[Discuss] Linux on laptops

[kentborg at borg.org (Kent Borg)]

On 11/12/2015 07:19 AM, Edward Ned Harvey (blu) wrote:
> I'm looking for a small, light, cheap, laptop to run linux. I prefer either ubuntu desktop or fedora.

Something that has intrigued me recently is the idea of running a fairly 
standard Linux on a Chromebook. They are small and cheap, and have long 
battery life.

The wild part is to have the file system on an SD card. A 256GB card 
seems the sweet spot and can be had for under $150. The SD cards above 
32GB all come formatted with some proprietary MS file system that has to 
be licensed, but I think Linux is perfectly willing to reformat them as 
ext4, etc. (I have not personally confirmed this.)

The downsides are quite real:

  - installation is going to be a bit odd,

  - SD cards are not terribly fast nor reliable--but how much should I 
trust random "SSD"s that come with soldered in notebooks these days? I 
see 256GB 
http://www.amazon.com/Lexar-Professional-UHS-II-Software-LSD256CRBNA1000/dp/B00PLENYXK 
says 150MB/sec read (write speed?, an Amazon reviewer says 75MB/s 
write), $141.

  - whether a given Chromebook has a fast SD slot is a question,

  - the cheap Chromebooks are not very fast CPUs,

  - the cheap Chromebooks are Arm CPUs which don't run x86 binaries.

But the upsides are interesting:

  - cheap,

  - good battery life,

  - light,

  - security of being able to remove your file system and put it in your 
pocket (partial protection against an "evil maid attack").


As for trusting SD cards to not die at random times? I don't trust SD cards.

The only thing I use them for that I really care about is my Nikon DSLR, 
and in that case my camera has dual SD slots and I have them configured 
in redundant mode where every picture gets stored on both cards. At any 
moment one of the two cards in my camera is a new one being used for the 
first time that when full will then be retired as archive (and backed up 
on multiple hard disks).

I don't trust SD cards. Were I to run a Chromebook with an SD card I 
would have to have two cards and be very frequently backing up to the 
second (via a USB to SD adapter?).


-kb