Upgrading From My Thinkpad T430s to a Dell Latitude 7300

My Lenovo Thinkpad's battery and it's internal battery are both dead or close to dead and I think possibly the power supply connector maybe dodgy too, so I was in the mood for an upgrade. I found this Dell Latitude 7300 on eBay from a reputable seller. It has a 8th gen Core i7 CPU and 24GB of RAM (8GB+16GB modules) which is more than any other machine I have, including my main desktop which only has 12GB of RAM. Cosmetically the only noticeable wear I have noticed so far are the long rubber feet it sits on are hanging off a bit, just needs gluing back on at some point.   

I had a good look through the settings In the BIOS and only needed to enable SMART reporting for drives. I noticed lots of useful settings in there, you can disable the webcam, mic, change backlit keyboard settings, enable boot from SD card etc. That's the optional MicroSD card reader, which is nice, though for me a full size one would have been more useful, but I suppose they went for that to save space, which is also obviously why Ethernet is missing too. I may buy a USB C Ethernet and card reader adaptor for it at some point. With slightly less ports than I am used to it does mean that the 7300 is very light compared to my old Thinkpad. Obviously having no optical drive also saves a lot of space and weight, it's not something I use often other than on my desktop machines. There's a USB 3 port on each side, a HDMI port and USB C for charging, alongside the old barrel connector for the old style power supply. And apparently you cannot damage the machine by plugging in both at the same time. This one came with a fairly compact LITE-ON USB C power brick. There's the usual Kensington lock connector, and also a Smart Card reader which I doubt I will ever use. This is the first laptop I have ever had with USB C charging, which I like because my phones use it too, so it makes things easier. 

The 7300 came with Windows 10 on it's 128GB NVMe SSD but there was no way I was keeping that garbage on this. I thought about upgrading the storage but just wanted to get Linux on it as quick as possible, I think 128GB should be fine anyway. 

I wiped out everything and installed KDE Neon. Everything went smoothly but I advise not leaving it long enough during the live session for the screenlock to kick in, because for some silly reason it requires a password, yet the Neon live user does not have a password set. If this happens, wait long enough for the install to have finished, then shut it down, or CTRL+ALT+F2 to a terminal and reboot it form there, that's the simplest solution. 

Anyway, the install didn't take long and upon reboot I had a nice crisp fresh KDE Neon install. And KDE really does look crisp on the 1080P LED screen, it's pin sharp, and feels much sharper than the one on my old Thinkpad, and has much better colours, the black actually look black! I switched the global theme to Breeze Dark as I find dark themes are easier on my eyes. And lastly I put the main panel at the top and a dock-like panel at the bottom of the screen.

I installed yakuake terminal VLC, Audacious, kubuntu-restricted-extras, gimp, wxMp3gain, krdc (remote desktop client) soundkonverter, synaptic (alternate package manager). KDE reports the battery health as at 69%. I have also installed lm-sensors as per usual and all temperatures are just fine under light usage though I did get a bit worried at one point while Dropbox was downloading loads of files and with a few tabs in Chrome, temperature on one core went up to just over 70, though that's still in acceptable figures according to Dell's site, and it hasn't happened again. It usually hovers around the 30 to 40 C area. I have also  changed the updates in Neon to the non-bundled variety, as it should be.  To disable offline updates, edit the config file /etc/xdg/discoverrc - for example using nano - and set it to off. Another tweak I do is add the 'Show Logout' and 'lock screen' options to the desktop right click menu.

Everything works out the box as with most Latitudes I have had, the keyboard and trackpad are decent, much better than on my old Thinkpad and is in good condition too. The backlight works fine, it's something I feel I cannot live without on a laptop or desktop these days. If you need to change the Fn key behaviour, pressing Fn + Esc toggles the Fn lock, allowing you to use the F keys without the Fn key.

For many minutes I thought there was something wrong with the webcam, but after a bit of googling I discovered that there's a simple little slider switch next to the webcam to enable and disable it. Although there are some KDE specific webcam tools, I find the app called Cheese is the best standalone Linux webcam app, it's very simple to use. It's not great quality compared with a smartphone camera of course, and not something I will use much, but it's nice to know it works. 

One slight annoyance is Discover keeps nagging me about a UEFI dbx update, and every time it supposedly updates, it still comes back again on reboot. I have tried updating on the commandline but I get an error, and I've searched online and not found a solution yet. 

On one cold boot it even did a firmware update but that has not made a difference. 

Update 30/06/2025 - A recent update to Neon has now fixed that UEFI dbx update issue.

Another bit of strange behaviour I had was when I closed the lid, it did not suspend/sleep, and continued to run as if the lid was never closed, which, if left for awhile, made the fans go full blast trying to keep it cool. After a bit of Googling I discovered that the previous owner had disabled the Lid Switch in the BIOS. 

Also one time when I manually Suspend I came back to find it had shutdown at some point, despite having plenty of battery left. I had just done some updates on KDE Neon so that could have caused that issue. When it does suspend and resume, it does so very quickly.

Overall I am very pleased with the Latitude 7300, it has a very nice bright screen, nice backlit keyboard, decent touchpad, and it's the first laptop that I have had that is significantly faster than my main desktop, in every way except possibly in graphics card power. It has twice the RAM and a much newer processor. The only thing of course is I do prefer the dual monitors on my desktop, though I could attach a monitor through HDMI.  I've mostly been using it for all the usual stuff I would do on my desktop, web browsing, image editing in GIMP, and bit of video editing in Kdenlive.  It's been particularly useful n the very hot weather when I don't want to run my main desktop machine. Hopefully it should last me awhile, and it runs so quickly I feel like I need to get a new workstation to match it! 

From Google Pixel 4a to Pixel 8a

Well my Google Pixel 4a's battery has become so bad that 5 or so minutes of video recording is enough for it to shutdown, and much like my first gen Pixel years ago, it can no longer determine the true state of the battery. So I needed a replacement phone, and well...I wasn't going to go back to using my Pixel 3a, that's even older and out of support I think. Anyway, it happened to be my birthday and Black Friday was  upon us, so it was a good opportunity to upgrade. For me another Pixel device was the best choice, I have got used to all the Pixel-only features, the amount and quality of the updates and most importantly the lack of bloat! Stock Android is essential for me. The 8a was on sale at a decent price on Amazon and it arrived very quickly. Interestingly, purely by chance, it arrived at the same date that my 3a arrived five years ago, but then I got my Pixel 4a not long after that, so the 3a became the backup device. 

Unlike my 4a that Google sent me for free, which arrived in a fancy box with extra stuff, the 8a arrived in a very small box with no charger. I presume most phones do not come with chargers these days, but luckily I still have the original chargers from both my 3a and 4a. In the box there was a charging cable and the usual little metal SIM removal tool and little USB adaptor used for direct transfer between phones I think but I've never used them. I put the phones side by side and went through the setup process, including the settings transfer, wirelessly. One annoying thing is the process never syncs the state of my data settings, it always leaves 4G on. When left on it cost me 2 quid a day because I am on PAYG. After the initial transfer, I then updated the 8a to the latest version of Android, version 15 (my 4a is on Android 13).  

It is going to take awhile to get used to the fingerprint sensor being in the screen rather than on the back. In some ways it's more convenient, such as when it's flat on a table but it's not quite as reliable as the old rear mounted one. Combining with face unlock helps a little, when there's enough light for the camera to see at least.

One of the first things I noticed is they've nerfed the camera app, some of the advanced quality settings are missing and it seems the photos are not the highest the camera sensor can take, at least from what I understand. The Pixel 8 and 8 Pro have 50MP cameras, but the 8a shows "64MP effectively 16MP" on GSM Arena. Apparently you have to get the 8 and 8 Pro to get the much higher quality and more advanced settings. Bogus! The 8a has a fantastic camera sensor restricted down to a much lower quality. However, it does take better photos than the 12MP 4a at least so it's still an upgrade for me. And Night Sight is still brilliant too.

I've also discovered that from the Pixel 5 series, Google has stopped unlimited uploads of videos and photos to Google Photos, so photos taken with my Pixel 8a now take up space whereas those taken with my 4a or 3a don't. This is especially important with videos that can take up a lot of space. One workaround is to turn off uploads and copy the files to my older phones and let them upload the videos and photos, but that's a bit of a faff. Also, I wish they would not keep changing Google Photos, right now if you edit a photo in the phone app, you have to save it as a new file, which means taking up more space unless you delete the old one, so editing takes longer. In the Chrome app you can just save it over the original file, that's the default, as it should be. 

The front facing selfie camera is a huge upgrade from the Pixel 4A. At 12 megapixels it's the same number of megapixels as the rear camera on the 4a and I finally get to have slow motion on the selfie camera, which is nice. There's a couple of features on the camera I've not had on a phone before, a wide angle lens in addition to the main lens, and the long exposure feature in the camera app, which is good for creating light trails. 

Long Exposure

Night Sight and Long Exposure

Wide Angle

It's the first phone I've had that has no headphone jack but I've been using Bluetooth headphones for a long time with my phones, so I'm not too bothered, and I could use an adaptor if needed. The lack of headphone jack presumably helps give it IP67 dust/water resistance. Also The speakers on the 8a sound noticeably better, a little louder and fuller sounding I think.

Battery life has been great so far, lasting all day, when I've been out with just 50% battery I've still managed to get through the day without charging. I am determined to look after the battery better than than I did on the 4a, but whether it works in the long term we shall see. I intend to try not to use Quick Charging as much. As i was writing this review, the December feature drop came out, which should help me look after the battery, it added Battery Bypass, the ability to stop charging at 80%. I'm currently charging about once a day on my average usage. 

So in conclusion, I am pretty happy with my Pixel 8a, other than the dumbed down camera app quality settings, but then I am not sure what else I could have bought instead. There certainly wasn't the budget for the 8 Pro, and there's not many other decent competitors at this price range without bloat. Hopefully this 8a will last me another 5 years or so and I'll see what Google has to offer when this phone needs replacing. 

How To Install Mkchromecast on Ubuntu and Ubuntu based Distros

Mkchromecast is a way to stream any sound from your desktop to your Chromecasts, which to me makes it a lot more useful than the Android app for streaming, particularly for streaming offline music to the no longer made Chromecast Audios. Just like Google Home, you can stream to just one or to a Home Group. As per my previous article, I was using Mkchromecast on Manjaro until recent updates killed it, so I switched that particular laptop to KDE Neon, which is my favourite distro. Anyway, here's how to install Mkchromecast: 

Firstly, install git, and then download Mkchromecast from git: 

    sudo apt install git

    git clone https://github.com/muammar/mkchromecast.git 

Then, switch to the mkchromecast directory and install the dependencies:

    cd mkchromecast

    pip install -r requirements.txt

Then install Mkchromecast

You can install from Discover or with apt (sudo apt install mkchromecast) and now it should work fine. I usually use mkchromecast -s to scan for devices and choose my Home group to stream all simultaneously. It's a shame Google discontinued the Chromecast Audio because it works pretty well, and is much cheaper than expensive streaming solutions like Sonus.

From Manjaro to KDE Neon on My Dell Vostro 3300

So there was a huge update on Manjaro recently to KDE plasma 6 and it killed Mkchromecast again on my Dell Vostro, but this time I wasn't able to get it working again. However I worked out how to get it working in 'buntu based distros, so I decided to switch it to my preferred 'buntu-based distro, KDE Neon. Neon is based on the Kubuntu LTS but with the latest KDE installed. The installer was even easier and smoother than it used to be, so after backing up stuff I wanted to keep, I installed Neon in about 5 or so minutes. This machine has an old hard drive but it still feels fairly snappy to use. 

One of the first things I like to do with KDE now is turn off the stupid Offline updates setting. Seriously KDE devs, this isn't Windows, I don't want or need to have updates run on shutdown! Linux doesn't need to reboot for most updates! I also switched to Breeze Dark theme, and moved the panel to the top, disabling the new floating panel setting. That's what I like about KDE, everything is configurable, unlike Gnome where they have a like it or lump methodology. And the search feature in Settings works very well. Also I discovered that my Dell Vostro has a back-lit keyboard, I accidentally hit the Fn keyboard shortcut to turn it on! 

I also installed all the usual items such as GIMP, Audacious music player, Filezilla, Cantata (mpd front-end) Yakuake (a drop down terminal) and Kubuntu-restricted-extras. In general this fresh install has gone very smoothly compared to an upgrade, though I did have a slight issue with menus not popping up from the system tray, Switching from Wayland to X11 at the login screen sorted that out. Another little tweak I do is re-enabling the Leave option in the desktop right-click menu. So, other than that slight issue, this fresh install has gone very smoothly, and I'll likely keep KDE Neon on this laptop until the hardware dies whenever that might be, this Vostro is a tough old thing.

Upgrading to KDE Plasma 6.0 - a rocky start for KDE Neon User Edition

When I read about the first stable release of KDE Plasma 6, I thought I'd probably just wait awhile until I try it, but of course I forgot that KDE Neon User Edition would get it so soon.  Well, the update happened and the first thing I noticed, on my main desktop machine, was that for some reason the onscreen keyboard came up on the login screen, large and covering half the screen! To fix this I found a solution on a forum, which entails editing sddm.conf like so:

sudo nano /etc/sddm.conf

and then add 

InputMethod=

Save and exit and the onscreen keyboard shouldn't appear again on the login screen. Also it's a rather basic login screen for some reason, no matter which theme I choose. Update - switching to the default Breeze login theme fixes this.

Then I noticed that Wayland was set as default again, after I tried to login and it wouldn't work. Nvidia is the reason for this, but thankfully X11 is still an option and that works. Then on the first few logins I noticed a lot of little errors I think some parts hadn't updated, so a quick trip to Discover, the package manager to make sure everything got updated was needed. And then a day or so after i updated, there was some major bug fixes, which has made things better but i am still getting the odd Plasma crash, usually after logging in and opening Chrome for the first time. Right now the desktop seems to have has settled down and actually feels a bit snappier than Plasma 5 was. I am still getting the occasional error and a few graphical glitches, black screens occasionally., 

KDE Activity manager constantly crashed with the "kactivitymanager closed unexpectedly" error.until I found a solution,  Navigate to ~/.local/share/kactivitymanagerd/resources and delete database, database-shm and database-wal. You will lose your favourites in the KDE menu but at least the annoying kactivitymanager won't keep crashing! Amother odd thing is that the Print Screen key does not open Spectacle anymore.   

Another minor issue is that since Plasma 6 is qt6 based, so Latte Dock no longer works, and will never be updated since it's been abandoned by the lead developer. A shame because it's been my favourite OSX-style dock for years. For now I have added another KDE panel, auto-hiding, and using the new floating panel feature. It's not exactly pretty, but it's functional. I shall miss the magnification effect from Latte, and I can't seem to get the panel to go translucent, even though I have set it to. Floating panels are default now, but to me they look odd on the normal panels so I have disabled them for those. Another minor niggle is that Dolphin always opens without the sidebar even though I closed it with it open. It used to remember my choice. 

On my main laptop, a T430s Thinkpad, the update installed more smoothly, there was no kactivitymanager errors but still have the same basic login screen and had to disable the onscreen keyboard like with my desktop machine. No graphical issues of course, because it's got Intel graphics. One thing I have noticed changed is that when I close the lid then open it again, the keyboard backlight now goes off instead of remembering which setting it was on. My laptop does not have the Dolphin sidebar issue though.

The KDE Neon developer blog has put up an apology for the number of issues with KDE Neon User Edition. Apparently the testing and unstable versions have been running more smoothly. Hopefully they'll send out more fixes soon.

You can read more about what's new in KDE Plasma 6 on the KDE website. 

From KDE Neon to Manjaro KDE on my Acer Chromebook 14

So, I only had KDE Neon on my Acer Chromebook 14 CB3-431 for a short time but there was no way round the performance issues with YouTube at 1080p. You can't really install another DE on Neon because the way it's built it would break it trying to install Lubuntu or other desktops. I decided to install Manjaro KDE, since it is running so well on my old Dell Vostro. Also, on Manjaro (and Arch) it has the most supported desktops, either unofficially or through the community, so if I need to choose a different desktop, that's lighter on resources, it's easy enough to switch between them...or so I thought... 

As with KDE Neon, I used my Dell Vostro laptop to put the Manjaro KDE ISO onto a USB stick using OpenSuse Image Writer.  Installing was a Breeze, just a USB boot and install from the live desktop as with Neon, since the tricky bit of replacing the bootloader on my Chromebook was already done as per my previous post. And, also as before, the first thing I did after install was set shortcuts for the Display brightness in KDE Settings, and set it to Breeze Dark theme so I wasn't half blinding myself on every boot! I also set all the other shortcuts again while I was there. And yet again re-adding the Leave option to the right-click desktop menu. I am not going to install too much, as it only has a 32GB onboard eMMC, and there's currently only about 8GB left. As with KDE Neon, all the hardware works fine, including sound, trackpad, suspend and resume, webcam, etc. Also one quick fix that needs doing on Manjaro is getting ssh enabled, since for some reason when you install the service it isn't enabled by default, and I found a fix here.

Then I installed Google Chrome using this tutorial (I used the second option of installing it using the AUR Helper, yay, which can be installed from the package manager if required) and made sure that YouTube played 1080p without stuttering or stopping completely, which it did just fine. Hurrah! I also installed any updates available through Manjaro's package manager. After a reboot for the kernel update, I then installed my favourite apps again, such as Audacious, GIMP, Filezilla, etc, though I didn't have to install VLC this time since it was already there. I have found that if I want to watch YouTube videos with as little jitter as possible, it's best to only have YouTube open, and absolutely no Facebook tabs! Facebook uses way too much memory and CPU. 

I also tried to install Lxqt desktop, just to see if I could save some resources, using these instructions, with no success, it does not load the whole desktop, just openbox itself, and caused a very slow boot too for some reason. I then tried Fluxbox desktop but the extra packages listed on that tutorial were unavailable to install and I couldn't get any apps to run. And on the reboot, it failed to boot. So very frustrating. So it turns out switching desktops on Manjaro is not as easy as I thought! I then had to reinstall and setup everything again.... It's a good job installing is so quick! So if you do want to try other desktops with Manjaro, it's best to just download the specific ISO for that desktop. 

So Manjaro is now running fine again. I could have used Google's ChromeOS Flex to extend the life of this Chromebook but I don't really want to go back to ChromeOS after the flexibility and freedom of running Linux on it.  It has a nicer screen for photo editing than my Thinkpad so that's what it will get used for, when not using my main desktop. The only slight downside is the lack of storage space, have to be careful not to use too much of the 15GB or so left on the drive. I have put a little USB stick in the side just in case I need it. I'll keep Manjaro KDE on it for as long as it continues to work well on it. Feel free to suggest any other distros that might suit it better. 

Installing a full Linux distro on my Acer Chromebook 14 CB-431

 So I was having trouble with my Chromebook. When editing photos with Google Photos it would slow down then freeze. After testing in another user account with no extensions or add-ons, it still had the same issue. I then went last resort and powerwashed it. This is simple and quick way of wiping back to factory settings....and then I decided to install a full Linux distro on it.... 

My Acer Chromebook 14 has been End of life for awhile now, (it was released in 2016) which means no more fixes for issues, and no new features. I'd already removed the hardware write protection screw inside the base in preparation for possibly putting Linux on it awhile ago, I had just put off doing it until now. Luckily there's very useful guides on the Arch Linux Wiki on how to put Linux on a Chromebook. I used the guide for my specific model, here.  It is a CB3-431, 4GB RAM, 1080P screen version (Acer also did a 2GB, 720p screen version). 

There's a couple of different options on the Arch Wiki, and I chose the Coreboot route. Linux only, no dual boot. After installing the custom bootloader, I went ahead with installing Linux as normal, wiping all the internal 32GB storage. I used my favourite distro, KDE Neon, which is basically Kubuntu LTS but with the latest version of KDE. I wrote the ISO to a USB stick using OpenSuse Image Writer, which worked perfectly, it's the first time I've ever used it. 

After a normal uneventful install, KDE Neon used just under half of the Acer's 32GB internal storage. It still boots pretty quickly. The main thing I noticed after logging in for the first time, was the display was on full brightness and of course in ChromeOS the Brightness keys are on what would be the normal F keys in Linux. You can use change shortcuts in KDE settings, and create custom ones. For Brightness Up and Down I used Ctrl + F6 and F7. For for the Volume keys I used Ctrl + Shift + F8 and F9  (which were the Volume keys in ChromeOS). The Fullscreen key is F4 so I added Ctrl and Shift for that too. There's a smaller number of F keys to standard so I had to choose another shortcut key for my favourite drop-down terminal emulator, Yakuake. As expected, the Google/Search key becomes the Super Key aka The "Windows key".  

Some of the fixes on the Arch wiki were not needed, such as those for the sound and touchpad. The trackpad seems to work fine, though right clicking only works with the default setting, clicking on the bottom right corner of the trackpad, instead of the two finger clicks that I am used to. Just a case of getting used to that, along with the new keyboard shortcuts. 

The sound works out the box and one advantage of running Linux on this Chromebook is you can increase the Volume beyond 100%, which you cannot do on ChromeOS, as the audio was far too quiet, in headphones or from the speakers on this machine. I used to have to use a Chrome extension called Volume Master to boost the volume on ChromeOS, but its downside was that YouTube couldn't run fullscreen while it was in use. Although having said that, sometimes after boosting the audio for some time, it sometimes goes to just playing a tone.  Another option I can now use is a USB audio interface, like my M-Audio M-Track Solo, which is something else I couldn't use with ChromeOS. 

After all the main tinkering, it was just a case of installing all my usual favourite apps, such as VLC, Audacious, Cantata, FIlezilla etc. And finally, bringing back the Leave option in the Desktop right click menu and removing the silly offline updates feature.  Performance is fairly snappy on first impression, considering it only has 4GB RAM. Lm-sensors reports the normal temperatures as 45 Deg C at idle, rising to just under 50 under heavier loads. Suspend and Resume work fine and battery life doesn't seem to be impacted. It does struggle with 1080P YouTube in Chrome, but it plays a little bit smoother in Firefox. I'm not using Latte Dock as I would usually, because that uses more resources than it should. KDE isn't as heavy as it used to be but I might have to install a distro with a lighter or minimal desktop environment.

 I've been impressed with the full 1080P screen on the Acer ever since I first got it, and KDE looks fantastic on it. I have always preferred to edit photos in Google Photos on the Chromebook instead of on the dull screen on my Thinkpad T430s, the colours are more accurate.  

So far, I am pleased with full Linux on my Acer 14, and I am not missing running ChromeOS yet. It can't run Android apps the same way as ChromeOS did, but that's something I rarely did. They often felt a bit awkward on the desktop. It boots pretty fast, getting to the logon screen not much slower than ChromeOS did. I only wish it had a backlit keyboard, but then at the price it was originally that was to be expected. Installing Linux has basically extended the life of this Chromebook and I'll keep using Linux on it until the device dies, which will probably be whenever the 32GB eMMC onboard storage is dies. It is soldered to the main board so it's not really upgradeable/replaceable. Until then, this Acer will get plenty of use, probably mostly YouTube and Google Photos when I am away from my main desktop. I just have to decide whether to stick with KDE Neon or switch to a lighter weight distro.