I got the Argon One Up

As soon as I heard that there was a laptop shell being developed for the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5, I went to the Kickstarter page and made my pledge. I've seen a few rug pulls on Kickstarter, but I've been using Argon's cases for my Raspberry Pi's and I trust their work and them as company, so I had no concerns there.

I managed to get a full unit with CM5 and SSD already installed so I didn't have to install any scripts or modify the boot config myself. I was most looking forward to being able to do ARM Linux computing on the go, and in that respect, this device certainly delivers.

I've been computing at home on a Pi 500+ recently, and have become quite at home in the defaut Raspberry Pi OS. The Trixie update gave us a much more modern look to the UI which I really like, and in my opinion it can now compete with a well riced XFCE or LX desktop. The Trixie repositories are pretty good, and I find myself installing most things from Apt without having added any additional sources. Even NodeJS seems to be at a point where there is little need to add a more up to date source - I'm not using it for anything cutting edge, and any third party software I use it for seems to run fine so far.

The build quality is good. There's a little rattle in the track pad which made me think it was clickable at first, but I quickly realised it's not. And light taps don't trigger any rattle. The keyboard is nice, I love a super key with the Raspberry Pi logo on it! I'm in the UK but I opt for a US keyboard nowadays. There is a slight bounce issue with the keys where a character can sometimes be typed twice, but it's no worse than the standard Raspberry Pi 500 I had been taking into work with me - and I taught myself touch typing so I see those errors as they happen. The screen is great, with a ratio off 4:3 it is tall and I'm not getting any glare. There's a webcam and microphone built in, and these work in the web browser so I don't need to install Teams from Pi-Apps, I can just use it in the Chromium browser. I made a webcam with a Pi Zero and a camera module for my desktop Teams calls, and that won't work in browsers anymore, I'm not sure what's causing the issue. The camera and mic are fair, better than you'd get with a budget laptop - more than good enough for my use case (Teams meetings for work).

The power key puts the shutdown menu on screen which is a nice touch. There's a hidden backlight feature for the keyboard - at first I thought the kickstarter units didn't have it and it would feature on units made thereafter, but it's here, I saw a comment in the support subreddit that said Fn + Space turns it on. I normally work in well lit areas, but it will be handy when I want to rsync games into RetroPie at night while sitting on my sofa. They didn't solve the battery plugin issue for the system tray, the laptop came with the desktop icon and a button on the keyboard that triggers a notification with the remaining battery percentage. That was good enough, but almost immediately Jeff Curless had posted a solution in the subreddit and hey presto, battery in the system tray! With a working battery plugin in the system tray, there was little need for the self-updating desktop icon/indicator - I like a clean desktop anyhow and normally delete anything that finds it's way there. I deleted the battery icon from the deskop, but the laptops service runner puts it back there. I didn't want to risk breaking anything, so I made a folder in the Desktop folder and called it hidden, and then I just changed my default desktop folder to the hidden folder in the settings menu. Clean desktop!

As it's a laptop, privacy should be considered. Raspberry Pi OS now has a lock screen, but without any tinkering it's in the Shutdown menu by default. And before it was introduced I had already set up my own swaylock script and put Lock Screen option in the menu so I could just hit Super and type Lock for a pixelated Swaylock lock screen with the Pi logo inside the input ring (my time playing with i3wm being put to good use).

#!/bin/bash
icon="$HOME/.Custom/swaylock-pixelate/pi-logo.png"

# create a temp file
img=$(mktemp /tmp/XXXXXXXXXX.png)

# Take a screenshot of current desktop
grim $img

# Pixelate the screenshot
convert $img -scale 10% -scale 1000% $img

# Add the lock image
convert $img $icon -gravity center -composite $img

# Run swaylock with custom background
swaylock --indicator-radius 100 --inside-color 99000000 --inside-clear-color 99000000 --image $img

# Remove the tmp file
rm $img

I keep my zsh, vim and tmux configs in the cloud now so they were nice and quick to set up; I just copied them to the required locations and used the plugin installers. I also keep my labwc rc.xml file in the cloud so I could just copy that over and add the following after the keyboard element for natural scrolling with the trackpad.

<libinput>
  <device category="default">
    <naturalScroll>yes</naturalScroll>
  </device>
</libinput>

I remain an advocate for ARM based Linux computing, and this is the laptop I've been waiting for. Although I wasn't expecting it wouldn't come in the form of a Compute Module shell. That said, I'm very pleased that it did happen this way. In a world of rising energy costs, AI chip hoarding, and fluctuating markets; sustainable methods of computing could be more important than ever before. Massive props from me for Argon40, Raspberry Pi, and all the other companies and organisations pushing this niche corner of computing ever farther into the future.