On 03/09/2017 19:08, Jonas Hedman wrote:
Hello I hope that is not OT for this list.
Basically I'm on the hunt for a newish laptop on which I naturally want
to run Debian. I'm a student and I spend most of my daily outandabout
computer time reading pdfs, writing LaTeX docs, surfing and doing some
light coding, no heavy duty stuff in other words. I use i3vm and I
generally like to keep things as light and minimal as feasibly possible.
I really value light weight and good battery life and my upper bound on prize
is somewhere around 875$ (~7K SEK). Memory should be greater than or
equal to 2GB and an sdd would be nice.
I know very little about hardware and I'm not quite sure where or how to
start looking. I though the Lenovo Thinkpad 13 looked promising but it's a bit
over my price target. Could chromeboosk be something to look into? I
know the older thinkpads has good debian support but if I remember
correctly they are also very heavy.
As a small reference: I made due with a Asus EEE PC 1005HA for a number
of years and it generally worked well for my purposes but it died and
surfing was a pain so I'm looking to upgrade a bit from that.
Any suggestions?
Best regards
Hi, I recently installed Debian 9 on an Asus "Zenbook" X430-UA (Intel
graphics) and it runs beautifully. It's my son study laptop and it's
performing well so far, battery life is excellent. Everything works, I
installed in UEFI mode alongside Win, grub is managing the boot process
for both OS, no problem outside of Win clobbering the bootloader already
once during an upgrade, but easy to fix. The keyboard is by my standards
(using Thinkpads and mechanical keyboard on desktops) awful, the space
bar stands out as particularly bad and spongy, but it is my only serious
complaint. Screen is too bright and blue, but easily fixed by applying a
color profile with "dispcalgui". It is not free since it requires
firmwares for Intel hardware, but everything is included in Debian
non-free. No ethernet port, tested a usb-c > ethernet adapter and it
worked well. Card reader works, webcam+mic too, touchpad (clickpad) is
good and very precise, click is not "clicky" enough for me but ok. I
didn't test the fingerprint reader but assume it doesn't work, I have no
use for it anyway. Sound is unexpectedly good for such a thin and light
laptop. My son loves it.
Happy shopping.
