[GTALUG] Ubuntu

[Giles Orr]

On 22 November 2016 at 21:34, Chris F.A. Johnson via talk
<talk at 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 at gmail.com