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?
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.
No experience myself, but I saw this recently on Lemmy: GPD Win Max 2
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.
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 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.
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!
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.
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.
Is this a laptop to you? https://thepihut.com/products/3-5-ips-capacitive-touch-display-320-x-480 because the rpi runs Linux pretty well.
Phone or small tablet with a wireless keyboard.
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!
GPD laptops run Linux well. Even their smallest laptop. So it’s really up to you as far how small you want to go.
This isn’t the smallest you can go per se and isn’t a laptop but I’ve happily run PopOS on my Surface Pro 8 for over a year. You lose the front camera due to the proprietary blobs, and there’s some tweaking needed such as to get the keyboard working for LUKS decrypt but it’s pretty damn good for those tasks you mention. I read a lot of comics and RPG rule/corebooks and it’s perfect for that plus some light browsing and media consumption. Biggest downsides are the battery life which isn’t great compared to on Windows (around 5hrs or so, up to 7 with light usage) but that’s Linux for you, and ofc it’s more awkward to balance the folio keyboard on your lap. But for all that, it’s pretty convenient to take around plus you get the benefit of that bright, Surface Pro display
I’m in love with my Lenovo Legion Go and use it as my primary PC for programming, photo editing, graphic design, and gaming. My friend got me a nice case for it with a pocket that fits my folding keyboard, a dongle, and a few adapters. I’ve completely removed Windows and run Bazzite on it.
A project that I’m sporadically working on is to figure out how to use the controller and fps mouse with input-remapper and plover for an all-in-one steno keyboard/mouse solution.
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.
