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.
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.
I use Brave pretty much just for that purpose, while I use Firefox to browse everything else.
There isFirefox 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 me
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.
Problem 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
I have a framework and love it but it’s probably not the best option for this. It’s kinda overkill and they can get a bit hot and loud. More of a desk laptop than a lap laptop IMHO. Also depends on how long you need the battery to last but this is reportedly better in the newer models.
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.
I bought a used HP Elitebook on eBay for a similar purpose. I can browse and do video calls on a bigger screen when the fancy strikes. Pretty much any used business laptop should work. I think I paid about $300 for mine and I paid extra for particular hardware I thought was neat but you don’t have to. Only thing to keep in mind is the battery will likely be pretty worn.
Personally, I’m waiting to see how support for the M1 Macbook Air and Thinkpad X13s develop. I have a MBA already, so I’ll probably throw Asahi on it eventually, and then wait for the ARM wars of 2025.
I’m not at all a fan of the keyboard on the MBA, but being passive and 13" is perfect for the couch.
I went with a used ThinkPad yoga 370. It still only has a dual core while the following Gen has 4 cores, so it seemed there was a price gap. It has thunderbolt 3 for when I want to switch to a bigger screen (with a cheap USB c dock) and USB c charging. Also I wanted to try a touchscreen on a laptop. I should be able to upgrade the single ram stick in it at some point. Running arch with sway without problems.
Edit: I had a x240 for years before. It was fine but I appreciate the higher resolution of the 370, even if I ended up using fractional scaling as it was just a bit too small.
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