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Comment by francis-io | Hacker News Reader

I hope you guys have lots of success, we really need more options for linux on a laptop.

I don't know if I'm the only one, but I really want a 13 inch laptop thats thin/ultrabook format, with low specs and only a HD screen. All I do each day is use a browser and SSH into other machines, I don't need an i5/i7 processor and HiDPI display to do that.

My ideal laptop would be an XPS 13 sized laptop, with a 1080p screen, i3 processor, 8GB of RAM and as much battery life increases as possible.

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If you're looking for 13 inch, standard HD screen with long battery life, and all you need is browser and SSH functionality, you might think about trying a Chromebook. The SSH functionality comes as a Google-made extension [1]. The CPU and RAM specs are usually lower than you mention, but in my experience the machine runs fine for video calls, Netflix, etc.

[1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/secure-shell/pnhec...

I switched to an Acer R11 Chromebook for something small and handy and cheap. It runs fast enough for browsing and shell stuff. Keyboard is decent, and it isn't flimsy.

I've also install crouton for a full Ubuntu environment, which I use occasionally. But mostly I'm ssh'ing into my workstation and servers.

My only annoyance is the caps-lock key, which is now the Google search key. You can press Alt-Search for caps-lock, but it is slow and a little glitchy.

Thanks for the recommendation. I forgot to mention I only run linux, I don't want to be tied into an OS like ChromeOS when I don't have direct control over it. I have considered wiping one and installing linux over the top.

I've got a Toshiba KIRA V63, which is basically exactly what you want except with an i5 processor. If I put the screen backlight to 11% (which is readable for me when I'm in the library or whatever) and run powertop, I can get 9 or so hours of real work done on the battery (Ruby on rails for the most part, Chromium and Emacs, judicious use of wifi).

I highly recommend the recent mobile i5 processors. They are ridiculously low power and amazingly fast. I really do not want for anything.

Now you almost certainly can't buy a V63 where you live (only Japan and even then I've heard Toshiba are getting out of the business), but this is the spec I recommend. The 1080p screen is the most important thing for battery life and performance. Don't get a higher resolution screen if you want to do a full day's work away from the power mains.

I absolutely love this machine to death (and take it with me everywhere -- even to the onsen).

I don't know enough about laptops to do it, but I've pondered that someone could probably make good passive income by building a website that takes in a request like this and recommends laptops (like the 8 sibling responses to you are)

The problem here with linux, is that a laptop that works great with linux kernel x.y and distro z, may suddenly break when kernel x.y' comes out. So now you have to get ahead of the distro's and test all your machines for functionality with every upgrade. Sticking to really mainstream hardware here helps a lot, but that still won't keep from breaking when the next rolling update comes out.

Frankly, having used linux on a few different laptops, i'm not really sure how someone who wants everything to always work perfectly and isn't capable of debugging kernel drivers and tossing out patches runs linux. The few times I've seen this situation, it seems people are just putting up with the broken backlight controls, standby that doesn't work, BT drivers that wont pair, etc.. All things i've had to fix on my machines. (the latest being the keyboard hotkey to enable/disable the trackpad needed "tweaking").

My girlfriend uses the HP Spectre x360 (model 4105-no), which works great in Xubuntu 17.04. It's fast, silent and looks great. Maybe a bit higher spec than you want, but then if you want to run a web browser without noscript that's probably needed these days :-/

No hardware issues that I know of (but I had to uncomment HandleLidSwitchDocked=suspend in /etc/systemd/logind.conf to get it to suspend, and of course XFCE doesn't know what to do with tablet mode, nor do we …). The rather big trackpad might take some getting used to though :-)

https://www.asus.com/us/Notebooks/ASUS-ZenBook-UX330UA/speci...

XPS 13 sizes, 8GB of RAM, 1080p screen. The lower end CPU choice for the UX330 is i5. At least older UX Zenbooks worked with Ubuntu right away with the exception of ambient light sensor.

Can't you pick up an XPS or thinkpad with essentially your ideal specs and linux? The one thing is you won't get great battery life on the ultrabooks because they usually have smaller 4 cell batteries I believe.

No great battery life on ultrabooks? Have you ever even used one? The XPS has one of the best battery life on the market and other thin laptops like chromebooks have great batterylife while still being thin. The reason why 11-14" ultrabooks have good battery life is very simple: SSDs take up less space and are more efficient, iGPUs take up no space and are more efficient and no DVD drive taking up space.

I love my Chromebook with coreboot and archlinux, but I need a upgrade to a 1080p screen and more than 4gb of ram without having to pay $1000 for a overpriced laptop with a dual-core i7.

I only got about 4 hours on an older ultrabook (about 5 years ago) with an SSD. I'm not sure what you get these days but under in the 3.5-4.5 hour range isn't very good IMO.

Get a refurbished X220 or an X250.

You should try a chromebook plus or pro from Samsung. I recently bought one and I'm in love with it. I use it even for work except actual coding.

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