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Ask HN: Good used $300-$500 Linux laptop for road warrior?

by TheMog on 1/26/17, 5:21 PM with 3 comments

I travel a lot for work and I already have company-issued MacBook Pro for work purposes. For various reasons (mainly to keep work stuff and personal stuff separate) I would prefer to carry a second personal laptop. The main requirements would be:

Must run Linux or FreeBSD well. Preferably Manjaro, but XUbuntu would be OK, too

Light weight. I'm lugging a ton of stuff around already and I'd prefer not having to bring a pack animal

* Compact enough to I can use it on the seatback tray in cattle class if I need to

* Decent battery life

* Expandable RAM and SSDs that can be replaced without using funky adapters would be really nice

What I don't need:

* A desktop replacement - I've got a nice collection of powerful desktops already. It does need to be powerful enough to run Emacs + C++ compiler and compiler for various JDK-based languages, but it's not a full-on development machine

Lenovo is usually my go-to when it comes to PC laptops, so I've been looking at 1st & 2nd gen X1 Carbons (fail on the expandable RAM and the SSD with no funky adapter, great otherwise) and X220/240/260s. I guess I should also at older Dell XPS 13s, but are there other laptops I should also look at?

  • by emaste on 1/26/17, 7:37 PM

    I have several Lenovo X220s running FreeBSD and am very happy with them. Inexpensive, good keyboard, sufficiently fast, good battery life, good expandability and availability of replacement parts.
  • by rijoja on 1/26/17, 7:01 PM

    Anything thinkpad really. No nonsense and a sturdy build.
  • by TheMog on 1/28/17, 2:29 AM

    Thanks - I found a very reasonably priced X240 on ebay, let's see how well that works out for me.