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?
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
Hey, well, the ChatGPT chart shows it, so it must be true!
An 11” screen is 58 usables. That’s just science.
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
that looks awesome and the pricing actually seems decent unlike some of their other devices
Nice, I was going to post GPD. Also no personal experience, I’ve wanted one for a while now, maybe one day.
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.
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 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 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.
GPD laptops run Linux well. Even their smallest laptop. So it’s really up to you as far how small you want to go.
Phone or small tablet with a wireless keyboard.
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.
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!
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
How small we talking? Dell Latitude 5310 is a nice small laptop, but that might be too big. You can always get one of those GPD mini laptops.
Alternately, a dell latitude 11 5175 with the battery keyboard could do as well.
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).
Ideally an old business laptop or tablet.
Something with at least 4GB of RAM, x86_64v3 compatible processor and SSD.
Dell, Lenovo and HP all made decent tablets and business laptops so check out eBay for your country. You also might luck out with Amazon Renewed.
