Suggestions for small beater laptop with pen support for Linux

[ozaz]

I'd like to purchase a small used laptop. It will be a secondary laptop that will only receive occasional use whilst travelling and as a general spare at home. No intensive tasks (I have another main laptop for that). I will install Linux on it (a lightweight distro if needed) so dated hardware should be fine.

The following characteristics are important:

1. Be small - might consider 12.5" but ideally I want it less than 12". This is so I have an option when travelling that's significantly smaller than than my main 14" laptop.

2. Be cheap. Ideally l don't want to spend more than about £200/$200 including any necessary battery replacement. This is so I have an option when travelling that I would be less concerned about losing or damaging than my main laptop.

3. Have touchscreen with proper active digitiser support. This is because I want something on which I can try and and play around with pen/stylus input in Linux. Ideally would also have an on-board storage slot/bay to house the pen.

An 11" Macbook Air would be great if it weren't for my desire to have something with a pen. If I was happy with a 12.5" screen I'd probably go for a ThinkPad Yoga 260. But ideally I want something a bit smaller. ThinkPad Yoga 11e looks interesting. Seem to be able to get current gen models (gen 6) for less than £150 on eBay (at least for the variant with M3-8100Y processor). A bit of a shame the display is only 1366x766, but that's not a dealbreaker for me given it will be only for occasional use.

Would be grateful for any thoughts or alternative suggestions.

Regarding active digitiser input on Linux - are certain technologies better supported than others (e.g. Wacom vs N-Trig)?

Thanks

 

[ahurst]

Have you considered getting a Chromebook? There are a ton of options with 12" or smaller screens, touchscreens (with or without pens), and are incredibly cheap to buy (especially used) compared to equivalent non-Chromebook hardware.

Of course ChromeOS is pretty limiting, but a good chunk of modern Chromebooks support installing regular Linux distributions with a little tweaking: if your model's supported, you can use the MrChromebox guide to flash a custom UEFI onto the device and install the distro of your choice like any other generic PC (see here for a compatibility list).

I've got an ASUS Chromebook Flip CM5 I use as a secondary laptop. Ryzen APU, 15.6" 1080p touchscreen, solid build quality, and only $350 CAD open box from Best Buy. It runs Fedora 38 like a dream, with the only issue being that headphone jack detection doesn't work out of the box (and there's already an upstream patch to fix it), and I needed to use a key remapper (keyd) to get the top row to function as regular Fn keys when I hold down the meta key.

EDIT: Just did a quick look locally, Best Buy Canada's selling the 11.6" Lenovo Chromebook 500e refurbished for $150. Comes with 8GB RAM, a 2-in-1 form factor with touch screen, and 64GB internal storage, and you can easily disable the firmware write protection to flash custom firmware by disconnecting/reconnecting the battery. With any luck you can find similar deals in the UK!

 

[ozaz]

Thanks. I wasn't sure if it was possible to replace Chrome OS on a Chromebook, so thanks for that link. I'll take a look. I may still go for a machine designed for Windows though as I may find it useful to have option of occasionally running full PowerPoint and OneNote under Windows (with machine setup to dual boot Windows and Linux).

I've been doing a bit of searching myself since my original post and found the following article useful for orienting me to options: https://www.ultrabookreview.com/2375-best-small-ultrabooks/

Probably still leaning toward the ThinkPad 11e Yoga Gen 6 as I can get nearly new models very cheap with 8GB RAM and 256GB SSD, and probably a decent chance of good Linux compatibility. But the Chuwi Minibook X 2023 caught my eye in the above article. Although a bit more than I was wanting to spend, it has much better specs so looks interesting if I can confirm has pen support (a bit unclear at the moment) and if I fancy more of a gamble on Linux compatibility: https://liliputing.com/chuwi-minibook-x-mini-laptop-gets-an-alder-lake-n-upgrade/

 

[370zulu]

+1 for the Lenovo. I found Linux support to be very good across the recent Lenovo offering for recent distributions. X1 Carbon is a little larger than what you may be looking for, but the 11e Yoga seems to fit fine.