Almost ten months ago, I mentioned on this
blog
I bought an ARM laptop, which is now my main machine while away from
home — a Lenovo Yoga C630
13Q50. Yes,
yes, I am still not as much away from home as I used to before, as
this pandemic is still somewhat of a thing, but I do move more.

My main activity in the outside world with my laptop is teaching. I
teach twice a week, and… well, having a display for my slides and
for showing examples in the terminal and such is a must. However, as I
said back in August, one of the hardware support issues for this
machine is:

No HDMI support via the USB-C displayport. While I don’t expect
to go to conferences or even classes in the next several months,
I hope this can be fixed before I do. It’s a potential important
issue for me.

It has sadly… not yet been solved ☹ While many things have improved
since kernel 5.12 (the first I used), the Device Tree does not yet
hint at where external video might sit.

So, I went to the obvious: Many people carry different kinds of video
adaptors… I carry a slightly bulky one: A RPi3 😐

For two months already (time flies!), I had an ugly contraption where
the RPi3 connected via Ethernet and displayed a VNC client, and my
laptop had a VNC server. Oh, but did I mention — My laptop works so
much better with Wayland than with Xorg that I switched, and am now a
happy user of the Sway compositor (a drop-in
replacement for the i3 window manager). It is
built over WLRoots,
which is a great and (relatively) simple project, but will thankfully
not carry some of Gnome or KDE’s ideas — not even those I’d rather
have. So it took a bit of searching; I was very happy to find
WayVNC, a VNC server for
wlroot-sbased Wayland compositors.