Ex-corporate refurbished laptop from the last 3 or 4 years for about $300 tops is perfect for this.
this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2023
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Can confirm, I use an old HP elitebook from work. Battery life is great, beats my wives new lenovo. More than powerful enough to browse the web and play in the terminal. Also only gets hot if I run a game on it; I wouldnt advise that though.
why would you buy a laptop that beats your wife's laptop? That seems abusive.
But honey, I can change (the OS)
I have a second-hand Thinkpad T480s that I love, I bought it for 250$ on ebay and replaced its battery because it was fried (+40$). I use it for school and it works flawlessly, around 8h of battery life in a well-configured OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. According to the specs sheet it shouldn't be, but for some reason it is noticeably lighter than a friend of mine's MacBook Air 2021. I will use this laptop until it dies so hard it can't be fixed at all.
Thanks for sharing the pictures! Loved it!
I found a T430 dock, its so nice
It's not the thinnest thing ever, but I find my old ThinkPad X230 very light and easy to use for extended periods on my lap
And its corebootable!
I bought a used Lenovo ThinkPad X240 Laptop i5 | 8GB RAM | 500GB HDD | for 50$ 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.
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
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The pinebooks are pretty inexpensive. I can't speak to quality or usability though
mine is an asus e210ma with a samsung nvme added, it's great
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.
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
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.
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.
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I use a 2013 macbook air for almost this exact use case. Ask friends and family if they have any old laptops lying around.
Thinkpad 11e
Ooo I think this may be the winner!
Pi-top or similar?
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
He also said Linux-friendly, lol.
Old macbooks are honestly great in terms of linux support
Afaik the M1Air is fully functional for this use case. I think only small things like the fingerprint sensor and deeper processor features are missing
I recentry tried an M2 Air and was just amazed how lightweight it was.
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 used a Pinebook for that
Check out /r/laptopdeals daily until you find something that fits your needs and budget.
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.
For the usecase you describe, I'd go with a Chromebook, and build ChromeOS from source myself if that aspect felt important.
ChromiumOS would be better. But you can flash coreboot on lots of Chromebooks and run real Linux on them
When you say webapps, may I ask what method you prefer for using PWAs on Linux? Do you install them as apps? If so, how?
I mean in firefox, not trying to get fancy.
I use Brave pretty much just for that purpose, while I use Firefox to browse everything else.
There is Firefox 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
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
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Would a Framework laptop work?
If it was going to be my daily drive. They are just too expensive to have as a system I can use while sitting with the family.
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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.
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