Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/04/27/first-impressions-of-a-200-li.html
…
2 Likes
He talks about preferring a lenovo machine but it’s not remotely comparable. Sure the lenovo machine has a faster processor but a much smaller and lower resolution display makes it (imho) not worth it at all.
Two gigabytes of RAM isn’t enough for a Linux computer. I have four and would love to have eight.
6 Likes
I have a tiny single-board computer from the same company running part of my network; its responsibilities are serving a NAS and running a VPN pipe to a server in another part of the world. I am very impressed with the build quality.
6 Likes
Depends on the use case. If you don’t have to run any bloatware electron apps then 2GB will do fine.
3 Likes
Well this is a workstation so you’d have to start with gnome and I doubt that would work in 2G. I could use FVWM and roll my own widgets, etc, but a browser would use all the RAM anyway,
2 Likes
Oh, no doubt. I wouldn’t be looking to replace a workstation for $200 though. I’m hoping to pick one up when they’re a bit more available to use as something a bit lighter and nicer to bring out to coffee shops and stuff.
1 Like
The Lenovo machine also has an awful Celeron dual-core processor and 4 GBs of RAM. It’s not going to be a pleasant experience running Windows 10 on that.
Also, the RAM is soldered to the motherboard so it can’t be upgraded.
I wouldn’t buy one at any price.
3 Likes
Have you tried something like dwm? It’s absolutely stripped to the bone, and is something an acquired taste, but I can’t now conceive of going back to a regular desktop environment.
2 Likes
Another vote for dwm. Made my eee pc so much more usable back in the day with 512mb of ram.
I’m more interested in how that $200 linux laptop compares to this $200+ chromebook. I use it all the time and there’s always a broken part. (currently a dead L speaker. previous one had flaky hdmi and one corner cracked/loose)
4 Likes
+2 for DWM. I’ve been using my own fork of it for years https://github.com/tekktonic/tdwm
2 Likes
Interesting. Is it purely a config fork, or have you made changes to the code base?
I have eeePC with 2GB RAM. It has Awesome WM instead of Gnome and works well for basic stuff like web browsing (Firefox), emails, TeX and spreadsheets. Obviously it’s not a full workstation but there are no laptops with ECC memory anyway so even a high performance machine would be pointless for me.
I’ve made a couple of changes to suit me. The biggest change is that I switched from tags to workspaces, added a horizontal tiling layout (I think this may be in by default now, but it wasn’t when I forked), and you can have a layout per-workspace. Normally I have my “main” workspace horizontal tiling so I can have a terminal below, the gaming workspace is monocle, etc.
2 Likes
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
