[TriLUG] Laptop recommendations

[Thomas Delrue via TriLUG]

On 02/19/2017 01:23 PM, Ken MacKenzie wrote:
> What was not stated clearly is why they are not an option.  And when 
> someone is setting a $1000 budget for a laptop to run linux for the
> sake of grandma internet usage I have to question why they are not
> thinking chromebook or for that matter any 3 year old craigslist
> hardware that will work fine for under $200 bucks.

<a_bit_snappy>
Why they are not an option was indeed not stated, but why does the
reason for their unsuited-ness need to be stated? Maybe they were
evaluated before this mail and already dropped from consideration
because of fatal flaws?
</a_bit_snappy>

For my friend's rationale:
A chromebook is Google and thus not a viable solution for anyone who is
privacy-conscious in even the most basic way. (and I'm not even talking
someone paranoid like me, I'm talking a regular privacy-aware human)
Crouton and the like are also not very grandma-friendly (apologies to my
nan for abusing her in this thread), $FAVORITE_DISTRO, however, is much
more friendly to me nan when she can be told to plop in the USB drive,
and literally click next-next-next--next-install while on the phone with
me, reboot and be good from then on.

The craigslist solution is untrustworthy: who knows what has been on
that device. I mean, 'we' (IT, security folks, etc) always go on and on
about how once a device has been compromised/infected, you really
*should* throw it away as it can never be fully trusted again, and I
can't even begin to imagine what has been or is present on some random
device one buys off of craigslist(*). But when someone actually
practices this mindset, oh boy, will you be called a dummy for wasting
money!

We looked at both options beforehand and dismissed them as soon as we
contemplated them, the reasons above are only a subset of why we
dismissed the options.

You're right about the grandma-internet usage though, but these days,
running a browser requires a multi-core, multi-GB-memory, SSD-drive
device anyway ("Lynx is NOT an option" - "But /why/ is lynx not an
option?") ;)

(*) That being said, I once worked for an organization who bought almost
all of their desktops and laptops from craigslist because "they are
cheaper and come with windows pre-installed so we can just plop 'em on
our domain like that"...
I literally wanted to do an "rm -rf --no-preserve-root /" on myself
after having learned that.
They even had a server like this; I think it went something like this in
the server-room (some slight paraphrasing, but the point is equivalent):
- Me: why does this thing look like a truck drove over it?
- Dude: oh, this is second-hand server, we got it from craigslist too,
it was very cheap.
- Me: but isn't this our domain controller?
- Dude: yeah, so? It runs, doesn't it?
- Me: *...sigh...* check my file system please... # fsck me

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