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Comment by hyperpallium | Hacker News Reader

I want this, but with a 7" display: smaller, lighter, better power efficiency (display is the main draw).

i.e. a netbook

The GPD Pocket fits this bill. It was available with Ubuntu pre-installed during it's crowd sourcing campaign. The support under Ubuntu is pretty good, including good support for the touch screen. 7" 1080p, atom CPU, 8GB RAM, 128GB SSD. More expensive, but under $500.

https://github.com/stockmind/gpd-pocket-ubuntu-respin

I just need one of these with the IBM butterfly keyboard [1] and it'd be wonderful

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_ThinkPad_Butterfly_keyboar...

There's an 11" model, IMO that puts it somewhere within netbook territory.

Assuming the same height/width proportions, it would have (11/7)^2 = 2.47 times the area. Quite a bit bigger.

11" is bigger than 7" for sure, but that's not my point. My point is that 11" is at the upper end of what I'd consider a netbook, and it wasn't immediately obvious to me when I browsed the page that there was an 11" model so I thought you might have missed it, too.

Thanks for being helpful, but I think we must be working with different definitions of the term "netbook".

I'm not sure of the proper definition, but I'm using it to mean something smaller and less powerful than a laptop - a kind of "sub-laptop" category.

What definition are you working with?

I'm thinking a small laptop with less moving parts (no DVD) and less powerful for the sake of price, mobility and battery life.

I'm intentionally vague about the specifics, but as far as I'm concerned, 11.6" fits the bill. For example, Eee 1101HA was 11.6" and was widely considered a netbook. The Pinebook, by comparison, must be somewhat lighter (no mechanical HD, tiny motherboard).

That said, I haven't really kept up with the ensuing maze of laptop terminology since the netbook days. Some late era netbooks would probably be classified as "sub-notebooks" or "ultra-portables" or some such today.

But I get that you'd ideally want 7", since you stated that explicitly. I've been passing time on train rides with a Libretto 50CT lately, and it's so damn practical in terms of size, so I feel you.

Fair enough! I had an original 7" eee, so that became my platonic form for "netbook". Though as a product category, that size doesn't even exist any more. Interesting that they got bigger, and today, phones are getting bigger. Perhaps approaching an ideal size?

I've switched over to android a few years ago as a development machine, expecting it to "disrupt" PCs, as other form-factors did. It has disrupted PCs, but not for development! BTW Always fancied the librettos, but seemed too expensive for me.

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