It’s a long long time I’m looking for an inexpensive small laptop with long battery life and keyboard. So I can carry it everywhere to write notes, do ssh, or fix small bugs.

The experience I have with me 7" ebook reader says that under 10" is too small to work comfortably with text. Above 12" will be too big to carry. I think even 12" is too big.

I want it to run an open source OS like BSD or Linux. Unfortunately, age of netbooks are over. So I wonder what options I’ve got. As far as I have researched:

  • Pinebook. The advantage is that it is open source and I can repair it easily meself. The disadvantage is that I think 11.6" is a lil big. Not sure as I never had a laptop at this size to tell for sure. But it seems these devices are not available in Pine64 store anymore. Only Pinebook pro which is 14".
  • A chromebook. I am not very much sure about these. It seems I can install Linux at least on some of them. The advantages are that I can easily find one for cheap. The disadvantage seems to be that I won’t be able to repair them easily. I guess the important part is the eMMC and its failure means bye bye? If I could put them from uSD, this shouldn’t be a problem. The chromebooks with SSD seem too expensive.
  • Reboot an old netbook. Advantage is that I can easily find one. Probably I could make changes to the laptop to make it more modern and usable. Mainly, replace the original lithium battery with a new custom one, possibly lighter and longer lasting. I could also replace the charging circuit and port with a modern type C. However, I’m not sure if one of these will last long enough given that they are second hand.
  • A Windows tablet. I could get one of these with keyboard and install Linux on them. Haven’t researched much about them.

I also have found Chuwi minibooks. But their support said they are discontinued.

Thoughts? Suggestions?

  • bert@lemmy.monster
    3·
    19 hours ago

    I kept seeing the MNT Pocket Reform suggested so i ended up picking one up (down votes to Crowdsupply for taking three weeks to even acknowledge my order).

    This thing is not even worth half the sticker price. It crawls just trying to boot the OS and the trackball is not smooth (both hardware and software) at all.

    I don’t use it for anything at this point, so I overpaid for a pretty looking paperweight. 🤷‍♂️

    edit: spelling errors

    • Unusable 3151 ⁂@lemmy.ml
      2·
      13 hours ago

      I have one with the RK3588 (32GB RAM version), and while it is CERTAINLY not competitive on price/performance, it’s been entirely serviceable for the last year, and I really enjoy it. The trackball is a bit annoying, but not game breaking. I think I found where the issue lies in their firmware, but haven’t had the time or energy to try to fix it. For some reason the polling rate on the trackball movement during scrolling is low enough that it doesn’t register if you move really slowly or only move a little bit, which ends up feeling a bit clunky, but it’s still better than most mice. The boot process takes ~10 seconds for me, but I’m loading NixOS with /boot on an SD card and I have LUKS encryption on my SSD.

      • bert@lemmy.monster
        1·
        19 hours ago

        I agree! I had really high hopes for it. I certainly dont regret supporting a small Kickstarter but it sure is a bummer that the device isn’t very usable

        Pretty sure it has the NXP i.MX8M Plus module.