I appreciate it's very ambitious but I want my own thing I can swap out parts for as time goes on. Think Ed from Cowboy Bebop's laptop.

>Is it possible to assemble and arrange desktop components in such a fashion that they could be around the same thickness as a laptop?

Not really.

Your first problem is going to be that desktop CPUs typically have far greater power consumption, which will limit your battery life, and they produce a lot more heat, which even a bigger laptop fan probably won't be able to dissipate. And forget about passive cooling. So you'll probably need to keep a full-size cooling fan on your CPU, which is going to limit your possibilities for a small form factor of your laptop.

And loads of other problems you'll run into that don't have a simple solution, like, how are you going to connect your screen to your mainboard, and will you be able to get drivers to work.

There are some modular laptops you can buy, but they're mostly a scam because in addition to a high base price, you'll pay through your nose because the hardware bits you can upgrade will likely be custom made for your particular laptop.

I'd honestly just look for a £300 to £500 laptop that lets you expand RAM memory and swap out your SSD. That's really all you need. Most laptop CPUs are soldered in nowadays, but you don't always have to upgrade your CPU to make your system faster and more capable. I just upgraded my mum's Windows 10 desktop PC from 8 GB to 16 GB and installed a decent new SSD, and it's loads faster now.

You could theoretically build a laptop out of laptop parts. Why do they need to be desktop parts?

I wish PC Specialist had a referral scheme, but AFAICT they don't, so I guess I'll have to shill them for free. They tend to avoid bottom-bin parts, you get to pick everything that's in there, and they're upgradeable. As an indication of the audience they're targeting, every machine they build comes with a booklet telling you where various parts are and how to swap them out. For their laptops, you won't necessarily get at everything, but they usually have either panels over where the RAM and storage sit or a case that's not too difficult to remove. If you have no life want to install Linux, the motherboard and chipset tend to have fairly generic parts on them so standard drivers will work.

It's certainly possible. A lot of people do this, but almost always as a hobby/creative craft project. They usually refer to them as cyberdecks, after the concept in Neuromancer. /r/cyberdeck is probably a good place to look. They're almost invariably low power raspberry pi builds, though.

It's not necessarily complicated to build one, but doing it out of desktop hardware would be impractical due to the power needed, as already said. If you were going to go that way, you might as well just build a mini PC, there are lots of solutions on the market already for that.

I'm not entirely sure what you're looking to avoid, independence from big tech is a reasonable goal, but it's not like your hybrid machine isn't going to have a intel chipset in it anyway.

As always, the most obvious solution is an older Thinkpad. They're fully rootable, down to the bios, and performance isn't much, or at all, behind more modern generations.

>>28165

>As always, the most obvious solution is an older Thinkpad. They're fully rootable, down to the bios, and performance isn't much, or at all, behind more modern generations.

System76 make modern laptops with fully open firmware.

>>28161

>I appreciate it's very ambitious but I want my own thing I can swap out parts for as time goes on. Think Ed from Cowboy Bebop's laptop.

Framework offer a fully modular laptop, but it's basically pointless for reasons stated by >>28162 - upgrading the mainboard in a modular laptop isn't really any cheaper than just buying a new machine and selling your old one.

The true cyberpunk solution IMO is to buy a Chromebook, install Coreboot and treat it as a disposable thin client. Real computers live in racks.

>>28166 All I want is a new laptop, but with a CD drive installed. Is it possible to do that? Or make a special mounting frame to put that in?

>>28187

I can't think of many modern laptops that are physically thick enough to accommodate a CD drive. External USB DVD drives cost about £30 and offer the advantage of not having to carry it around for the (presumably) 99% of the time that you don't need a CD drive. If you do need a CD drive on a daily basis, I'd suggest some kind of psychiatric help, because that's just weird.

>>28188
How about wanting to watch a DVD box set on a cross country train ride instead of having to faff around ripping it off the disks for 15 minutes when you're in a rush or having an external drive with a wire trailing everywhere? 'Oh look, people don't buy physical copies of things so they can own them as much as they used to, so let's save them a feather's worth of weight and 3 mm of thickness by cutting out the DVD drive.' It's the same reasoning they use to remove memory card slots. All it does is make things clunky.

>>28189

Carrying a whole DVD box set around is fine though apparently.

>>28189

Allow me to introduce you to a marvellous new technology called "BitTorrent". It's like a DVD box set, but it doesn't weigh anything because it's made of clouds.

>>28191

As the saying goes, the cloud is just someone else's computer. Are you suggesting he carry around someone else's computer as well as his own? That's even more faff.

>>28192

You don't have to carry it, it just sort of hovers. You do sometimes have to chase after it if it's windy out.

>>28193
That's not a problem if it's a real computer with a proper rack to keep it in place.

The annoying thing about removing all the ports and what have you is that it makes transferring things between computers a faff. I tried setting up file-sharing on my home network a while ago. I thought, it's the 2020s, surely we've sussed out how to move a film from one computer to the other without just downloading it again, I'm sure this kind of thing used to be a lot easier. Which it did, because everything had some kind of removable media as standard, and now nothing does.

I ended up giving it up as a bad job and just buying a big memory stick instead.

>>28195

Get yourself a NAS, it's a game changer.

>>28196

I've been meaning to, but they're not cheap by the looks of it, and I'd want to hard-wire it all rather than rely on wifi. When I move into my new place and I can run ethernet cables wherever the fuck I like, I'll definitely have one on the list.

>>28190
I'd have that in my bag and I can put a disc in as and when I like. The point is it's easier than an external DVD drive and I shouldn't have to faff around with bittorrent. Obviously I can just rip them from the disk the day before, but if you're in a rush it's nice to have that shit integrated.

Desktop components are built to be in a desktrop case in terms of cooling requirements (those fin towers aren't just for fun) and power requirements. Build on the shoulders of giants (who might be dwarfs standing on giant's shoulders).

If the batteries for them weren't dead or stupid expensive I'd recommend an Eee 900. They were truly great machines with excellent Linux and BSD compatibility and a very capable wifi chip/antenna (nudge nudge, wink wink).

There's any number of SBCs capable of running a decent desktop and running on a few 18650 batteries, Pinebooks are the most prominent example and should serve as a good inspiration if you really do want to make your own.

>>28202
The ASUS EEE series were excellent laptops - I liked the trend of small / cheap laptop devices, it seems to have disappeared in favour of Chromebooks.