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Comment by johngalt | Hacker News Reader

Considering your goals and price range. I'd recommend shopping the refurb market. Specifically business laptops that are off lease. Bigcorp IT departments tend to cycle their hardware every 3-4 years and flood the market with used cheap/good used laptops. They won't be 'ultrabooks' but they will be cheap, reliable and easy to maintain.

Something like a Dell E6430 would be a good bet.

https://www.dellrefurbished.com/laptops/dell-latitude-e6430-...?

Keep in mind that raw stats/specs aren't everything. I've seen countless people held up by hardware issues that have nothing to do with the speed of the processor.

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This is the exact laptop that my employer provides me. While it is not thin or light, it is a pleasant machine to use. I have no problems using it on my lap on the couch or at a coffee shop. My machine is configured as an i5-3340 with 16GB RAM and a 256GB SSD (I also added a second SSD in place of the CD/DVD drive). I frequently have 3 or more VMs running under VMware, an instance or two of Visual Studio, Chrome, Outlook, and half a dozen other small utilities (text editors, skype for business, etc). I have no complaints whatsoever about performance. The touchpad isn't the greatest (I prefer my T420 in this department), but the keyboard is fine, and the screen as well.

As someone else mentioned, the T4x0 series are also very good. I have a personal T420 that I have upgraded to 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD, and Blu Ray that has held up very well over the years. To be honest, aside from the screen resolution, there is nothing pushing me to upgrade to a newer machine, and this thing was released in early 2011.

When I am looking for something thin and light, I use an Acer C720 Chromebook which has been reloaded with a full Linux install. It is perfect for SSHing into a more powerful machine if I'm just going to be in vim / bash all day. I get 8-10 hours of battery life in this mode. I picked this machine up for $130 a year or so ago (refurbished).

I tried Ubuntu on my c720 and had issues with the cursor. I think it might have been me brushing my hand against the trackpad which I believe the Chromebook os recognizes as accidental but Ubuntu did not.

Have you had this issue?

I don't remember having that issue specifically, but I do know that on a fresh install the touchpad is not very responsive. I'm currently running arch with the following as /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-synaptics.conf:

  Section "InputClass"
      Identifier "touchpad catchall"
      Driver "synaptics"
      MatchIsTouchpad "on"
      MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
      Option "FingerLow" "5"
      Option "FingerHigh" "10"
      Option "VertScrollDelta" "-25"
      Option "HorizScrollDelta" "-25"
      Option "CoastingSpeed" "5"
      Option "CoastingFriction" "20"
      Option "TapButton1" "1"
      Option "TapButton2" "3"
      Option "TapButton3" "2"
  EndSection

There's also a specialized Ubuntu-derivative called GalliumOS [1] that you might try. They try to work out all these configuration oddities before you get it loaded.

[1] https://galliumos.org/

Palm detection is turned off by default for some reason, but you can just turn it back on.

I'm currently traveling around the world (8 months, 12 countries so far) carrying a refurb MacBook Air from 2013 (I think). It's great, and I especially like that the all-metal chassis makes it really quite rugged. It fits perfectly down the back of an REI Trail 40 backpack, along with the rest of my stuff (great backpack for traveling light, BTW). If it breaks down there are Apple stores or repair shops in lots of places (though it may not be a cheap fix...) and if I'd bought AppleCare I think that would cover me all over the world.

Edit: We're also carrying an iPad, and it's the least-used piece of electronics we have. For planning our trip, booking, programming, email etc the laptop is way better, and for everything else we use our phones. Unless you're sure you want a tablet you might just want a normal laptop. Also, weight matters a lot (this might be an argument back in favor of the Teclast)

In my experience traveling, about 2013 Macbook Pros got too thin to be described as rugged. I have sporadic hardware issues with mine (late 2013) due to what seems to be physical pressure while in transit.

It's not rugged in the sense of a ruggedized laptop, but I do think they're tougher than anything else of a similar size.

I've had the odd transient problem with the keyboard (keys swapping or not working) but that's always resolved itself, and actually it hasn't happened for a while. What problems are you having?

Immediate graphical corruption and hard resets based upon minor pressure on certain regions of the touch pad, comes and goes. When it's "on" it's frequent and irritating. Quote to fix is too high.

One caveat is that the battery life on used or refurb laptops tends to be quite poor, because they don't usually replace the battery with a new one. All they guarantee is that it's tested/working, which can mean battery life as short as 15-20 minutes, just so long as it holds enough of a charge to turn on and run for a few minutes unplugged. Sometimes you get lucky and it might be hours, but I wouldn't expect anything like 6+ hours. So I usually add on the cost of a new battery when comparing, unless you're planning to use it as a "luggable" that's mostly plugged in.

Depending on the model you might be able to get a new battery. Of course it could add $50-$70 USD to the price.

I second this opinion. There are for example lots of people who are happy with older Lenovo models. Performance wise you don't need to loose that much, since the Intel CPUs are not getting that much faster. Pick up some good model (for example on Lenovo side look at X2x0 or the T4x0 (where x=2,3,4,5,6) models) and swap HDD with some reasonably priced SSD and put in max memory.

The SSD is key for the Latitude e6xxx. Some of my co-workers are stuck with those and spinning rust and they are hot garbage.

I just bought a 2015 Thinkpad T450 from eBay (I do mean "just bought", it hasn't even arrived yet). Beware the T440 and earlier because they max out at 8GB RAM. I got a T450 with an i7 processor and 8GB RAM expandable to 32GB, and it came in under $500 including the fancy Thinkpad dock.

In general, nothing runs Linux quite like Last Year's Model.

It's not quite true that T440 and earlier max out at 8GB RAM - I'm writing this from a T430s w/ 16GB RAM. A T430 can also go to 16GB, and a T440s can go to 12 GB.

That doesn't agree with the docs I read. But since I am reading your post, I guess the docs could use an update. :)

I'm 2 for 2 personally and 3 for 3 on family recommendations buying refurbished Dell Latitudes. I currently have the E6430u which is very nice and light with good Linux support; that's a bit old now but I just checked and you can get an E7250 (i5, 256GB SSD, 8GB RAM, HD Screen) for under $600! And you can upgrade the memory... yourself!

Just make sure you double check the wireless card support on Linux. The Latitudes use a variety of different chips.

I've found that nowadays even the ones with Broadcom garbage work well enough with Linux. However, if your distro doesn't ship with non-free firmware, be prepared to plug into an ethernet port to rectify that issue.

The 14" Latitudes are great and IMHO strike a good balance between performance (you can get non-ultrabook class quad-core processors), screen size, and portability. Linux compatibility is usually pretty good, too (I'm currently using an E5470 running Fedora).

I usually buy my stuff from the Dell outlet (Catch them during a sale and you can save a crapton of money on a refurb).

This is a great idea. I'd recommend looking at a refurbished surface pro 3, those shouldn't be that expensive by now.

Yes ! These Dells are amazing

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