Any suggestions for cheap but decent laptops for coding?

EveryMuffinIsNowEncrypted@lemmy.blahaj.zone to Linux@lemmy.ml – 82 points –

I'm currently learning how to code (currently Python, then maybe JavaScript), but I'm not always around my desktop, and learning on my phone is not always an option (also, it can be quite cumbersome at times). Therefore, I'm looking into purchasing a laptop just for learning how to code and stuff.

I don't want to get a Chromebook because I want to be able to wipe the drive and install Linux on it (probably Linux Mint). Maybe it's changed since 2013, but the last time I had a Chromebook, it was a pain in the ass to install even bog-standard Ubuntu on it.

Problem is, I'm also heavily limited by space & budget: no more than 11 in (280 mm) total laptop width and 330 USD base price.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Please forgive me if this is not the right space for this kind of question. Lemme know if it is and I'll delete it. :)

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It’s probably best to limit yourself to a used laptop.

Reading and writing code is nothing more than reading and writing text, and for that you don’t need a fancy gpu or screen.

What I would recommend you look for in a laptop is

  • an SSD instead of an HDD
  • more cpu cores (at least 4 cores)
  • more memory (RAM) (at least 8GB, preferably 16GB+)

More memory and cores will help you with compiling and running your code.

And make sure you take regular backups! You never know when your disk will fail.

Also make sure to check linux compatibility before you buy. Laptops used to be a pain (10+ years ago), and it’s gotten a lot better, but it’s not always perfect. Just search for “[brand] [model] linux” or try to find the model on the archlinux wiki.

an SSD instead of an HDD

I'd rather search for upgradeability, i.e., non-soldered RAM, easy access to HDD, maybe replace the optical drive with an HDD caddy, etc...

Well, just for learning coding on Linux OP wouldn't need 16GB.

I feel people used to having more RAM always recommended insane amounts of RAM. 4 GB gets you by running a browser or PDF viewer with a code editor, 8 or more GB is recommended IMO.

is nothing more than reading writing text

Unless you’re compiling rust.

  • Mic drop *

More memory and cores will help you with compiling and running your code.

Have you even read my comment?

Whooosh!

Sound of a joke passing over you

For Linux I would just find the best ThinkPad within your budget (a used one, in this case)

Edit for an example (and re-edit to clean up link): https://www.ebay.com/itm/134956529143

You make a great point, but the problem is I've looked at a ton of them and they all seem to be too big. I have a very limited primary workspace at only 11 inches and for example the T14 Gen 1 you linked to is 12.95 inches in width.

Oops, I missed that part. There's the X280 and its predecessors (X270, X260, etc.). The screen is 12.5" so the overall dimensions should be OK.

12.5" is too big. If the screen itself is 12.5", then the total laptop width (if the screen is 16:9) will almost certainly be bigger than that. Like I said, my primary workspace is limited strictly to a max of 11 inches.

.......Unless you knew that and I'm completely misunderstanding you. Which, mind you, is definitely a possibility. Lol. So, I'm sorry if that's the case and I humbly would ask you to elaborate. ;)

FYI 12.5" is the diagonal, it's going to be much narrower

Probably used is the right answer. Be mindful of battery life and wear.

Steam Deck. I'm half serious if you got a wireless mini keyboard with touch pad. You can play games on it too BTW ;)

Lol, that's kind of intriguing honestly. Are Python interpreters even available on whatever fork of Linux that SteamDecks use? Haha.

Yes. Steam Deck is based on Arch linux. I even have PyCharm installed.

This amuses me.

It doesn't really surprise me, but it does amuse me.

Thank you for brightening up my week a bit. I've had a wisdom tooth removed and have been in a lot of pain, so my past two weeks have sucked.

steam deck is NOT a proper replacement for a work desktop, ymmv

For a desktop yes. You can dock it and forget that it's not a regular Linux desktop. Especially if it means Python and JS, you don't need much power for that.

For a laptop not so much, because you'll need to bring screen+keyboard+mouse and everything to plug them so the portability aspect seriously suffers.

I am super partial to old ThinkPads. Currently I am running an x1 yoga gen 4 that I got from a company that was recycling it for free. I also have a P52, and a t460s. All have been great. I have used several others including an x230, an x201, a w520, w530 and w540(least favorite due to the trackpad). Generally I like to stop at about the Intel 8th gen series as parts are usually still fairly serviceable and affordable.

I do like me some good Thinkpads too. :)

But, unfortunately, all of those are too big. :(

I have a very limited primary workspace, of only room for 11 inches total laptop width.

My bad! You may have totally said that and I missed that part.

You might want to look at the dell XPS 13 series. Their small bezels in the more recent models put them more in line with a MacBook 11 inch. Might be best bang for the buck as far as performance.

Rocking a T480 hackintosh over here.

Used latitude.

I picked up a used Latitude 7300 (I think?) last year and am quite happy with it. I appreciate that I can replace the ram and ssd myself for repair / upgrade.

I’m running Mint on it and haven’t noticed any problems.

Used t490 / t480. Can you elaborate on the "heavy limited by space"?

The x390/x280 are the same era as these but smaller, so might be a better fit here. The X390 has soldered RAM though, so I'd look for the 16GB version if you can find it (there's not much of a price difference used)

Buy an old thinkpad from craigslist. The one I'm using is from 2011 and is perfectly sufficient tech-wise. I'll have to replace it soon, but only because it's falling apart.

Yeah get a used laptop. Anything used in good condition is way better than new at the same or often twice the price.

Chromebooks are bad, but they run Coreboot. With MrChromebox and Chrultrabook you can get a normal Coreboot BIOS on there and run any Linux distro.

But they are often not repairable and have extremely limited storage and RAM. Also finding info on many of them is horrible.

If you really want to you can combine:

  • a raspberry pi (with case)
  • a power bank
  • a small USB keyboard
  • a small portable display
  • a mouse

It doesn't take more space than a laptop :))

At that point you might as well go with a steamdeck. Works with or without the mouse/keyboard/screen and can play games. The desktop environment is full kde and ready to go.

That's a good idea! Do I need to know any coding or soldering to set up a Raspberry Pi?

No, just download Raspbian (Debian for RaPi) or any other popular distribution on your main computer and copy it to your RaPi's SD card. Oh and if your mouse "lags" - you can increase your mouse refresh rate in settings.

Also while the setup obviously works and does its job (and is really fun to use) it's probably not better than a laptop. It's more of a thing you use because you can...

...anyway, if you already have some of the parts it's the cheapest you can get, and it is just as practical as a laptop. I already had a pi4 with case, a keyboard and a mouse, so only was missing a portable monitor and a powerbank (but buying a powerbank never is a bad idea anyway).

I recommend the Thinkpad yoga 11e, which is their education edition. They're out of stock at the moment, but they'll come back soon. They always do. It's an 11 inch laptop with a flip around touch screen and integrated stylus. Works perfectly with Linux. It's not super fast, but it's under 300 dollars new. And it's made for kids so it's durable. I have one and I love it. You can get one used if you like, but at that point you're probably better off with an older model.

Now that apple has their own silicon, all the older intel based MacBooks are pretty cheap. I just replaced my wife's 2013 MacBook Airs battery, upgraded the drive, and installed Linux. It's been a solid little laptop. Not the fastest but there's probably a few pro models within your price range. Just make sure to get at least a 16gb model since the ram is soldered. Might have issues with the webcam, but the wifi drivers are pretty good.

I thought Macs are notoriously difficult to install Linux on, like from a firmware level.

Is this incorrect?

The Intel ones are quite a bit easier, but still not as easy as a PC. You need to disable some FW security settings to allow for a non Apple kernel to boot.

Ah. In that case, I think I'm gonna steer clear of Macs. I'm not at all familiar with post-2013 Macs in the first place, and I definitely don't know enough to fiddle around with its firmware security settings (or any firmware security settings, for that matter).

if you can compromise on the width, a used thinkpad t480 is under budget, upgrade-able, works fine with any linux and is plenty good enough to do what you need.

If you can get a metal body laptop, I would suggest you do. Metal chassis with Linux will last a long while. Programming will not take much resources (and if it does, rewrite your code). Since you're into light programming like python any distro would be fine. It feels like the community has somewhat agreed to suggest Linux Mint to new users so I'll support that.

Thanks, yeah, metal seems better, but I imagine a metal chassis would be more expensive, so probably out of my price range... And yeah Linux Mint was what I was gonna do. I've heard a lot of good things about that distro in recent months.

Refurbished Dell 7390? ~$250 has an 13" display with relatively small bezels. I think if you want it even smaller, you'd need some mini laptop or a tablet or steam deck. But that has other downsides. And having a device with an full-size keyboard is nice if you want to type / code.

Agreed on the benefits of having a full-size keyboard. Alas, 13" is too big. My primary workspace is limited to 11" for the total laptop width (i.e. screen and bezel).

The good thing about Linux is, it's not very ressouce demanding. If you pick the xfce version of Mint, you can get away with 4GB of RAM. But you won't have that much fun coding as soon as you start something more ressource heavy (big data sets, ML, ...) so this depends a little in which direction you want to go. However see if you can find something used, preferably something you can open from the back side to upgrade components like SSD and RAM (cheaper than buying higher specs)

getting a small laptop as a dumb terminal and using a cloud server as a more beefy “as needed” machine isn’t a bad option either

I recommend looking for refurbished laptops. As they'd give you better bang for buck. If you do indeed to with refurbished laptop, check everything thoroughly before buying including how long the battery lasts and if the display has any deffects.

I am also supremely space-constrained, but I also had no need to take my development device away from my desk. So I got a workstation and a KVM to switch between workstations, thereby needing only one keyboard, mouse, and set of monitors for multiple computers.

I went further than that, because I also needed to keep the desktop largely clear and the floor space used down to an absolute minimum. So I got a 60s “tanker desk”, and put a smaller office table on top of it. the computers all sit on top of the office table, up near the ceiling (and away from a lot of the dust!) and the monitors and KVM dangle down from beneath it. This leaves only the two pedestal legs of that office table and my keyboard and mouse as the only things “on” the top surface of my desk.

And ignoring the chair, I can have four workstations and six monitors within a 30×60 inch footprint (the tanker desk).

I have an 8 year old Acer aspire and it works great for coding. I've learned a lot about both of those languages with zero worries and recently moved the OS over to nix with excellent results.

I work in IT and my 4 year old retired Dell 5300 is working just fine. Great form factor as well.

Looking it up, it seems like a delightful little laptop, but it's too big. It's got a 13.3 inch screen, and I'm limited to a total laptop width of 11 inches.

The screen is measured diagonally.

The screen width won't be 13 inches.

Not the screen width. The laptop width. The total space I have to work with is exactly 11 inches wide.

(I didn't have a ruler, so I used a 3-hole punch, which has the zero point in the center, and spreads out 5½ inches in each direction, resulting in a total width of 11 inches.)

The laptop won't be 13.3 inches either.

Wait, now I get what you're saying.

What do you mean the laptop won't have a 13.3" screen? The page I linked to said it does. And if the screen is 13.3", then the total laptop width will be more than that.

I've got a Lenovo P11, goes pretty well on a charge, and VSCode is available on android, haven't used it much as I almost always code at home now.

Oh shit! I didn't even know VSCode was available for Android. Nice! Thank you!

 

Edit: Er, nevermind. VSCode is indeed available on Android, but for US$12. Ew. Thanks anyway though. :)

That's fucked up, it was $8AUD when I got it like a year ago. Fuckin corpos and their price hikes.

I was happy to swallow it to code on the go, but I only used it for a few weeks. Sometimes I lay in bed to code though so I can watch TV as well (never mind all the errors I make as a result).

Honestly, why should it be paid at all when it's free on desktop? That doesn't make sense to me.

I thought exactly the same thing, as previously though, I was willing to swallow the $8 (at the time) in order to use my tablet for coding (may as well be a laptop running android tbh).

Some reason I have Chromebook Lenovo Thinka Pad 11e saved in my notes

Iirc it's something that isn't too difficult to unlock and get Linux on it, otherwise I wouldn't have considered it.

Don't Chromebooks require doing "something something chroot" or whatever to get Linux installed on it? Or has that not been the case since 2013? Because my last Chromebook was in 2013 and it was a pain in my (sadly not yet open-source) ass to install and set-up.

I'm using Lenovo ThinkBook, which is cheaper than Thinkpad, and the keyboard layout is different. It supports upto 40GB of RAM.

Like Thinkpad, the main brand is Lenovo. Thinkbook keyboard is like Acer and other brands.

ThinkBook

Ooh, that's intriguing. I've never heard of that brand.

and the keyboard layout is different.

How different? Are we talking "different shape of the Enter key" or "full-on head-banging death-metal Dvorak"? Because I like me some QWERTY.

It supports upto 40GB of RAM.

Holy shit that's a lot of RAM.

Used Dell XPS, Thorvalds' own choice of laptop, and often ranked well on iFixIt reparability ratings

I've been using a Dell XPS-15 9560 for over six years now, the keyboard needed to be cleaned after four years and and the charging port needed to be replaced (€10 inc service) recently. The battery no longer lasts 11 or so hours but it lasts 2 or so which I'll take, for about €100 I could replace just the battery.
All of which, for how fast devices tend to break on me, is an incredibly good mileage I'd say!

And oh yeah, whatever Linux I've been distro hopping to has worked swimmingly!

You can usually find old(ish) refurbished thinkpada on amazon for around that price. I recently bought a refurbished t480 for $315 CAD

You can find good used Dell Latitude's on ebay for pretty cheap. I'd avoid thinkpads as they have wifi-card blacklists on them.

I have a bunch of used ThinkPads. Whats that blacklist thing? Never heard of it 🤔

I belive hes refering to lenovos bios blocks certain wifi cards? I remember before buying my t440p i watched a stupid amount of videos of people moding them. Some of which were bios mods for newer wifi cards.

Probably a non-issue for this use case then. A relatively cheap Lenovo for programming, would not be too old to have a decent wifi card already in it. Even the pretty old ones I got for my kids have decent wifi cards, some even 4g. No issues at all with running Linux.

Oh, it's worse than blocking certain wifi cards, it blocks all wifi cards except what came with the laptop. I mispoke when I called it a blacklist, it's a whitelist.

Some of the cheaper Thinkpads are terribly poor quality. Once a by word for ruggedness, now just another name.

Chromebooks have a great builtin support for running Linux in a container. No need to wipe and re-install. And they are consistently cheap and often small.

A older Dell XPS 13 could be good too.

However, with some effort, you can install Linux and turn them into regular laptops.

Second this. Did it a few weeks ago, works perfectly fine. Paid 50€ for a four year old Acer Chromebook 11 and followed the matching guide here: https://mrchromebox.tech/#devices
(Don't buy my model, the keyboard is crap)

I would prefer to have a Chromebook wiped out and turn it into a "real" computer than having to support the ChromeOS

Does the Chromebook is x86_64 or ARM?

Chromebooks are sold in both architectures. The Arm Chromebooks may be cheaper and have better battery life.