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Best <$400 USD Ultrabook for Debian 12
  • I honestly love the idea behind the Framework laptops. If I had the cash that is what I would buy.

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    Best <$400 USD Ultrabook for Debian 12
  • So real, it was honestly a dumb-fuck moment and I am more than a little embarrassed. That’s what code reviews are for!

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    Best <$400 USD Ultrabook for Debian 12
  • I meant under $400, I am an idiot

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  • I’m trying to downsize from an aging gaming laptop to an ultrabook I can use for writing, web browsing, and JavaScript / Python web development. I understand an ultrabook will be a downgrade in the performance department, but I don’t need all the performance my current laptop offers.

    I’ve been looking at ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 8 machines and they seem like a good sweet spot of price to recent parts/repair-ability. Anybody have other suggestions for Linux ultrabooks? Needs to be <$400 USD.

    PS. For more intense tasks, such as training language models, I plan on renting cloud compute as I don’t have the space for a deep learning machine at home.

    edit: meant under $400, I am a dumbass

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    Which lightweight Linux Distribution with GUI would you recommend for an old Laptop ?
  • I daily drive a netbook and I use Debian 12 with KDE Plasma on it. The netbook is a 2014 ThinkPad 11e with a Celeron and 4GB of RAM. I find it comfortable for writing and even some Python and JavaScript development. I remote into my servers/cloud infra for more intense development tasks.

    +1 for upgrading whatever you can before installing linux. An SSD in particular will go a long way to make it feel snappy.

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    Plan on getting a Linux laptop: any suggestions?
  • Maybe a slightly controversial stance, but consider straight Debian. With flatpak support in both Plasma and Gnome being stellar, you can have up-to-date apps with a rock solid base that runs on almost anything.

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    If you want to host something on a Raspberry Pi, you should consider using literally any other piece of hardware
  • I recently moved off a combination of Pi 4 and an old netbook to the ODroid H3+. Orders of magnitude faster while having socketed storage and RAM. The best part is the NVME and SATA ports that let me attach 41TB of raw storage and add a data warehousing nature to my setup. 10/10 would buy again.

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