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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The ultimate couch laptop will be an M1 MacBook Air as it has no fans and a suped up phone chip so it doesn’t heat. It also has amazing battery life… But it’s still pretty expensive and it cannot be repaired. Otherwise old MacBooks should be pretty good because most of the Intel models used relatively low end chips because their thermal design was so limited
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.
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.
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.
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.
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