Little laptop
Most of the stuff I do on a computer can be done in Firefox: mail, twitter, discord, etc. But my machine is in our office (it’s a proper dual-screen desktop setup), so I spend a lot of time there. I do have a laptop that I could use on the couch, but it’s a second-hand one, and the touchpad doesn’t work, and sometimes the power button doesn’t work either and you have to put it on its docking station just to turn it on.
Far from ideal, and what it comes down to is that I don’t use the laptop that much. But I do would like to do light browsing stuff on the couch. I also have a 7″ tablet, and while that’s fine, it’s not ideal for actually typing a reply.
In the early days, I owned an Asus eee laptop, a 10″ thing that was too slow and ran too hot to be truly convenient. But with the modern more efficient processors and SSDs, smaller laptops are once again viable alternatives for larger systems.
I’ve been keeping an eye on the market for those. Most of those are Chromebooks, running a special Linux distro from Google that basically ties you into their ecosystem. The hardware is cool, but the OS not so much - but of course you can install Ubuntu on Chromebooks…
Then I saw the Lenovo Yogabook 300e: a laptop with a screen just under 12″ with touchscreen (with a pen included). The screen can even be folded onto the base of the laptop, and one review I read mentioned a free M2 slot for an extra SSD. And it’s certainly reasonably priced… So I got one.
They come with Windows 10 S installed on the 32GB SSD, but after booting once to check that it worked, mine is already running Ubuntu. 🙂
I tend not to not use the trackpad (I can touch the screen after all), and the keyboard is a nice chicklet keyboard, which I actually prefer. I don’t see any obvious expansion slots, so I think I’d have to open up the whole bottom of the machine to get to the reported M2 slot, but there’s still 60% space left on the 32GB internal SSD, so it seems like I could do without after all. And there’s a slot for the micro-SD card, so if I want to access/store a lot of media, I can always use that.
Folding the screen is a bit weird, because the keyboard is exposed if you use it like that. And it’s not convenient to hold the thing like that, because you’re constantly pressing keys. There is a function key to block the keyboard, but still I don’t think I will use it a lot like that.
I’m pretty pleased with it! Small enough to take with you, but also with a keyboard so it’s convenient to type mails or replies.
Crossposted from my blog. Comment here or at the original post.