Hello, it's not fitting all your requirements but I'm very happy with my Acer C720 Chromebook (11.6-Inch, 2GB). The production is now discontinued but you might find it in some online shops. I replaced ChromeOS with elementaryOS and upgraded the HD. The battery lasts for really many hours. I used to bring it to the office without charger, discontinually use it for about 6 hours (browser with maaany tabs opened, mail client, office suite, videos, etc.) and still had like 15% of the battery, back home. I never switch it off, at home. I use darktable, with it, too. Of course performances are not good but it's ok for me and I always bring it with me on holiday. Regards, Gianfranco

On 24 June 2019 12:08:59 CEST, "Samuel Lelièvre" samuel.lelievre@gmail.com wrote:

You might be interested in William Stein's notes on turning a Pixelbook into a development environment with Crostini and CoCalc.

https://cocalc.com/share/7e3d9d776c51474c4b81a8864f7595a8df2427c6/chromeos/?... _______________________________________________ Discussion mailing list Discussion@lists.fsfe.org https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion

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On Wed Jul 3 11:44:19 UTC 2019, Erik Albers wrote:

On the german list someone came up with the eeePC. This is from size exactly what I am looking for and you can get them second hand at around 50 euro.

Golden Delicious still sell the Letux 400 netbook for 125 euro:

http://shop.goldelico.com/wiki.php?page=Product&product=1011

Unfortunately, the original batteries are unusable, so you would have to find a suitable replacement - suggestions welcome! Also, you would need to find a way to put a modern version of Linux on it, though I feel that something more lightweight would be better on that kind of hardware.

I noticed that someone else also mentioned some systems from Dragonbox, though they are quite a bit more expensive than either a "new old stock" or second hand netbook. I don't know if it's possible to use all the hardware without a lot of non-free firmware on some of those devices, so that might also be a consideration.

Regards,

David

On 04.07.19 12:44, Alessandro Rubini wrote:

...

On the german list someone came up with the eeePC. This is from size exactly what I am looking for and you can get them second hand at around 50 euro.

I had 3. One was my laptop (with external keyboard), one was my son's and the other was my wife's desktop (with external kbd/mouse. One broke and the other two are parked away since years.

thank you for the input. You remember if you had a SSD in it? I guess this makes a big difference.

Best, Erik

On Tuesday 16. July 2019 17.07.25 Michel Roche wrote:

Hello, I've used to be quite fan of eeePcs but in the long run they appeared to be not powerfull enough, even for basic usage with lighweight desktops (lxde is he limit).

The amount of memory in various devices is now a significant problem for anyone wanting to run a "modern" GNU/Linux distribution. Or rather, the general accretion of bloat [1] in those distributions is a problem when trying to keep machines usable which once had rather generous amounts of memory.

Also, "modern" desktop environments seem to want copious graphical effects and the hardware to support them. So, when evaluating the MIPS Creator CI20 without its PowerVR-based GPU enabled, I found that MATE [2] was the most usable lightweight environment.

And obviously, with everybody loading up the "modern" Web with superfluous gadgetry, Firefox will gladly saturate the CPU, I/O channels and take lots of RAM. Unfortunately, more lightweight browsers like NetSurf [3] are likely to struggle with today's mainstream sites infused with surveillance capitalism, reaching out to dozens of other sites serving their own JavaScript payloads on every page load.

Finally I prefer getting old X200 or X2[2-4]0 Thinkpads, maybe a little bigger, slightly more expensive, but way more usable in the long run, even on holidays. And top of all they are quite tough for travelling, and finding spare parts is not that difficult.

The netbook era produced some interesting models in the size range that was requested. As mentioned before, the Letux 400 Minibook is about 21cm across, 25cm diagonal, even though the hardware can only run what would be regarded as an embedded distribution today. The Efika Smartbook is maybe slightly bigger but its 512MB is not sufficient for "modern" Web usage.

So, while hey aren't totally free hardware, since it's really well supported on linux based distros that's the type of hardware I would recommend.

Vendors do sell reconditioned Thinkpads with Libreboot as the BIOS, meaning that Free Software does run at most levels in the device. Some of these vendors are mentioned in the wiki page that was previously maintained:

https://wiki.fsfe.org/Activities/Hardware/Hardware_Vendors#Vendors

Obviously, that page is now likely to be rather out-of-date, as well as being difficult to find on the reorganised wiki unless you know it is there.

And obviously, whilst the low-effort approach that might get up-to-date answers is the one that involves asking for recommendations as and when they are needed, the more sustainable approach is to identify reliable vendors and maybe even cultivate relationships where hardware properly supporting Free Software can be continuously produced and sold. [4]

Paul

[1] Why the KDE mail client needs its badly-optimised MySQL-based Akonadi stack running underneath it is but one example of the phenomenon.

[2] https://mate-desktop.org/

[3] http://www.netsurf-browser.org/

[4] Rather than it become an exercise to see which vendors are still in business and which ones had to give up because everyone just decided to buy something from Dell or HP or whoever and install over the bundled Windows distribution.

On Fri, Jul 19, 2019, at 07:46, Michael Kesper wrote:

While normal sites are usable when uBlock Origin takes care of filtering out most crap, more "active" sites (heavy use of JS/CSS) become really sluggy,

I am recently filtering these other sites in the firewall or in DNS. I am preferring this arrangement.

Am Mittwoch 07 August 2019 16:20:32 schrieb Paul Boddie:

Sadly, "more is better" continues to be the dominant theme of the technology industry: power consumption benefits (due to more efficient circuitry) are typically overturned by vastly increased consumption.

It is a main theme of the vast majority of customers. Most selling points that convince people are related to "more" (power, cpu cores, speed).

So this become a topic of educating more people about long lasting IT hardware (and thus Free Software, which is a good fit.) As https://dwheeler.com/oss_fs_why.html#tco writes for years:

"4. FLOSS can often use older hardware more efficiently than proprietary systems, yielding smaller hardware costs and sometimes eliminating the need for new hardware."

This is one of FSFE's message that we repeat wherever we can. One recent example is our booth and participation Bits & Bäume conference https://bits-und-baeume.org/rueckblick/en

So, my solution to this is to open the network monitoring development tool in Firefox, load a page with a lot of surveillance scripts, save the log as a "HAR" format file, and then I have a script which dumps the hosts from the log. With that output, after editing to preserve the sites providing genuine content, I have another script which assigns the hosts with unrouteable IP addresses, and this then gets deployed in /etc/hosts.

It is remarkable how much difference this makes and how many script/image/tracking hosts are involved in serving even those sites that have something to say about the ethics of surveillance.

What you describe is a lot of work that most people cannot or are not willing to put up. uBlock origin is a good match for those people (if they know about it). Again a majority of people seem to like that they get news and some services offered for the attention. They are not willing to pay basic services, they'd rather be influenced. Also they like the comfort of online storages, suggestions based on statistical data and many buy the promise of better services if their data is analysed.

As all those advantages exists in small quantities here and there, this is a gray world. In my view we as FSFE are working for a better understanding of what is going on and on the basic ability to inspect code and change it. LineagesOSMicroG and https://iridiumbrowser.de/ are examples where these freedoms have been used to make the situation (a little bit) better.

I guess it is easy to criticise a habit but harder to actually break it.

It is not our habit, it the habit of many people - most of them non-techies.

Again, leadership from organisations like the FSFE on such matters is rather lacking, but that is another topic.

We cannot save the world alone and in all aspects, but at least we can try. :) (Being bitter and cynical does not help us, as alternatively others will shape the future for us.)

Best Regards, Bernhard