I’m interested in ideas for small laptop-style devices that (1) run Linux and (2) are actually usable (i.e., not so small or low quality they’re basically toys).
My goal is for something to supplement my current, larger laptop. Something I can throw in a bag and pull out as needed during the day to take a few notes, read an eBook on, access the web, and so on.
Anyone have or heard of such a device?
Maybe not the smallest but I recently got a second hand Panasonic CF-RZ6 and it’s incredibly useful. Surprisingly most(all?) hardware’s working on Linux/FreeBSD/Win10/MacOS 10.13(OpenCore) that I tested, and the battery lasts about 4~5 hours with low clock speed on Linux. S3 sleep is also working pretty well. The japanese keyboard is hard to type on, and it’s pretty hard to obtain outside japan though.
IBM Thinkpad 701.
Possibly this. https://liberux.net/
I guess an important question is how small is unusable for you? That’s not an objective measure, and will be up to what you find usable.
It’s clearly an objective measure. Do some research!
/s
I format all my movies to be under 9" so I can get 100% usability out of smaller laptops
It’s 100 usables. It’s its own scale, don’t confuse people.
its more a hand and finger size vs keyboard size.
No experience myself, but I saw this recently on Lemmy: GPD Win Max 2
Nice, I was going to post GPD. Also no personal experience, I’ve wanted one for a while now, maybe one day.
that looks awesome and the pricing actually seems decent unlike some of their other devices
A 2012 11" MacBook Air will run ZorinOS nicely and is truly tiny but very usable. Any Air made between 2012-17, really, but the 11" is SMALL.
This depends on how big hands you have.
A fully usable system good enough to watch Youtube, do spreadsheets and play Minecraft can be a few inches wide.
So basically what is the smallest keyboard and screen you find usable? There’s likely a laptop around that size.
GPD laptops run Linux well. Even their smallest laptop. So it’s really up to you as far how small you want to go.
A netbook maybe? I used to have an old 10" lenovo netbook with a celeron CPU and 2GB of RAM. Worked pretty well with Lubuntu. I could even play StarCraft on it. If you just need it for light browsing and office tools, it should work fine. You can probably get one with at least 4 or 8 GB RAM for better performance.
I’ve had many laptops over the years, from the original eeePC to 17" portable workstations, and the smallest I personally found to be “usable” on a daily basis were in the 12" class; I used a Sony Z505 throughout law school. Get that size with a usable keyboard and touchpad. Anything reasonably modern with 8GB of RAM should be able to putz around in Linux as a secondary device.
I had one of the 10" eeePC machines for years. That thing was a tank. It did everything I needed it to, especially weird networking configurations. The battery also lasted over 6 hours. I mostly ran Crunchbang #! Linux on it.
I don’t think I could live on a 10" screen anymore, but back in the day it was a dream machine.
I don’t think I could live on a 10" screen anymore, but back in the day it was a dream machine.
Interesting. Years ago I moved from an 18in desktop setup to something like your eeePC. Unexpectedly, I also found it fine. These days I have a 14in and it feels unnecessarily big and heavy.
If you’re happy doing things one window at a time (i.e. monocle view, or basically as on mobile OSs), turns out the floor’s the limit!
For the hell of it, I used one as my main work laptop for a while. $199 plus $20 of RAM when I got it, IIRC.
External keyboard, put the laptop on a cantilevered board so that it’s right in front of my eyeballs so that the screen size doesn’t matter, use it mostly as a thin client to a beefier machine so the CPU doesn’t matter much.
I had the original eeePC too. I found the problem with the screen to be the resolution, not the size. My Lenovo Legion Go with its 8" screen is perfect as my daily driver.
I had one too. Besides the screen resolution, the actual worst thing about them was the MMC storage. Literally slower than a 5400rpm HDD. Mine was the one with the slightly faster atom CPU, but it was bottlenecked by the crazy slow storage.
Not sure how much power you need - but I just bought a used Microsoft surface 7 pro and installed Linux Mint on it. Was pretty damn easy actually. Runs great!
Phone or small tablet with a wireless keyboard.
If you already have a larger Linux laptop that you’re otherwise happy with, have you considered just throwing it in a padded laptop backpack?
I have a Toshiba Satellite T110, 11.6" screen, now running Linux Zorin. I’ve had it for 15 years - got a new battery at one point and added RAM, very easy to do. It’s been a cracking little machine, really nice for travelling with.
Looks like a great machine. May I ask how’s the battery life/power usage on it?
These days I mostly keep it plugged in, but it had good battery life when new. I got a replacement battery when it failed to hold enough of a charge for 5 or 6 hours. I honestly can’t remember how long ago that was. I still travel with it occasionally, it’s useful for working with photos (Gimp).
