So I’m going back to school either tbis fall of spring, and am going to need a laptop. First time going back to school in about 10 years. Going for computer science to start as well as general ed
Things I’m looking for:
-lightweight! I’ll be riding a bicycle often, so this is important
-a really good keyboard. Obviously with computer science, I will be typing a lot
-AT LEAST 1080p, preferably higher
-13-14" screen
-very likely to install Linux and use that as my main OS
-durable
I plan on doing programming on it for school and hobbies, usually while watching a movie/music for background noise, and probably have a website or two open on a second display. Gaming will likely consist of simple indie games, old school jRPG’s, and old console emulation, though I do plan on streaming with them.
I also plan on building a NAS to store most of my media, and even thought about remote gameplay options since the games I’d e playing really don’t require low latency, and figured I probably don’t need a dedicated gpu for what I demand of it, but I am worried about thermal throttling for when I am doing a few things are once.
I was thinking of getting the Lenovo x1 carbon, though I thought I would post this to see what other ideas the community might have in case there might be q better option. My thoughts behind it is that it is light, the right size, durable, great keyboard, great screen, and being the “professional” line, hopefully built to handle a good workload without throttling. Ooh, and I find the simple black styling sexy as hell
I own a Lenovo Yoga 3 11,6" laptop, and am very satisfied with it. I'll summarize your criterions:
Right size: I think that 11,6" is just right for a portable laptop. The Dell XPS 13" is a 13" screen in a 11,6" chassis, but anyways.
Durable: This is unfortunately where I feel Lenovo cut the costs for this laptop. It's all plastic (almost), and little force is required to warp the chassis. Being plastic, this isn't too much of an issue, but adjusting the screen distorts the LCD, which doesn't feel great.
Keyboard: I'm used to typing on shallow keyboards, so I can't help you here. It's mushy, soft and shallow. Perfect for me, probably not perfect for people used to mechanical keys.
Screen: 1080p IPS screen. It's really good. Great viewing angles, color accuracy and brightness. Glossy finish, though.
Performance: It uses the Broadwell-Y line of processors, which are low power and performance. I have had no performance issues on debian and haven't seen any throttling. I use cpufreq instead of intel p-state. I do mostly lighter stuff (latex, freecad, scripting) and it has no issues with that. Some websites are slow, however, but I'm ready to blame that on crappy web development, rather than poor performance on my end.
Aesthetics: there's a white and an orange version. Although there are images of a black version, it was not available when I purchased mine.
Edit: Most importantly, all function keys are programmable and although automatic identification of certain things don't work out of the box (e.g. only they keyboard is turned off in tablet mode, and not the mouse; I haven't looked into the gyro for automatic screen rotation), as far as I can tell, most things are supported in debian stretch.