[sf-lug] Gamer/educational student laptop running Linux and Windows; Previous thread was: Considering purchasing a lightweight laptop: thoughts Thinkpad X1 carbon vs. Thinkpad T460S

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Jon Lam (jonplam at gmail.com):

> Thanks for the excellent suggestions Rick ( I like your name too since my
> youngest twin brother's name is Rick).  I am not much of a gamer so I can
> not explain why I would need one of the Acer V Nitro.

They're certainly nice machines, but Nvidia is one of the very worst
hardware OEMs as to cooperation with the open source community, and 
the Intel Skylake architecture poses challenges that are still being
ironed out.  (See the Matthew Garrett link I posted for some details.)



> Since I will be entering a program at SFSU soon, I believe I will be
> much more suited with a laptop (light weight albeit) for lugging
> around as I travel from the south bay to the city on various
> occasions.  [...]
>
> I would like to switch over to Linux more as a "student" laptop.
> Along those lines, what is an excellent brand and model for a laptop?

Lightweight laptops, these days, come in at about 2.5 lb (lightest) to 4 lb.  
The weight savings gets achieved using 13-14" screens, skinny shells
with few ports, SSDs rather than hard drives, no internal optical drive,
and lighter, shorter-runtime battery packs.

Which one should you look for?  I'd look for a used laptop of a model
that's been on the market 1-2 years already.  This saves you a ton of
money, some of which you can then use in maxing out the unit's RAM
(often very cost-effective) and replacing the hard drive, if there is
one, with an SSD (ditto).

Read the computer-for-sale ads on Craigslist, and do Internet research 
on the ones that look interesting.  Be aware that there are some really
cruddy machines out there, e.g., entire model lines marketed for the
home user that are just cheaply done, e.g. Toshiba Satellite series,
Dell Inspiron series, Compaq Presario series, HP Pavillion series, and
Acer Aspire series.

Personally, like Michael Shiloh, I've always had a soft spot for
ThinkPads, but that's an individual thing.  Of those, as Michael was
suggesting, the T-series are the main line of full-featured laptops and
weigh a bit more, while the X-series are ultra-lightweight and
accordingly you're short on ports, a bit short on battery runtime, etc.

(You do not get ultra-lightweight without giving up something.)

> With that said, I have a really "slow" Lenovo G50-45 machine (model
> 80e3) that was retrofitted with Fedora.  I guess I could use it but
> would like to keep that at home as it is not responsive as others (I
> am guessing). 

Am betting the most cost-effective things you could do are:

1.  Max out its RAM at 16GB.  (Am betting yours has 4GB.)  Your
    machine has two slots for 204-pin SO-DIMMs, and takes this
    specific type of RAM, according to reviews:  DDR3L SDRAM, 
    1600 MHz / PC3L-12800.  http://www.satech.com/ would be one
    place to shop.  (I've dealt with them and like them.)  
2.  Replace its hard drive with an SSD.  (This will also reduce
    weight and increase battery runtime by a lot.  It also yields
    an amazing performance improvement.)
3.  Switch to something less ridiculously slow and performance-sucking 
    than the GNOME Desktop Environment ('DE').

Honestly, I'd do the third of those things, and see what a difference 
it makes to use a modern distro that doesn't waste RAM and CPU.

Your G50-45 weighs 5.51 lb as provided, so it's a bit zaftig, which 
cannot really be helped because of the nice, wide, 15.6" diagonal
measure LCD screen.  As I mentioned, for a laptop manufacturer, getting
down to 3 lb pretty much necessitates a much smaller (13-14" screen),
and the smaller shell to match.

Honestly, your G50-45 is a _really nice_ machine (albeit a bit heavy),
and with appropriate choice of software you would not perceive it as
slow.  If you really love Fedora / GNOME, just add more RAM (and
consider switching to an SSD instead of your unit's 1TB hard drive).

If you are not in love with Fedora or GNOME, you're back at the classic 
'Which distro?' question.  I don't do distro advocacy (it's lame), but 
do maintain this text to try to help people:  
http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/faq/kicking.html#distro

Be aware that there are variant offshoots/packagings of GNOME with
different names for historical reasons:  MATE, Cinnamon, Unity.
All of those are very 'heavy' DEs, as is KDE.

Of the other popular DEs, Xfce (aka XFCE, Xfce4) is a _little_ less
heavyweight than GNOME/Cinnamon/Unity/KDE.

Lower than that in resource requirements are:  Enlightenment and its 
close cousin Moksha Desktop (in Bodhi Linux), LXDE (but see note), ROX
Desktop, and FVWM-Crystal.

It is also not at all necessary to have a DE.  The X Window System works
just fine without a DE and with your choice of X window manager.  I
personally prefer this, using the Window Maker window manager.

You might consider Linux Mint 18 "Sarah" Xfce Edition, or Bodhi Linux.
Even without any other change to your system, I'll bet you'd find
either, and especially Bodhi Linux, to make your system fast.


Note about LXDE:  This was long a favourite lightweight DE, but had the
long-term problem that the gtk graphics toolkit, which also underlies
both GNOME/Cinnamon/Unity/KDE and Xfce, had been starting to prove 
unsatisfactory.  They did an exploratory partial port to Qt, the
graphics toolkit underlying KDE, found it to be much better, and joined
forces with Razor-qt, a small struggling DE effort.  The joint project
has now produced its next-generation successor to both LXDE and
Razor-qt, one called LXQt (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LXQt), but at
this stage it's still a little raw, beta-ey.