The best portable monitors I know of (and I have an entire collection of 22-ish full HD monitors in search of the Holy Grail which is a carry on sized full HD monitor as large as possible but they don't make cheap thin 19-20 full HD monitors) are the top half of this shop https://shop57714512.world.taobao.com/ Use Superbuy as your taobao proxy. These are tripod mountable full HD IPS monitors with a CNC machined case and a driver board. Very basic but has all you need. If you prefer aliexpress, https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1920-1080-17-3-inch-IPS-Disp... and https://www.aliexpress.com/item/2ms-15-6-inch-1920x1080-IPS-... and so on seems to be the same thing.

Another solution is https://www.packedpixels.com/ but the size is not so great.

I currently carry a Sharp LL-S201A which is slightly larger than the above ones -- I got a great deal off eBay for once. If I didn't then probably I'd get one of the 17" ones above -- the Sharp needs a VESA mount which makes things unwieldly.

Ps. packedpixels are small but their height of 240mm closely matches the height of the ThinkPad 25/T470 of 232.5mm . An USB C to dual DisplayPort MST hub and a charger like https://smile.amazon.com/Charger-Premium-MacBook-Convert-Tos... could provide for two of those on both sides of the display (45W for laptop, 15W for the displays, you could even charge your phone while at it). It's an option.

Wow those are some nice prices, thanks for the links!

If you want a low-end ARM laptop, buy a low-end ARM laptop.[1]

[1] https://www.pine64.org/?page_id=3707

Wow that is an incredible price. Comparing that to the OLPC XO[1] just shows how far tech has come in the last 10 years.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLPC_XO

I feel that if you want to buy a "disposable" laptop might as well put 60$ more in it and buy one of the cheap ASUS laptop, you'll get an infinitely better build quality (for the price range), x86 and better distro compatibility.

Very neat! Thanks for sharing

Looking more closely, is that thing for real? It started as a Kickstarter. The site says "Note: PINEBOOK next shipment date will be on August 25th, 2017. Ship from Hong Kong." and "We will fulfill the BTO queue based on first come first served basis and starting on 28 March 2017. Our sales team will email when it is your turn in the queue." Not good, considering they announced in 2015. Is there a real product like this, as in "you order it and it shows up without any nonsense?"

The Pine A64 board was a 2015 Kickstarter. The Pinebook was announced November 2016, and apparently starting shipping last April. The "you order it" step sounds a little convoluted, though. You sign up to their waiting list, and when they've got a production slot for you, they ask for Paypal information, your address, etc. You'll apparently receive the device a short time after the production date.

I ordered a PINE64 and IoT stamp on June 10th and received it on June 24th. YMMV, but they seem fine.

That's just a board. Anybody can get boards made easily. What about the laptop?

I own the 14" Pinebook. I don't recommend it. Almost all of the distribution images with support for the device is done by a single guy[1], and the keyboard is terrible at registering key presses. This is a known issue[2], but there's no support or warranty on the device so if you buy it before it's fixed, you're out of luck.

Besides that, the quality and the feel of the device is pretty nice.

I bought it because I figured it'd be a decent netbook to break out when there's a network issue or that I could use it for IRC or programming while traveling. Instead it's just collecting dust.

[1] https://github.com/ayufan-pine64 [2] https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=4729

11.6" Pinebook owner here. This version doesn't have the keyboard issue, but they've had trouble sourcing the screens, so it can take ages before the 11.6'' is produced and shipped. I was lucky to order it not long after it was announced.

And yeah, it's mainly Ayufan busting his butt with all of the pinebook distros, with a little help from two or three others. But he's pretty much hammered out all the issues that Ubuntu had upon the pinebook's initial release, and he's active on the Pine64 IRC if you ever run into any issues.

I run xenial ubuntu with i3wm, and it's fine for on-the-go programming. I've been using it to learn Common Lisp at coffee shops. Don't bother if you're a React/Angular/Vue etc developer; the build tools will take too long for it to be productive. I'm not even sure if it can handle ruby sass, for scss scripts.

So yeah, it's great if you want to tinker with a cheap ARM notebook. But not great as a daily driver, or any complicated dev work.

From what I have read they have a very slow queue so I don’t imagine they’re over committing.

And frankly the rest of the laptop is not very complicated.

Thanks for the link I've never heard of these before!

There's the pinebook which is the laptop version of what you are describing https://www.pine64.org/?page_id=3707

How's the battery on the pinebook?

According to that page it has a 10000 mAh battery, and according to this [1] review it lasts about six hours.

[1] https://hackaday.com/2017/04/28/hands-on-with-the-pinebook/

eh.. Why do manufacturers speak mAh instead of watts??

people get very annoyed when they know what that really means. Say for example, every power bank available says 10,000 mAh, or 20,000 mAh (or whatever), but all those are at 3.6 volts (not at 5 volts). As most of the other specs is in 5 volts, most people don't even know this.

> eh.. Why do manufacturers speak mAh instead of watts??

Neither amp-hours nor watts measure energy. Watts measure power, which is irrelevant for a laptop battery, and amp-hours measure nothing unless you know the battery voltage.

The spec for a battery should be in joules or watt-hours.

Enough with the watt-hours already! Let's all just measure batteries using Joules, we have a unit specifically for quantities of electrical energy.

A watt-hour is 3600 Joules, which is not a nice round number, but it's fairly easy to remember. At least they're both proper units of energy.

My thinkpad battery holds 5e23 eV of energy.

Both because using mAh in consumer electronics became common with NiCd and NiMH cells before they broke the 1A limit, and today because it allows writing a bigger number on ads.

This is basically what I did with my Acer netbook for a few years. I threw Arch Linux on it and used it through most of college.

With the largest battery I could find for it, it easily got at least 10 hours, IIRC. I don't believe it approached 20 hours, but this was also about 7-8 years ago.

I don't remember the exact model (it was one of the later ones they made, I believe). I have it around here somewhere if you really want to know which one it was.

The worst part about it was the screen resolution. It was something like 1024x600. There were a few applications and light games that assumed your screen was at least 768 pixels tall (Photoshop CS2, for example, which otherwise worked perfectly in WINE).

For something a bit more modern, I'm continually intrigued by the GPD Pocket Mini Laptop [1].

[1] https://www.gearbest.com/tablet-pcs/pp_613003.html?lkid=1106...

I don't think the battery life was there, but people used to be really into turning Motorola Lapdocks, originally intended for their Atrix phones, into Raspberry Pi machines.

A Chromebook might be able to do what you require for 9-10 hours, with a little tweaking.

I have a Baytrail based Chromebook running GalliumOS (Ubuntu + XFCE) that is good for about 10 hours of usage (in an 11 inch form factor, a larger laptop could accommodate a larger battery). Apollo Lake is rolling out now and should be even better (~30% performance increase should lead to more time idling with the same workload). I'd expect firmware/software support for running generic Linux on it in 6 months or so.

Probably wont hit 20 hours, but I could imagine 12-14, which is pretty respectable.

I would like one of these. I spend most of my time on ssh and maybe one or two webpages.

I want to embed something like this into a nice mechanical keyboard, with some way of hooking up to a display (possibly an Android tablet or something head-mounted). Finally, ultra portable computing with a decent keyboard!

You may be interested in the Pocket CHIP, it's pretty much what you asked for minus the sleek case, and I don't think the battery lasts quite that long (but it's open source and hackable so you can add your own if you want):

https://getchip.com/pages/pocketchip

Sounds a lot like a phone

Flash Ubuntu Touch onto a phone, and tape on a bluetooth mini keyboard.

isn't the screen the biggest consumer of power for any laptop nowadays? I wonder what's the theoretical maximum battery life you could get out of this sort of setup if you had (say) the current macbook pro battery but the beagleboard

Probably not, considering that some CPUs in laptops go past 20 or 30 Watts. Most displays don't reach that power usage.

google chromebook. you can run android, & get various tools like ssh natively, and then you can do many more things with android tools. turn on dev mode and you can run linux in the environment too. You can buy a laptop for $300, get either an intel or arm cpu, it all just works.

Wouldn't an iPad with the keyboard cover and ssh client app meet these requirements?

I so want "iPad Pro + SSH client + keyboard cover + gcloud/aws box" to work for my needs, but I have yet to find a solution that allows ESC/Meta and all the common control keys to work seamlessly within Emacs in a way that doesn't confound my decades of traditional and laptop keyboard muscle memory.

If anyone has definitively solved this problem, I would love to hear about it. I've dropped 50+ USD on apps trying to make this happen.

I tried this too, but there appears to be no way to swap caps and control. This is simple on macOS and Linux and something I am so used to that I can't really work without it, especially in emacs.

Get a full sized regular bluetooth KB to attach to the ipad pro...

Stupid question. Can I install linux on an iPad?

Chromebooks?

Yeah! You could buy a discarded shell from some existing device, like a broken Chromebook.

Yes, that's how I typically do workshops is with Chromebooks.

IMO chromebooks are far too tiny

I just bought an Acer Chromebook 14, haven't used it much yet but it seems just large enough. At least it has full 1920x1080 resolution.

Many are, but some have reasonable sized keyboards. I prefer some of the older models.