Best Linux laptop for travelling?

[doragasu]

Until now, I was using a Series 3 ARM Chromebook running ArchLinux for travelling. It had many pros: very light, high battery duration, fast internal flash storage (although not as fast as modern eMMC/SSD devices), etc. But it was a real pain to keep the machine updated. As the kernel uses binary blobs, I couldn't keep it updated, and recent systemd updates combined with an old kernel made the thing break all the time and required to spend time hacking.

So I was planning to buy a new laptop to retire my Chromebook. I don't need a shinny (and expensive) ultrabook. Just something similar to my old Chromebook, but that will not make me spend hours hacking the thing to get it running. So I was thinking on switching from ARM to Intel CPUs, to avoid hacking. Maybe something like an Tablet Acer One 10 S1002-18DH would be perfect (cheap, light, SSD storage), but it uses an Atom Z3735F CPU, and I suspect it is not well supported by the Linux kernel.

Can anyone help me recommending a not very powerful but cheap, light and Linux friendly laptop?

Thanks!

[haagch]

How about an intel chromebook?

I personally just bought the Acer Chromebook 13 CB5-311 with Tegra K1, because it's one of the cheapest with long battery runtime and 1920x1080 I could find and because of this article: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...TK1-Chromebook. So far I haven't gotten the archlinux arm mainline kernel to boot, maybe I have to compile my own kernel... But maybe soon this chromebook will be a good alternative, if the cpu isn't deemed too slow then...

[doragasu]

Looks good, and being able to run a mainline kernel is really tempting, but it requires some tinkering, and I wanted to avoid wasting time like I did constantly with my Series 3 ARM Chromebook.

[doragasu]

After some time searching, I think I will buy a Dell Chromebook 11 (the one with the i3 CPU). i3 CPU, 4GiB RAM... I would preferred it with a 32 GB SSD instead of the 16 GiB one, but that's the storage that my current Series 3 Chromebook has and I had no problems with it. I have to dig on the net a bit to see if the internal SSD is soldered to the board or can be upgraded.

This machine is listed on the Arch Wiki, and it looks like Arch runs without problems in it (just flash an updated coreboot and then do a bit of tweaking to increase touchpad sensitivity and you're done).

[doragasu]

It looks like neither Dell Chromebook 11 (with i3 CPU) nor Acer C720 are distributed in Europe, so I finally got tired of searching and bought an Acer Travelmate B115-M (Celeron N2940, 4 GiB RAM, 500 GB HDD, fanless). Excepting for the slow and suprisingly noisy HDD (that I'm planning to swap for an SDD unit), I'm very pleased with the laptop. I ditched Windows and installed AchLinux without a single problem (once I discovered how to disable UEFI secure boot), and everything works out of the box with 4.3 kernel.

The laptop is light, and battery life is pretty good: around 7 hours with heavy use (building Arch packages with the 4 cores at 100%) that raise above 9 hours on light usage. Recommended if you plan to buy a not-too-powerful, cheap and Linux friendly laptop (but you are advised that changing the HDD is highly recommended).