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?
You will not like this answer:
An old 11” macbook air or the 12” macbook circa ‘17.
They’re everywhere, last forever, parts are cheap, they’re durable, there is good Linux support, the screens are good and they don’t stick out when you’re using them in public.
I used to have 11” as my hard upper limit of diagonal size years ago but since then I realized it’s no big deal to carry a 13” diagonal computer now that they’re all incredibly thin and light.
Just looked at my local 2nd hand app in Belgium. Withing 20km of me, there are 8 macbook air 13 inch from 2015 to 2017 for <=150€.
Not bad, slap MX Linux on it or something light and it would be a great programming, browsing, etc… Small laptop