I had a former employer get me a pimp
asus zenbook, the nice 2800x1600ish 15" display, dual ssd, etc,
but it was a freakin basketcase under ubuntu to get working. Even
trying arch and some others were painful, each with widely varying
quirks.
Their bios didn't support "legacy" booting, so I had to learn efi
which wasn't itself so bad, but very different and took some time
to figure out my raid+crypto+lvm with gpt. I encountered
countless bugs/quirks, many with the nvidia video that the desktop
version wouldn't work oob without causing the oss drivers to wig
out at 100% cpu, and if I let the display sleep, it wouldn't
reawaken. Great, since the install took forever with it pegging
the cpu the whole way, and having to reboot it constantly to work
around the crappy ubuntu desktop installer quirks that came with
13.10 at the time.
Some reason I don't remember, the alt installer wouldn't work on
it too, I think the 4k resolution blew up the vesa compatibility
for the ncurses-based di installer. I think sound didn't work at
the time too (needed newer kernel support at the moment).
Once it was working, I'd have lots of random lockups and other
things my laptops just didn't do, which really made using it far
more painful than my little crap hp folio, so I just kept using
that. When I quit, I gave it back gladly and checked Asus off my
buy list. Asus obviously didn't give a darn about linux support,
not even as an afterthought, and I doubt they've changed much
since early 2014 when that adventure took place.
I'm currently using a 12" lightweight dell latitude 7220 laptop,
i7 ulv proc, 16gb of ram, dual msata ssd, 1080p touch screen, and
a docking station. Only a dual-core and crap intel graphics, but
as a workstation, it's light, docking station is wonderful, and
works almost entirely great with linux, having run mint debian and
settling back on ubuntu.
I say almost, the only issue I've had is after a month or so of
use, it'll go into this zombie mode that I can't get it to
shutdown or hibernate without a hard powerdown, as it'll literally
keep waking up immediately after going to sleep. More than a few
times I pulled it out my laptop bag broiling itself, but now I
just pay attention and hard power it down (holding the power for
10sec) if it does. I need to harass dell some, this is a bios bug
it seems.
It's kinda pricey new ($2200ish), but I never buy new, rather look
for dell outlet coupons around holidays, usually finding 30-35%
off, at refurb price made it a steal (I think I paid ~$900),
saving to upgrade the memory and ssd's.
-mb
On 07/05/2015 11:16 AM, Stephen Partington wrote:
I have really been crushing on the ASUs
XenBook's lately. They have an interesting array of them now
and most of them are some pretty sexy machines.
http://www.amazon.com/Zenbook-13-3-Inch-Ultraslim-Aluminum-Available/dp/B00SGS7ZH4
is the cheaper one i have been looking at. they have a more
fully featured version that has Nvidia 960M graphics and a
4k touchscreeen but thats about 1700 right now.
On Sun, Jul 5, 2015 at 10:06 AM, Keith
Smith <
techlists@phpcoderusa.com>
wrote:
If you are
only going to use it for mail and surfing the web, anything
that runs Windows 8 will run better with Linux on it.
i3 / 4GB RAM would be my preference
I think at the bare minimum I'd want at least a Pentium with
2GB of RAM.
Looks like the Celeron is a dual core and the Pentium is a
quad core.
Here is the list of Celeron laptops.
http://www.dell.com/us/p/laptops?~ck=mn#!facets=226291~0~19561351,55846~0~14739528&p=1
Pentiums are more expensive.
http://www.dell.com/us/p/laptops?~ck=mn#!facets=226291~0~14720657,55846~0~14739528&p=1
I've noticed that some of the cheaper Laptops do not come
with an optical drive (DVD) and I noticed my Dell laptop
does not have a microphone in so I assume Skype calls are
out... have not researched so I might be wrong.
Keith
On 2015-07-05 08:09, joe@actionline.com
wrote:
What does this esteemed brain trust recommend as
the best options for an inexpensive ultralight to
run Linux?
Probably an 11 or 13" screen, thin, and light
weight (i.e. at or under 3 pounds)
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A mouse trap, placed on top of your
alarm clock, will prevent you from rolling over and going back
to sleep after you hit the snooze button.
Stephen
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