this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2025
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I'm interested in ideas for small laptop-style devices that (1) run Linux and (2) are actually usable (i.e., not so small or low quality they're basically toys).

My goal is for something to supplement my current, larger laptop. Something I can throw in a bag and pull out as needed during the day to take a few notes, read an eBook on, access the web, and so on.

Anyone have or heard of such a device?

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[–] wjrii@lemmy.world 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I've had many laptops over the years, from the original eeePC to 17" portable workstations, and the smallest I personally found to be "usable" on a daily basis were in the 12" class; I used a Sony Z505 throughout law school. Get that size with a usable keyboard and touchpad. Anything reasonably modern with 8GB of RAM should be able to putz around in Linux as a secondary device.

[–] azimir@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 day ago (3 children)

I had one of the 10" eeePC machines for years. That thing was a tank. It did everything I needed it to, especially weird networking configurations. The battery also lasted over 6 hours. I mostly ran Crunchbang #! Linux on it.

I don't think I could live on a 10" screen anymore, but back in the day it was a dream machine.

[–] JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago

I don’t think I could live on a 10" screen anymore, but back in the day it was a dream machine.

Interesting. Years ago I moved from an 18in desktop setup to something like your eeePC. Unexpectedly, I also found it fine. These days I have a 14in and it feels unnecessarily big and heavy.

If you're happy doing things one window at a time (i.e. monocle view, or basically as on mobile OSs), turns out the floor's the limit!

[–] tal@lemmy.today 4 points 1 day ago

For the hell of it, I used one as my main work laptop for a while. $199 plus $20 of RAM when I got it, IIRC.

External keyboard, put the laptop on a cantilevered board so that it's right in front of my eyeballs so that the screen size doesn't matter, use it mostly as a thin client to a beefier machine so the CPU doesn't matter much.

[–] thefartographer@lemm.ee 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I had the original eeePC too. I found the problem with the screen to be the resolution, not the size. My Lenovo Legion Go with its 8" screen is perfect as my daily driver.

[–] flubba86@lemmy.world 2 points 13 hours ago

I had one too. Besides the screen resolution, the actual worst thing about them was the MMC storage. Literally slower than a 5400rpm HDD. Mine was the one with the slightly faster atom CPU, but it was bottlenecked by the crazy slow storage.