[TriLUG] Laptop recommendations

[Ron Kelley via TriLUG]

Agreed.  I bought a Toshiba Chromebook-2, installed a custom firmware (free, available on the ‘net), replaced the 16G boot disk with a 256G M-2 SSD, and run pure Ubuntu 16.04.  This thing flies!  Very light-weight, runs all Linux apps, etc.  The only downside is the trackpad (I use an external USB mouse).





On Feb 19, 2017, at 11:05 AM, Ken MacKenzie via TriLUG <trilug at trilug.org> wrote:

That is a lot of money for what basically a chrome book can do, which at
its core is gentoo linux.  I consider for most cases a chromebook to be one
of the best linux laptops you can buy, for any money.  If you need more
than what chromeos offers then you can put it in developer mode and use
crouton to install linux along side chromeos.  If you do plan to do that I
would recommend avoiding the ARM based chromebooks.  Still with chromebooks
(not all yet) supporting android apps as well as chromeos and the crouton
linux install option they are pretty much a very powerful platform for just
about anything you can imagine.

I am on my second chromebook of 3 in this house.  I am typing to you from
it on an Acer R11.  It has android app support, and right now typing this
from within the ubuntu trusty chroot in qtile and opera.  But for testament
of power I have used chromebooks with the crouton chroot to run realtime
audio synthesis and dj mixes from stage.  Do not under estimate what can be
done with a chromebook.  And because it is already a linux based machine
all the hardware pretty much works from within the chroot.  And yes you
could run a full blown unity setup if you wish.

Caveats on distro, crouton is pretty much debian or ubuntu based distro
install only.  And if you want touch screen support at present it is ubuntu
based only.

Ken

On Sun, Feb 19, 2017 at 10:51 AM, Matt Pusateri via TriLUG <
trilug at trilug.org> wrote:

> I happen to know that Lenovo T450’s and T460’s run RHEL and Fedora pretty
> well.  So I imagine that they’d run other distro’s well too.
> 
> Matt P.
> 
>> On Feb 19, 2017, at 10:47 AM, Thomas Delrue via TriLUG <
> trilug at trilug.org> wrote:
>> 
>> Hey all,
>> 
>> A friend of mine is looking to buy a new laptop(*) with a budget of
>> roughly 1000-1200 USD. Obviously, this device will run
>> $YOUR_FAVORITE_DISTRO Linux. It's purpose is not to do heavy computing
>> but mostly use it for what your grandma would use it for: i.e. browsing,
>> listening to music, some minor photo editing and -but this is
>> aspirational- maybe some video editing.
>> 
>> What are the recommendations for laptops these days and what are some
>> common pitfalls that could prevent putting Linux on it?
>> We've looked at System76 and I think he's looked at those offered by
>> Costco but he was underwhelmed by all of them.
>> 
>> (*) chromebooks are not an option
>> 
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> 
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