yeah....that's the biggest downside so far.

Another slight discomfort: opening the laptop to upgrade was a scary experience. You have a few screws but once you start unscrewing them the top part of the bottom case starts to violently try to get out, and things are bendy and make noises. Maybe the captive screws on that side should not be fully unscrewed but loosen and then try to open the case little by little.

Like all laptops (almost) the bottom detachable case has plastic bits inside that clip into the laptop, and these are always sketchy...so I even broke 2 while opening it. Was not a great experience but I guess next time it will be easy. Luckily the entire laptop is made out of aluminium so even without these plastic things everything can close pretty tight.

It can be loud and it is a bit heavy. Having a dedicated GPU the fans will be pretty loud when you do intensive tasks, but probably that's quite normal... Also it is heavy for a "tablet" and quite huge. So this is not really comfortable to use it like that. On the desk is properly fine.

Software-related issues.

Since this laptop is quite new, not even a year old, the hardware is not flawless with Linux. The worst of them all: the speakers will stop working after a few minutes of use. You have to restart pulseaudio for them to work again for a bit. Then they stop again. This seems to be a bug that was reported and should be fixed with newer releases of the kernel. I can easily put up with that since I never use the laptop's speakers - I have external ones - but for most people this would be a reason not to use Linux on this laptop.

The Hibernate mode kills your laptop. I found out the hard way. I had to fix some bad sectors on the drive because it was not booting up anymore. Probably another issue that will be fixed in the near future, but for now no Hibernate mode. Suspend works ok tho.

If I turn the screen brightness down completely, from the keyboard, I cannot bring it up again. I have to shut down the laptop from the power button....that sucks.

The face recognition camera does not have any real support in Linux so that's not usable....this is the case for all laptops as far as I know.

Closing the lid won't respect the XFCE settings I setup for it, so it won't turn off the screen, or lock, or else.

Basically, with Linux, this laptop is not easily portable. You can't use the speakers, you can't hibernate it, you can't even close the lid to have it turn off the screen....

So, you may wonder, why did I keep this laptop if it has these issues?

First of all the software related issues will be fixed and they won't bother me much at all. Pretty much every laptop I had to install Linux on, had some sort of issues like that. It is normal when you create an operating system for ALL laptops out there.

Second, the hardware-related issues are not that bad. I am getting used to the keyboard and I won't have to open up the laptop that often anyway.

So, then, the good parts.

The build quality is great.

This is all metal. Slimbook for example felt flimsy, this one feels really sturdy. I can kill a human and a dog with this laptop and I am sure it will still work :). The hinges, metal, feel like they will last me a lifetime. It barely bends, no cracks, and feels really solid overall...

It is also super slim and of course bendable 360 degrees:

Look how great that looks. So thin, so portable. This is a lot more slim-book than the Slimbook one :). And the charger is also tiny compared to the Slimbook or my previous laptop:

The touchscreen is also a plus since I can test TROMjaro directly on my own machine.

Speaking of the screen, the screen is AMAZING. The blacks are so black that if I were to select a 16:9 instead of 16:10 resolution I can't even tell since the black borders are as black as the screen's chassis. The colors are vibrant and it looks amazing from all angles.

Also...am I crazy or 3-4k resolution is no different from Full HD!? I tested with this laptop and there is 0 difference in how it looks. That's good since I can use the FullHD resolution and this improves the battery life. From my initial tests it can last some 5-6 hours on wifi doing things. Others have tested this and it can last some 20h if you are not connected to the internet and just watch local media.

When the speakers work they are very loud and sound great, despite only using 2 of them out of 4 in Linux.....when they will all work this laptop will sound amazing am sure.

The touchpad is great. Smooth, HUGE, and looks neat.

The glassy surface that cuts my arms while typing feels great when using the touchpad :D

Speaking of looking neat, there is only 1 logo on the back.

And that's not even that visible. I like that.

The port selection is perfect. On the left side you get an HDMI, normal USB, and two USB C / Thunderbolt - meaning they support any sort of connection basically.

On the right side you get another normal USB port, an audio jack, and a full SD size card reader.

So you can be sure that this laptop can connect to anything.

For example the way I set it up now that I have to work on TROM II and need a bunch of external stuff, I use a USB-C dock. It connects to the laptop into one of the USB C ports. One cable, mind you. This dock has the following connected to it: 3 HDDs totaling 14TB of data + my headphones + speakers + external microphone + mouse + external display + projector + 1GB Ethernet + power charging so that it also charges the laptop + webcam.

This is so amazing. It means I can quickly unplug one single cable and take the laptop. Then plug it in and all of those are connected.

The webcam is also better than your average laptop camera, like for example many times better than Slimbook's. The built-in microphone I've heard is also very good but I have not tested it yet. The webcam also has a physical shutter so you can block it.

THE INSIDES!
I think this is the only laptop-convertible in the world that's 16inches and has a 16:10 aspect ratio, is so slim yet all metal build, but allows you to replace the RAM and has 2 slots for it. This was a must for me. It was advertised as 32GB max, but I easily added 64GB of RAM. DDR4. And I upgraded the NVME M2 to 4TB.

To compare it now with the Slimbook Executive 16, that one costs 1.750 Euros with 16GB of RAM and 512GB SSD. Sure, the CPU is a bit better and the GPU much better (useful only if you play video games which I do not). This laptop, the Inspiron 7620 costed me 1.100 Euros and with 64GB of RAM + 4TB SSD around 1.700 Euros. MUCH MUCH MUCH better in all regards than the Slimbook offer.

Lastly the power button it is also a fingerprint reader:

And I managed to make it work in TROMjaro - wasn't that difficult. How amazing that now I can unlock the computer with the fingerprint and works perfectly fine. Or when I install new packages....FINGERPRINT! NO more typing my very long admin password :).

OVERALL.

For 1.700 Euros I got a great laptop. It has a big and amazing screen, great port selection, fantastic build quality, great touchpad, good webcam and mic, ok upgradability and repairability, great CPU and good GPU. Touchscreen, bendable 360 degrees, consumes less energy than the Slimbook, small power charger (USB C), great price overall. In time I'll get used to the keyboard too and the software related issues will be fixed.

Ok ok, a very long post.....but to me this machine is important since it allows me to do the so many projects I am doing. It is an extension to my brain. So it matters to me.

Now I plan to give my old laptop to a dear TROM friend who has helped the project a lot for the past year or two. If I manage to send it to the other side of the globe somehow to not break our pockets. I want to give my older stuff to others who can use it for longer.

I will try to get "laptops" out of my head and in a week or so focus again on TROM II. I spent a lot of time searching for a good laptop and I feel like I have finally found it. It is time to move on :)