On 2023-12-20 Hartmut W Sager wrote:
Overall, the (former) netbooks would be your thing. However, I don't think the netbooks existed near enough to the present to still be useful (if a used one were available).
Ya, netbook-y-ish form factor would be ok, except I don't want the useless KB and joke of a battery and performance. A lot of these "educational" laptops are 11", and that would be the lower limit. However, I'd need a real CPU, and decent rez (1400 is ok). The edu laptops are all celeron N-something, which is fine for me in XFCE. And they can still do VT stuff.
The big question is how far others have gotten with putting Linux on these things... so many MUUG members just stick with Windows! (grrr people!)
I'm also very curious about ARM "always on" Windows laptops that were appearing a few years back, but seem to have never taken off. And they never seemed to be cheap even though they should be as the CPU is a tiny fraction of the price of an Intel CPU. I don't mean the "Chromebook" or "*Pad" class: I mean fully-fledged laptops that just happen to run an ARM CPU. With many distros having ARM support, it would be a fun thing to try. But the performance would have to be up there with a few-year-old celeron. (The newest Macs would qualify except they are probably 4X what I want to spend and heavily locked down and AFAIK the Linux support is still WIP.)