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?
Ex-corporate refurbished laptop from the last 3 or 4 years for about $300 tops is perfect for this.
Can confirm, I use an old HP elitebook from work. Battery life is great, beats my wives new lenovo. More than powerful enough to browse the web and play in the terminal. Also only gets hot if I run a game on it; I wouldnt advise that though.
why would you buy a laptop that beats your wife’s laptop? That seems abusive.
But honey, I can change (the OS)
Can confirm, bought a Dell latitude 4790 which is a corporate machine refurbished for $270. It’s super powerful for the price, runs Fedora perfectly.
I have a second-hand Thinkpad T480s that I love, I bought it for 250$ 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.
Thanks for sharing the pictures! Loved it!
I found a T430 dock, its so nice
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.
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.
My couch laptop is an i5-5200u and it does great until you get more than 2 heavy browser tabs open.
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!
Any chromebook that supports Coreboot. Absolutely unrepairable and very low storage, but good Linux support and coreboot!
mrchromebox.tech/devices
But be aware a ton of features that would work on ChromeOS don’t work, I’ve done this to 4 and all have separate problems
Very interesting! I had an Acer Chromebook I couldnt even open up, so I got rid of it as fast as possible.
Could you share experiences?
- keyboard layouts, missing buttons
- what features are missing?
- anything else thats good to know?
The pinebooks are pretty inexpensive. I can’t speak to quality or usability though
I bought a refurbished dall latitude 7490 for like 270$. For the price it’s a powerful machine, 16gb ram and i7 processor. Installed fedora on it and I’m in love with it. For the price it puts out the power I need for software development.
Thinkpad 11e
Ooo I think this may be the winner!
There are plenty of Chromebooks that can wiped & replaced w/ Linux. I run Debian 12 on my HP x360. Check this list: https://chrultrabook.github.io/docs/docs/supported-devices.html
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.
mine is an asus e210ma with a samsung nvme added, it’s great
I was leaning thinkpad.
What about something like the Thinkpad X201? It’s not ultralight but it is quite small.
Other than that I’d probably say a Chromebook with a Linux install. Second hand they are quite cheap and can likely do what you are after. A lot of them have passive cooling which is nice for a couch device. I was able to install libreboot on my C201P quite easily and now it just runs a traditional Linux install
I’m writing this on my x201 on my couch. I love it, but it’s not a great couch laptop. It’s kind of heavy, runs hot, and has poor battery life vs more-recent comparables.
Yeah the heat would be what would make me hesistate to use it as a couch laptop but if OP wants something cheap I would say it’s an okay option
I used to have X230 as a daily driver for laptop (I got separate desktop) and it’s a really nice machine for it’s size. Only the display is a bit lacking by todays standards as it’s only 1368x768, but for 150€ (give or take) it’s not too bad.
I have that same laptop, and it sounds perfect for what you want. Cheap, repairable, and runs linux well.
I prefer the T480 series (imo Thinkpad went downhill from there onwards). The non-s is a great off-road laptop, but for what OP is asking, the T480s seems like a more sensible choice.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/155206247310
Without the trackers
Just buy a tablet at that point.
With a terminal being a core use for the machine?
Yeah, trying to use either a soft keyboard for that, or a tablet keyboard while lounging on the couch.
I bet you money that you statistically use the touch screen keyboard on your phone significantly more than you ever are to your hardware keyboard for your PC.
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?
As others have mentioned, secondhand laptops and surplus business laptops are very affordable and probably better value for the money than a chromebook. My understanding is that drivers for things like fingerprint sensors, SD card readers, or oddball Wi-Fi chipsets can be issues to watch out for. But personally I don’t care about the fingerprint sensor and only the Wi-Fi would be a major issue to me.
A couple years ago now I picked up a used Acer Swift with 8th gen intel and a dent in the back lid for something like $200 to use as my “throw in a backpack for travel” laptop, and it has been working great. In retrospect, I would have looked for something with 16GB of RAM or upgradeable RAM (8GB soldered to the motherboard, ugh), but aside from that minor gripe it has been a good experience.
