Looking for a "couch laptop"

parallax@local106.com to Linux@lemmy.ml – 90 points –

I'm in the market for a Linux friendly ultralight laptop to check web apps and run terminal, nothing fancier then that. Do any cheap systems exits these days? I was looking at a chrome book but apparently the mediatek chip doesn't play nicely with FOSS.

Any thoughts?

74

Ex-corporate refurbished laptop from the last 3 or 4 years for about $300 tops is perfect for this.

Can confirm, I use an old HP elitebook from work. Battery life is great, beats my wives new lenovo. More than powerful enough to browse the web and play in the terminal. Also only gets hot if I run a game on it; I wouldnt advise that though.

Can confirm, bought a Dell latitude 4790 which is a corporate machine refurbished for $270. It's super powerful for the price, runs Fedora perfectly.

I have a second-hand Thinkpad T480s that I love, I bought it for 250$ on ebay and replaced its battery because it was fried (+40$). I use it for school and it works flawlessly, around 8h of battery life in a well-configured OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. According to the specs sheet it shouldn't be, but for some reason it is noticeably lighter than a friend of mine's MacBook Air 2021.

What I really love about it is the ThinkDock Ultra (iirc 30$ on ebay), which lets me place the laptop on my table, and by just sliding a piece of plastic, it connects all of my peripherals in a second. I love this laptop so much that I'll use it until it dies so hard that it can't be fixed at all.

laptop, cover laptop, open dock, no laptop dock, I/O laptop + dock

I bought a used Lenovo ThinkPad X240 Laptop i5 | 8GB RAM | 500GB HDD | for 50$ as a couch laptop to run Linux / Python code. I can browse the internet and it’s light.

It's not the thinnest thing ever, but I find my old ThinkPad X230 very light and easy to use for extended periods on my lap

When you say "couch" my first thought is a recent-ish Celeron or Pentium Silver fanless laptop. Performance akin to a Core 2 Duo but no fan to get blocked sitting on the couch. Like the Latitude 3210(?)

Laptops that appeal to me are often bottom breathers so it's one thing I miss from my old MB Air.

My couch laptop is an i5-5200u and it does great until you get more than 2 heavy browser tabs open.

Any chromebook that supports Coreboot. Absolutely unrepairable and very low storage, but good Linux support and coreboot!

mrchromebox.tech/devices

But be aware a ton of features that would work on ChromeOS don't work, I've done this to 4 and all have separate problems

Very interesting! I had an Acer Chromebook I couldnt even open up, so I got rid of it as fast as possible.

Could you share experiences?

  • keyboard layouts, missing buttons
  • what features are missing?
  • anything else thats good to know?

The pinebooks are pretty inexpensive. I can't speak to quality or usability though

I bought a refurbished dall latitude 7490 for like 270$. For the price it's a powerful machine, 16gb ram and i7 processor. Installed fedora on it and I'm in love with it. For the price it puts out the power I need for software development.

mine is an asus e210ma with a samsung nvme added, it's great

What price bracket are you looking at? The two laptops that I normally use in that situation is a used Thinkpad X1 Carbon I got on eBay, and a HP Dev One that works pretty well for that.

I am fine with refurbished but ideally looking for around 13" and under a couple hundred bucks

The Thinkpad link that was shared below looks pretty nice, they tend to be fairly cheap and easy to get replacement batteries and parts. There's a lot available in that $150 to $200 bracket on eBay. Edit: I just saw it's 14", so a bit bigger than what you wanted. You can filter by screen size and price on eBay to give you an idea of what you can get. You may need a new battery depending on the age, so keep that in mind.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/155206247310?mkcid=16&mkevt=1&mkrid=711-127632-2357-0&ssspo=hHEhCOiITeW&sssrc=4429486&ssuid=h5eIb-AvSIq&var=&widget_ver=artemis&media=COPY

I prefer the T480 series (imo Thinkpad went downhill from there onwards). The non-s is a great off-road laptop, but for what OP is asking, the T480s seems like a more sensible choice.

I was leaning thinkpad.

What about something like the Thinkpad X201? It's not ultralight but it is quite small.

Other than that I'd probably say a Chromebook with a Linux install. Second hand they are quite cheap and can likely do what you are after. A lot of them have passive cooling which is nice for a couch device. I was able to install libreboot on my C201P quite easily and now it just runs a traditional Linux install

I'm writing this on my x201 on my couch. I love it, but it's not a great couch laptop. It's kind of heavy, runs hot, and has poor battery life vs more-recent comparables.

Yeah the heat would be what would make me hesistate to use it as a couch laptop but if OP wants something cheap I would say it's an okay option

I used to have X230 as a daily driver for laptop (I got separate desktop) and it's a really nice machine for it's size. Only the display is a bit lacking by todays standards as it's only 1368x768, but for 150€ (give or take) it's not too bad.

I have that same laptop, and it sounds perfect for what you want. Cheap, repairable, and runs linux well.

Just buy a tablet at that point.

With a terminal being a core use for the machine?

Terminal app for iOS

Terminal app for Android

Expensive premium Windows tablet to use PowerShell

Cheap Windows tablet to use PowerShell

Expensive linux tablet

Cheap linux tablet

Cheap Chromebook tablet to use CroSH chrome terminal

Problem?

Yeah, trying to use either a soft keyboard for that, or a tablet keyboard while lounging on the couch.

I bet you money that you statistically use the touch screen keyboard on your phone significantly more than you ever are to your hardware keyboard for your PC.

You would be very very wrong, since I hardly use my phone.

But to your point, a soft keyboard is very different for conversational input that autocorrect and predictive typing excels at, and command entry and scripting where syntax is critical and you aren't really typing in English or some other language.

I write and run plenty of small to medium Python scripts on my iPhone. It's an adjustment, but it's absolutely manageable.

Is that your preference?

Not particularly. I use it because it's always available.

But the limiting factor is way more the lack of real estate than it is typing.

I'd much rather have something with a dedicated keyboard and sturdy hinge.

I use a 2013 macbook air for almost this exact use case. Ask friends and family if they have any old laptops lying around.

As others have mentioned, secondhand laptops and surplus business laptops are very affordable and probably better value for the money than a chromebook. My understanding is that drivers for things like fingerprint sensors, SD card readers, or oddball Wi-Fi chipsets can be issues to watch out for. But personally I don't care about the fingerprint sensor and only the Wi-Fi would be a major issue to me.

A couple years ago now I picked up a used Acer Swift with 8th gen intel and a dent in the back lid for something like $200 to use as my "throw in a backpack for travel" laptop, and it has been working great. In retrospect, I would have looked for something with 16GB of RAM or upgradeable RAM (8GB soldered to the motherboard, ugh), but aside from that minor gripe it has been a good experience.

The ultimate couch laptop will be an M1 MacBook Air as it has no fans and a suped up phone chip so it doesn't heat. It also has amazing battery life... But it's still pretty expensive and it cannot be repaired. Otherwise old MacBooks should be pretty good because most of the Intel models used relatively low end chips because their thermal design was so limited

He also said Linux-friendly, lol.

Afaik the M1Air is fully functional for this use case. I think only small things like the fingerprint sensor and deeper processor features are missing

I recentry tried an M2 Air and was just amazed how lightweight it was.

When you say webapps, may I ask what method you prefer for using PWAs on Linux? Do you install them as apps? If so, how?

I mean in firefox, not trying to get fancy.

I use Brave pretty much just for that purpose, while I use Firefox to browse everything else.
There is Firefox PWA, but it feels like such a shitty hack (don't get me wrong, it's not badly made, but they're forced by the circumstances to make a setup process that is one big headache) that I'd rather have a browser that has official and solid support and it also doubles as my browser to test web content on Blink, so it's a win-win for me

Yea, I tried with Firefox PWA, but as you have told, it was not usable for me. Most PITA was, that I had to install my plugins on any PWA again and again.. I would love using a browser which is not chromium based but has nice PWA features.

Maybe you can try GNOME Web if you don't like Chromium, it should have them too, not sure how good the implementation is, though

Problem is that Webapps require a very unhardened browser. Complete caching, cookies saved, serviceworkers in the background, so if Firefox got the feature hardening would break it

Isn't that kind of the point though? I'd appreciate the option, but I don't know how usable actual web apps would be without access to those things

Yes of course. Thats why support would totally be possible, but it needs to be a seperate unhardened firefox profile. Then all good.

I picked up a Black Friday Lenovo ChromeBook (Flex 3) for US $160 and use it essentially the same way you describe. You can load up a Debian-based Linux environment within ChromeOS. It's basically my web-capable thin client.

Would a Framework laptop work?

If it was going to be my daily drive. They are just too expensive to have as a system I can use while sitting with the family.

I have a framework and love it but it's probably not the best option for this. It's kinda overkill and they can get a bit hot and loud. More of a desk laptop than a lap laptop IMHO. Also depends on how long you need the battery to last but this is reportedly better in the newer models.

I bought a used HP Elitebook on eBay for a similar purpose. I can browse and do video calls on a bigger screen when the fancy strikes. Pretty much any used business laptop should work. I think I paid about $300 for mine and I paid extra for particular hardware I thought was neat but you don't have to. Only thing to keep in mind is the battery will likely be pretty worn.

Something with a spacious keyboard would be great.

Personally, I'm waiting to see how support for the M1 Macbook Air and Thinkpad X13s develop. I have a MBA already, so I'll probably throw Asahi on it eventually, and then wait for the ARM wars of 2025.

I'm not at all a fan of the keyboard on the MBA, but being passive and 13" is perfect for the couch.

For the usecase you describe, I'd go with a Chromebook, and build ChromeOS from source myself if that aspect felt important.

ChromiumOS would be better. But you can flash coreboot on lots of Chromebooks and run real Linux on them

Check out /r/laptopdeals daily until you find something that fits your needs and budget.

I went with a used ThinkPad yoga 370. It still only has a dual core while the following Gen has 4 cores, so it seemed there was a price gap. It has thunderbolt 3 for when I want to switch to a bigger screen (with a cheap USB c dock) and USB c charging. Also I wanted to try a touchscreen on a laptop. I should be able to upgrade the single ram stick in it at some point. Running arch with sway without problems.

Edit: I had a x240 for years before. It was fine but I appreciate the higher resolution of the 370, even if I ended up using fractional scaling as it was just a bit too small.