Ask HN: Did You Use Netbook? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Did You Use Netbook?

3 pointstaubek7 comments

Some 15 years ago I've had in my hands Asus EEE. It was one of the first netbooks[1] out there. I really liked the concept of it but I couldn't get it at that time.

Did you ever use netbook? What are your thoughts on them?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netbook

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I owned an Asus Eee PC 901 within a month or two of its release.

I bought it when I started my first job at Starbucks. I was super happy to be able to afford new tech that was so useful to me, as I moved a lot during this time.

It's bulky now considering the original compact appeal. Backpacks nowadays are often designed to fit a 16" MBP better than the small fat irregular shape of a 9" Eee PC.

After maybe four years and many travels and Windows updates, it ran constantly hot and the battery died. The touchpad became unresponsive too. That massive hinge also managed to crack. It lost its portability and ended up struggling with everything and break, but it served me very well.

To replace it with something that could fill the same role, I got an even cheaper 13" Asus C300 Chromebook (2014). It was more elegant and efficient for my needs but not nearly as evocative today as the Eee PC. :)

Got a Dell Mini 9 is very nice and sturdy (a lot more solid than the other netbooks of the time), crisp display, ran Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope on it and it worked well. Went from 8GB storage to 16GB, wish it had a 2.5" HDD or SSD instead of the SSD card.

Since architecture was 32 bit could not transition to 64 bit Linux, probably still be using it now and again if it could run preferred newer Distros.

I also had a mini 9. I made it a Hackintosh, and my wife took it on a trip as it was the only remotely portable machine we had. It was fun, though I think I didn’t use it for a lot.

I had some early model MSI Wind Netbook. What a great little machine. They were nice and hackable – I remember replacing the Wifi module with an OS X friendly model and getting a nearly perfect Hackintosh experience for a few hundred bucks, and in a form factor smaller than anything Apple had at the time.

I think Chromebooks largely displaced the Netbook segment, which is sad. Feels like today you can get: A cheap, bigger laptop; An expensive, small ultrabook/Mac; A Chromebook.

I was a happy netbook user. Still missing the form factor but as far as I understand they were niche products for users like us. Apparently, no one produce another one today.

I would be happy with a fanless, 10.1" model and replaceable battery. Today, market has every possibility for them; low-power architectures, USB-C, great screens, etc.

I just recently tried to revive my Acer Aspire with Debian, after many years of just sitting on the shelf. It installed and runs, but it's not the same. I loved having it originally. Highly portable, I could sit it on my lap on an airplane, and not worry about not having enough space!

They still exist -- they are most often called Chromebooks now, but you can put Windows or Linux on most any of them.

There are also other Chromebook-like netbooks that run some "lite" version of Windows called "S Mode", but I've never seen one in person.

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