I’m in the market for a Linux friendly ultralight laptop to check web apps and run terminal, nothing fancier then that. Do any cheap systems exits these days? I was looking at a chrome book but apparently the mediatek chip doesn’t play nicely with FOSS.
Any thoughts?
I have a second-hand Thinkpad T480s that I love, I bought it for 250$ on ebay and replaced its battery because it was fried (+40$). I use it for school and it works flawlessly, around 8h of battery life in a well-configured OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. According to the specs sheet it shouldn’t be, but for some reason it is noticeably lighter than a friend of mine’s MacBook Air 2021.
What I really love about it is the ThinkDock Ultra (iirc 30$ on ebay), which lets me place the laptop on my table, and by just sliding a piece of plastic, it connects all of my peripherals in a second. I love this laptop so much that I’ll use it until it dies so hard that it can’t be fixed at all.
I found a T430 dock, its so nice
Ex-corporate refurbished laptop from the last 3 or 4 years for about $300 tops is perfect for this.
It’s not the thinnest thing ever, but I find my old ThinkPad X230 very light and easy to use for extended periods on my lap
And its corebootable!
I bought a used Lenovo ThinkPad X240 Laptop i5 | 8GB RAM | 500GB HDD | for 50$ as a couch laptop to run Linux / Python code. I can browse the internet and it’s light.
Any chromebook that supports Coreboot. Absolutely unrepairable and very low storage, but good Linux support and coreboot!
mrchromebox.tech/devices
When you say “couch” my first thought is a recent-ish Celeron or Pentium Silver fanless laptop. Performance akin to a Core 2 Duo but no fan to get blocked sitting on the couch. Like the Latitude 3210(?)
Laptops that appeal to me are often bottom breathers so it’s one thing I miss from my old MB Air.
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With a terminal being a core use for the machine?
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Yeah, trying to use either a soft keyboard for that, or a tablet keyboard while lounging on the couch.
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You would be very very wrong, since I hardly use my phone.
But to your point, a soft keyboard is very different for conversational input that autocorrect and predictive typing excels at, and command entry and scripting where syntax is critical and you aren’t really typing in English or some other language.
I write and run plenty of small to medium Python scripts on my iPhone. It’s an adjustment, but it’s absolutely manageable.
Is that your preference?
Thinkpad 11e
Ooo I think this may be the winner!
What price bracket are you looking at? The two laptops that I normally use in that situation is a used Thinkpad X1 Carbon I got on eBay, and a HP Dev One that works pretty well for that.
I am fine with refurbished but ideally looking for around 13" and under a couple hundred bucks
The Thinkpad link that was shared below looks pretty nice, they tend to be fairly cheap and easy to get replacement batteries and parts. There’s a lot available in that $150 to $200 bracket on eBay. Edit: I just saw it’s 14", so a bit bigger than what you wanted. You can filter by screen size and price on eBay to give you an idea of what you can get. You may need a new battery depending on the age, so keep that in mind.
When you say webapps, may I ask what method you prefer for using PWAs on Linux? Do you install them as apps? If so, how?
I mean in firefox, not trying to get fancy.
I use Brave pretty much just for that purpose, while I use Firefox to browse everything else.
There is Firefox PWA, but it feels like such a shitty hack (don’t get me wrong, it’s not badly made, but they’re forced by the circumstances to make a setup process that is one big headache) that I’d rather have a browser that has official and solid support and it also doubles as my browser to test web content on Blink, so it’s a win-win for meProblem is that Webapps require a very unhardened browser. Complete caching, cookies saved, serviceworkers in the background, so if Firefox got the feature hardening would break it
Isn’t that kind of the point though? I’d appreciate the option, but I don’t know how usable actual web apps would be without access to those things
Yes of course. Thats why support would totally be possible, but it needs to be a seperate unhardened firefox profile. Then all good.
Yea, I tried with Firefox PWA, but as you have told, it was not usable for me. Most PITA was, that I had to install my plugins on any PWA again and again… I would love using a browser which is not chromium based but has nice PWA features.
Maybe you can try GNOME Web if you don’t like Chromium, it should have them too, not sure how good the implementation is, though
It seems to work as I want 😃 thank you!
Awesome!
Pi-top or similar?
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For the usecase you describe, I’d go with a Chromebook, and build ChromeOS from source myself if that aspect felt important.
ChromiumOS would be better. But you can flash coreboot on lots of Chromebooks and run real Linux on them
I picked up a Black Friday Lenovo ChromeBook (Flex 3) for US $160 and use it essentially the same way you describe. You can load up a Debian-based Linux environment within ChromeOS. It’s basically my web-capable thin client.
Would a Framework laptop work?
If it was going to be my daily drive. They are just too expensive to have as a system I can use while sitting with the family.
