On 22 November 2016 at 21:34, Chris F.A. Johnson via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
On Tue, 22 Nov 2016, Chris F.A. Johnson via talk wrote:
On Tue, 22 Nov 2016, ted leslie via talk wrote:
You may want to approach this the other way. I you go to newegg.ca for example, i see the cheapest chrome book at about 400$, instead, do search on 8GB portable (4GB is cutting it close),
I've been using Mint on a Dell Inspiron i3 with 4GB for a couple of years without any problems.
I normally have 20 workspaces open, on which I always have at least 2 shell windows open, as well as Firefox, emacs (usually 2 or 3 frames as well as one instance as root), alpine and slrn each in its own shell window, Gentoo file manager, audacious, often xboard, etc....
And I forgot VLC, often two instances open.
I'm with Chris on the memory requirements: 4GB will be satisfactory for nearly anything you're likely to do (unless you decide you need to run virtual machines). I highly recommend more memory, but given your cost constraints - that's usually the most expensive part. And it's the easiest to upgrade later if you come into some money (assuming of course it's upgradeable at all - that's not a given ...) I also agree with Ted's approach of shopping by what's available and then searching for people's experiences with that model. Be EXACT about the model: there's been a lot of discussion of the Asus Zenbook 305CA on this list (I'm typing on one now), and it's NOT the same as the Asus Zenbook 305 - which was an American model with better support ... This means doing considerably more research than you would to just buy a Windows laptop, but unfortunately this is an important step when migrating to Linux. Put in the time for your reading. Older computers are generally better supported: by the time they've been out for a year, most models are fully supported. Good luck! -- Giles http://www.gilesorr.com/ gilesorr@gmail.com