[lug] Shopping for a thin & light

[Davide Del Vento]

I have been provided Dell Latitude laptops from my employer and have been
very happy with them. First thing after getting them, I always wiped the
original OS and installed various flavors of modern Linux (with employer's
permission, of course). More often than not, it required nothing else than
waiting for the installation to complete. A few times it required minimal
driver work, but not much that Google can't figure out in less than 10
minutes.

I am not giving you the exact model number, because it's not written on the
machine and I gave up on trying to understand the exact models once I
realized their names are meaningless and "expire" pretty often. I've always
found the 12" screen is the best compromise of decent real estate vs
portability, especially in this (stupid) era of widescreen popularity. And
the keyboard is normal size, not reduced size (no numeric pad, of course).
The laptops have the docking station connector on the bottom (which is non
standard and changed and required a new docking station purchase, awww what
a nice business model...)
I use the same machine *both* as carry-around and "desktop replacement" (of
course in this second role it requires two external 24" monitors). My
current one is 4-core i5-2520M with 8GB of RAM and 256GB SAMSUNG SSD HD, I
don't remember the previous one.

If you need only the carry-around option, I'm sure Dell has something
similar less beefy in term of specs, without the docking station option,
and of course of lighter price (don't believe you can go lighter than this
in actual weight)

Cheers,
Davide

On Tue, May 21, 2013 at 12:51 PM, Quentin Hartman <qhartman at gmail.com>wrote:

> I'm considering replacing my Asus Transformer tablet and keyboard dock
> with a "real" thin & light notebook. I'm finding I don't use it for
> entertainment much anymore; That is mostly happening on my phone (Galaxy
> S3) or iPad mini. When I use it for work, I find myself wishing for
> something a bit more robust. In short, it's become the odd man out in my
> selection of devices.
>
> I'd like something about the same size (half-inch-ish thick, 10" screen),
> and it must be Linux friendly. I carry it daily so I can respond quickly if
> something goes Terribly Wrong with one of the systems I'm responsible for.
> I've found a couple contenders, but I was wondering if the group might have
> any favorites that I have missed.
>
> Suggestions?
>
> Thanks!
>
> QH
>
>
>
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