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The Eee PC 701 was amazing. It was really good for students who needed something small and light that they could take to the library, etc. The alternative back

The Eee PC 701 was amazing. It was really good for students who needed something small and light that they could take to the library, etc. The alternative back then was a heavy power-hungry full-size laptop. This is before all the stuff we take for granted today like tablets, etc. The Dell Inspiron Mini 9 was the next really good netbook. After those, Apple introduced the Macbook Air which came in a 11.6" size. Even Linus Torvalds owned one. Chromebooks have now taken over the small and light segment replacing tablets as well, but they're locked down and all-in on Google compared to the old netbooks which let you run anything, so they're not an ideal replacement. I don't think netbooks will be back. When you look at something like the Raspberry Pi 4, it's way more powerful than the old Eee 701 was and the Pi is a very small form factor. If a manufacturer thinks there is a market for it, they could encapsulate something like that in a keyboard and screen and give it Linux as an open OS. So why won't this happen you ask? It's a tough call because the competition for netbooks is actually smartphones. A student writing a paper, all they need is just a bluetooth keyboard and something to lean their 6.7" phone or tablet against.

maicro 4y ago
I'll just throw this out there - GalliumOS works fairly well to convert a Chromebook into a full-fat Linux laptop. I've only installed it on one, but the process wasn't too hard. The end result is kinda hacky, and from what I recall there's not much development being done on Gallium of late, but it's still an option.
- TheCycoONE 4y ago
  GalliumOS works for the x86 chromebooks. For a handful of arm chromebooks archlinuxarm works reasonably well. I bought a Samsung Chromebook Plus (1st gen) before covid when I was taking the train every day. I find it to be a great carry with me device for note taking, web browsing, coding, and light gaming when combined with a tiling window manager. It certainly feels like the netbook promise of the late 2000s. I have to caution that for that particular device the stock kernel in archlinuxarm no longer boots because there are limits on the boot partition size. The workaround I'm aware of is to build out your disk on an sd card / usb stick on another computer, cross compiling the kernel with a reduced set of drivers, and installing it using binfmt-qemu-static/chroot.
  - squarefoot 4y ago
    I wonder what's the purpose of GalliumOS. After the usual unlocking, I've installed Manjaro on several 1st and 2nd generation Chromeboxes with no problems whatsoever; everything supported out of the box, and I would expect Debian or Ubuntu to work as well. Are there any incompatibilities with newer generation models so that a dedicated distro is needed?
    - bubblethink 4y ago
      Google doesn't upstream chromebook code. Chromebooks run hacked up downstream kernels. GalliumOS incorporates those hacks. Over time, some things make it upstream.
- bluesquared 4y ago
  Still pretty hacky on my Acer Chromebook Flip C302, could never get audio working quite right. I'd agree and say GalliumOS on most Chromebooks is like mid-2000s desktop Linux hacky.
RosanaAnaDana 4y ago
pretty sure i bricked my eee doing a bios update so i could put linux on it.
- dwringer 4y ago
  Mine almost bricked itself due to the accumulation of driver and Windows updates, so I installed Linux to save it. But by then it was slow, noisy, and full of moving parts compared to alternatives and I never really used it again.
0xcde4c3db 4y ago
> Chromebooks have now taken over the small and light segment replacing tablets as well Maybe, maybe not. ICYMI, Google "pre-announced" an Android tablet for 2023 [1]. [1] https://twitter.com/madebygoogle/status/1524462561143537664 https://twitter.com/madebygoogle/status/1524462561143537664
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Nursie 4y ago
Nah, the 901 was where it was at! Atom chip, more usable screen size, 4GB system drive that was reasonably snappy. I used that thing for years, even ran OSX snow-leopard on it for a while.
- joecool1029 4y ago
  I still have one in operating condition. It was the first laptop I owned with SSD's (dual SSD setup, 4GB SLC and 16GB MLC SSD. Also had SD card for expansion. The SSD's were unique in that they slotted into slots that were physically mini-pcie slots, but wired electrically with SATA, PATA, and USB. Having the SSD setup in 2007 was ahead of its time and really made the laptop feel faster than it was. Also being the size of a paperback book meant it traveled well. After the 901, Asus was sorta forced to kill the line as Windows sold more units than Linux and was a pig on drive usage (Microsoft stopped licensing XP as it was long in the tooth by this point). Rather than throw the dual SSD setup in, they moved to slow 250GB HDD's and sized up the keyboard/screeen to 10". Basically became a cheap and slow and not that much smaller laptop. Oh, another random thing the 901 had was lots of easy to access internal USB headers to wire devices to internally like additional drives and touch panel. This was something else removed in later models cost cutting.
  - Nursie 4y ago
    It did feel pretty snappy due to the drives. I replaced one of the internal ssds with a 64GB third-party add-on in mine, doubled up the RAM, replaced the webcam (Linux models for some reason came with a different camera module to windows one, and only the windows one was hackintosh compatible, so I had to ebay-it) and did all manner of other things to mine. Including replace the keyboard when I accidentally sliced through the ribbon cable :/ Really good, rugged, tiny little laptop. When I got bored of OS X I went back to debian, I think I only got rid of it a couple of years ago during a clearout. The addon drive was dead, as was one of the originals. Its last-ditch configuration was / on the original 4GB, /home on an SD card and lxde for a lightweight DE. After a while it struggled with youtube and stuff and I drifted away from it.
- jrockway 4y ago
ryukafalz 4y ago
As for why manufacturers don’t make netbooks… it’s a fair point if you’re only looking at the major PC makers I guess, but overall they actually do! Think GPD Pocket series, One Mix series, (soon) MNT Pocket Reform. It’s a niche, but the hardware exists!
- jamesgeck0 4y ago
  Microsoft makes two netbook adjacent devices! The Surface Go is a netbook with a tablet form factor. And the Surface Laptop SE is an (admittedly slightly large) netbook.
- type0 4y ago
  GPD MicroPC even has a serial port, but nowadays something like a Seeed reTerminal with E10-1 is probably a better buy
- marttt 4y ago
  I wonder if this indicates that refurbished netbooks actually would have some aftermarket value, for "niche people" or more capable Linux users at least. Maybe they would run into driver issues, though.
strken 4y ago
As a student the 701 was great. It fit in my (large) coat pocket, supported up to 2gb of ram, ran Xubuntu fine, was sturdier than my main laptop, had amazing battery life, and a real keyboard. It fit in that annoying niche between my tiny consumption-oriented phone and big work-oriented laptop, when I needed a full Linux environment for something but didn't mind if the command took a little while longer to type or run. Later netbooks were all missing something. They were either expensive, had exclusively soldered parts, were thinner and less sturdy (but not smaller), had driver problems on Linux, or had terrible battery life.
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- hashtag-til 4y ago
  wow. So many memories. I had one that I used as spare laptop, and compared to laptops at that time, the battery life was amazing. The weight made it very discreet (important for me living in a crap place in which somebody could kill you to take your laptop) and portable. Used to run Ubuntu on it - a little struggle to get wifi working, but apart from that it was great.
- pnutjam 4y ago
  Yeah, soldered parts; but most manufacturers sell a windows pc with emmc storage that is pretty cheap. I have an older HP version with 2GB of Ram and 16GB eeMC storage. It fits in the tablet pocket of my backpack, is super light, long battery life, and runs opensuse like a champ, even with KDE. EDIT: emmc, not eemc.
  - strken 4y ago
    The only problem I have with soldered parts is soldered RAM. Everything else can be worked around with patience or external parts, but once you don't have enough RAM to run a web browser with a single tab open to a common website, you're constantly page faulting. I'm not sure whether this is planned obsolescence, or just the consequence of consumers who don't know or care about upgrading their device to keep it current.
dirtyv 4y ago
If you are actually interested in buying something like that you just described the Pinebook/Pinebook Pro. I've got the Pro and love it
- crotho 4y ago
- l72 4y ago
  I bought a Pinebook Pro because I wanted to support the project. However, it has turned into my primary personal laptop. It works great for all my personal development projects (emacs + elixir/javascript/react/python), running my side business (Shopify store), along with book keeping (plain text accounting), and general web surfing. Suspend works well. Battery life is good enough (not as good as my m1 macbook). Wifi and everything else works fine. The only annoyance is the sound card doesn't get reset correctly after suspend. This required setting up a script to reload the module + a systemd unit to run it when coming back from suspend. It is cheap enough that I'm not worried about throwing it in my bag or taking it overseas. It also seems to get a lot of attention in public as it has no markings on it at all! I've thought about expanding the hard drive (as 64G isn't much), but it forces me to push everything to my home server/NAS which is a good thing.
creakingstairs 4y ago
I know it will never happen but I'd love for Apple to bring back 12 inch MacBook with the new M1 chip and the newer keyboard. It would be perfect for light note taking/ productivity on the go.
- oynqr 4y ago
  I'm not so sure Apple is stoked on bringing back the Macbook that was regarded as the worst by many.
  - Sunspark 4y ago
    If they think it was rejected because of the screen size and not the incredibly shallow travel of the keyboard, they need to poll better. They have been bad for years with laptop keyboards.
grecy 4y ago
I ran MacOS X on my Dell Mini 9, it was a close to flawless as you could get back then in such a tiny portable. From memory, sleep was the only thing that didn't work 100% correctly - I always just shut it down.
- Cockbrand 4y ago
  Same here, on an Eee PC 901. It was a bit slow compared to a real Mac, but ran surprisingly well, resulting in quite a fun little machine with OS X.
marttt 4y ago
+1 for the Dell Mini 9. In fact, I use it daily for most things, as I got one in mint condition for only a few euros. Tiny Core Linux, framebuffer mode, text-only browsing, Ali G. Rudi's framebuffer tools [1]. I also added a matte screen protector, which is fine against eye strain. I really don't want to go back to neither a traditional GUI experience, nor, somewhat surprisingly, to a bigger screen. This is a bit odd, but it is much easier to stay focused with a small screen. You'll write more one-liner scripts to help your workflow. A machine the size of an A5 writing pad. It's a nice experience. The keyboard is also surprisingly tolerable. And, due to being fanless, the machine is spookily quiet, which helps even more with the focusing. There should be a lot of old netbooks lying around. I imagine they were often used only a few times and then forgotten in that bottom drawer, because, maybe you do need to be somewhat a geek to use one of these in a dedicated manner. I couldn't imagine using my Mini 9 with a traditional GUI, or even a mouse. For terminal-only work, though, it is really great. So I guess all these old, peanuts-prized machines could be interesting to frugal computing / retrocomputing people, which seems to be a growing niche among younger folks. 1: http://litcave.rudi.ir http://litcave.rudi.ir
notyourwork 4y ago
The Asus was perfect during undergraduate, in fact I actually mined bitcoin on it in a class when we first heard of cryptocurrency. Pretty wild stuff, I miss that bugger. Only downside was the ram soldered to the board preventing upgrade.
themodelplumber 4y ago
You got me thinking...I still run my MSI Wind netbook (RIP Zareason!), and it's worked great with both Haiku and Q4OS recently. The keyboard is a near-disaster in some ways but after configuring a bunch of workarounds it's reasonably comfortable. I took it on a trip to Sicily soon after purchasing and have fond memories of using it and my n810 "media center" for that trip. I didn't have WiFi at the guest house where I stayed so I ended up getting my work done from the front of a tiny cafe in Noto, stooped over the tiny screen, but very much geeking out. The form factor is still really kind of cool when I'm in the mood to play with it, but once anything with cords needs to attach to it, it starts to look kind of overwhelmed IMO. Still, to this day I'd rather build stuff on it than on my phone. But that probably has a lot to do with things like muscle memory, maybe in addition to the fact that a properly-configured desktop OS (esp. with keyboard workarounds) is just something else when you're ready to work.
- marttt 4y ago
  "... I still run my MSI Wind netbook ..." Were the MSI Winds fanless, or did they have a fan? And the hard disk, I assume, wasn't a SSD? I ask because I just noticed kids of our relatives using an abandoned Wind as a toy (to play "work"). They claim it is "broken", but who knows. I sneaked behind their back and tested the keyboard for typing -- it felt really good! A pity to see a potentially useful machine simply lying around like this, especially when my country needs to help out close to 50,000 war refugees from Ukraine. Our CS students refurbish laptops for the refugees -- this one could make an excellent machine for an Ukrainian hacker, or any other user with modest needs. Another excellent netbook was the Samsung NC10 [1]. Really good keyboard (93% of full size), sturdy build in general, screen hinges reach about 180 degrees, and a "fanless mode", that is, you can adjust the fan speed with a hotkey. Unfortunately, the one I tested suffered from its symptomatic "white screen problem" (described in the Wikipedia article). 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_NC10 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_NC10
  - themodelplumber 4y ago
    That's interesting, yeah mine has a fan but it is normally impossible to notice if the noise level in the room is even just a little bit above "quiet". Same with the original HDD, which on mine was spinny. I don't recall ever hearing it in operation. I replaced that with an SSD (be sure to clean the fan venting area while you're in there if you do that) but the before/after change didn't exactly blow my mind. For a hacker it could be great. You could do a LOT with it. Most development and scripting tasks are easy. However I would strongly recommend a separate pointing device, as it's a pretty substantial upgrade to the user experience. For web browsing, Falkon and 3-4 tabs max can work pretty well but modern JS SPAs probably wouldn't be very fun (if they'd even work in Falkon). I use Dillo a lot myself. I remember hearing about the Samsung, that's too bad about the white screen problem. I think the biggest problem I've had with the Wind was that the power button's blue LED failed, but all the other LEDs work and the button itself is fine.
wodenokoto 4y ago
> I don't think netbooks will be back. When you look at something like the Raspberry Pi 4, it's way more powerful than the old Eee 701 was and the Pi is a very small form factor. If a manufacturer thinks there is a market for it, they could encapsulate something like that in a keyboard and screen and give it Linux as an open OS. So why won't this happen you ask? Roughly speaking, that is exactly how netbooks started and then they very quickly switched to Windows. I don't know if it was consumer pressure or pressure from MS that caused this, but I do think it was Microsoft that pressured producers to switch.
- Marazan 4y ago
  Combination of MS and Intel. MS offered a massive discount on windows XP for netbooks as they saw the Linus writing on the wall. Intel choked of supply for people who wanted to build more fully feature netbooks - thus the constrained specs on things like memory)
- Beltalowda 4y ago
  I used to work at a computer store at the time; mostly doing tech stuff but also sales sometimes when it was busy. We sold a lot of Netbooks, both running Windows and Linux. "This model runs Windows" was a real selling point for many customers. You have to realize that many people just don't give a flying hoot about their computers, they just want something to access a few websites and such, and Windows is what they were familiar with. We sold a lot more Windows EEE machines than Linux ones, in spite of being quite a bit more expensive. Was there also pressure from Microsoft? I don't know; I wouldn't be surprised. But there certainly was a real consumer demand as well.
  - Nursie 4y ago
    The specific linux on the eeepcs was pretty bad too, IIRC. I couldn't use it. So you really had to be someone interested in messing around with them to get the best out of them.
- awiesenhofer 4y ago
  I wouldn't call it "pressure" - MS just started to give away Windows for free if the device was under certain specs[1]. At that point it became a nobrainer for OEMs to just use Windows if it costs them the same anyway. [1] up to 11" and 4gb RAM IIRC
nvrspyx 4y ago
Now I'm feeling nostalgic. My main laptop in high school was a tiny Eee netbook (don't remember the model) running CrunchBang. I ended up using it as a headless server for a makeshift home lab during my freshman year in college.
grudg3 4y ago
I had one as well and loved it. One day someone broke into the flat and it got stolen. I still think about it sometime. It was really a great form factor.
otabdeveloper4 4y ago
https://www.asus.com/Laptops/For-Home/Everyday-use/ASUS-E203/ https://www.asus.com/Laptops/For-Home/Everyday-use/ASUS-E203... How is this not a netbook in everything but name?
- mkl 4y ago
  It has an 11.6-inch screen. Netbooks were tiny, more like 7-10".
ant6n 4y ago
I had a Dell Mini 10 (actually 1012), and it was a bit larger, so keyboard was actually useable. Plus it had a useful screen resolution (1300s vs 1024 for width).
wirrbel 4y ago
I think I have never seen a chromebook in real life.
- gtirloni 4y ago
  It's heavily used at schools these days. Also, a local college has thousands of them here.
- Random_Person 4y ago
  I've got one. I use it only for writing. It's been great for that because it's terrible at everything else. It is essentially a modern-day word processor for me. I can work for hours and hours unplugged and if I need to do a bit of research, I can without having to pull out my distraction machine (phone).
- decafninja 4y ago
  Same. Then again, outside of work I seem to rarely see any laptop in use that isn't a Mac these days. I know that's not representative, but still.
amadeuspagel 4y ago
You have a linux container on chromebooks, where you can run anything. Doesn't feel locked down to me.
timw4mail 4y ago
Netbooks are kind of back, though. 11/12" screens, N3000/N4000 series Celeron processors, 32-64GB of storage, sd card slot, and Windows 10.
type0 4y ago
> The Dell Inspiron Mini 9 was the next really good netbook. After those, Apple introduced the Macbook Air which came in a 11.6" size. Lenovo S10 could run Hackintosh
jwommack 4y ago
Windows updates on older Eee PCs got/gets brutal a few years in. Mostly due to them needing to take up more and more hard drive space. I remember there was a significant security update a few years back that would just constantly retry on Eee PCs because it needed like 20Gb of storage it would basically never get. Made it essentially unusable.
GekkePrutser 4y ago
The EEEPC 701 was not great in terms of maximizing usability for the form factor. The screen bezels were huge as were the speakers beside it. The vertical resolution wasn't even enough to show some control panel dialogs in Windows XP. I had one myself but there were just too many corners cut to take make it work out. Later models solved these issues and more and were much more bang for the buck. And maximized the usability for the size and price point.

maicro 4y ago

I'll just throw this out there - GalliumOS works fairly well to convert a Chromebook into a full-fat Linux laptop. I've only installed it on one, but the process wasn't too hard. The end result is kinda hacky, and from what I recall there's not much development being done on Gallium of late, but it's still an option.

TheCycoONE 4y ago
GalliumOS works for the x86 chromebooks. For a handful of arm chromebooks archlinuxarm works reasonably well. I bought a Samsung Chromebook Plus (1st gen) before covid when I was taking the train every day. I find it to be a great carry with me device for note taking, web browsing, coding, and light gaming when combined with a tiling window manager. It certainly feels like the netbook promise of the late 2000s. I have to caution that for that particular device the stock kernel in archlinuxarm no longer boots because there are limits on the boot partition size. The workaround I'm aware of is to build out your disk on an sd card / usb stick on another computer, cross compiling the kernel with a reduced set of drivers, and installing it using binfmt-qemu-static/chroot.
- squarefoot 4y ago
  I wonder what's the purpose of GalliumOS. After the usual unlocking, I've installed Manjaro on several 1st and 2nd generation Chromeboxes with no problems whatsoever; everything supported out of the box, and I would expect Debian or Ubuntu to work as well. Are there any incompatibilities with newer generation models so that a dedicated distro is needed?
  - bubblethink 4y ago
    Google doesn't upstream chromebook code. Chromebooks run hacked up downstream kernels. GalliumOS incorporates those hacks. Over time, some things make it upstream.
bluesquared 4y ago
Still pretty hacky on my Acer Chromebook Flip C302, could never get audio working quite right. I'd agree and say GalliumOS on most Chromebooks is like mid-2000s desktop Linux hacky.

RosanaAnaDana 4y ago

pretty sure i bricked my eee doing a bios update so i could put linux on it.

dwringer 4y ago
Mine almost bricked itself due to the accumulation of driver and Windows updates, so I installed Linux to save it. But by then it was slow, noisy, and full of moving parts compared to alternatives and I never really used it again.

0xcde4c3db 4y ago

> Chromebooks have now taken over the small and light segment replacing tablets as well Maybe, maybe not. ICYMI, Google "pre-announced" an Android tablet for 2023 [1]. [1] https://twitter.com/madebygoogle/status/1524462561143537664 https://twitter.com/madebygoogle/status/1524462561143537664

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Nursie 4y ago

Nah, the 901 was where it was at! Atom chip, more usable screen size, 4GB system drive that was reasonably snappy. I used that thing for years, even ran OSX snow-leopard on it for a while.

joecool1029 4y ago
I still have one in operating condition. It was the first laptop I owned with SSD's (dual SSD setup, 4GB SLC and 16GB MLC SSD. Also had SD card for expansion. The SSD's were unique in that they slotted into slots that were physically mini-pcie slots, but wired electrically with SATA, PATA, and USB. Having the SSD setup in 2007 was ahead of its time and really made the laptop feel faster than it was. Also being the size of a paperback book meant it traveled well. After the 901, Asus was sorta forced to kill the line as Windows sold more units than Linux and was a pig on drive usage (Microsoft stopped licensing XP as it was long in the tooth by this point). Rather than throw the dual SSD setup in, they moved to slow 250GB HDD's and sized up the keyboard/screeen to 10". Basically became a cheap and slow and not that much smaller laptop. Oh, another random thing the 901 had was lots of easy to access internal USB headers to wire devices to internally like additional drives and touch panel. This was something else removed in later models cost cutting.
- Nursie 4y ago
  It did feel pretty snappy due to the drives. I replaced one of the internal ssds with a 64GB third-party add-on in mine, doubled up the RAM, replaced the webcam (Linux models for some reason came with a different camera module to windows one, and only the windows one was hackintosh compatible, so I had to ebay-it) and did all manner of other things to mine. Including replace the keyboard when I accidentally sliced through the ribbon cable :/ Really good, rugged, tiny little laptop. When I got bored of OS X I went back to debian, I think I only got rid of it a couple of years ago during a clearout. The addon drive was dead, as was one of the originals. Its last-ditch configuration was / on the original 4GB, /home on an SD card and lxde for a lightweight DE. After a while it struggled with youtube and stuff and I drifted away from it.
jrockway 4y ago

ryukafalz 4y ago

As for why manufacturers don’t make netbooks… it’s a fair point if you’re only looking at the major PC makers I guess, but overall they actually do! Think GPD Pocket series, One Mix series, (soon) MNT Pocket Reform. It’s a niche, but the hardware exists!

jamesgeck0 4y ago
Microsoft makes two netbook adjacent devices! The Surface Go is a netbook with a tablet form factor. And the Surface Laptop SE is an (admittedly slightly large) netbook.
type0 4y ago
GPD MicroPC even has a serial port, but nowadays something like a Seeed reTerminal with E10-1 is probably a better buy
marttt 4y ago
I wonder if this indicates that refurbished netbooks actually would have some aftermarket value, for "niche people" or more capable Linux users at least. Maybe they would run into driver issues, though.

strken 4y ago

As a student the 701 was great. It fit in my (large) coat pocket, supported up to 2gb of ram, ran Xubuntu fine, was sturdier than my main laptop, had amazing battery life, and a real keyboard. It fit in that annoying niche between my tiny consumption-oriented phone and big work-oriented laptop, when I needed a full Linux environment for something but didn't mind if the command took a little while longer to type or run. Later netbooks were all missing something. They were either expensive, had exclusively soldered parts, were thinner and less sturdy (but not smaller), had driver problems on Linux, or had terrible battery life.

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hashtag-til 4y ago
wow. So many memories. I had one that I used as spare laptop, and compared to laptops at that time, the battery life was amazing. The weight made it very discreet (important for me living in a crap place in which somebody could kill you to take your laptop) and portable. Used to run Ubuntu on it - a little struggle to get wifi working, but apart from that it was great.
pnutjam 4y ago
Yeah, soldered parts; but most manufacturers sell a windows pc with emmc storage that is pretty cheap. I have an older HP version with 2GB of Ram and 16GB eeMC storage. It fits in the tablet pocket of my backpack, is super light, long battery life, and runs opensuse like a champ, even with KDE. EDIT: emmc, not eemc.
- strken 4y ago
  The only problem I have with soldered parts is soldered RAM. Everything else can be worked around with patience or external parts, but once you don't have enough RAM to run a web browser with a single tab open to a common website, you're constantly page faulting. I'm not sure whether this is planned obsolescence, or just the consequence of consumers who don't know or care about upgrading their device to keep it current.

dirtyv 4y ago

If you are actually interested in buying something like that you just described the Pinebook/Pinebook Pro. I've got the Pro and love it

crotho 4y ago
l72 4y ago
I bought a Pinebook Pro because I wanted to support the project. However, it has turned into my primary personal laptop. It works great for all my personal development projects (emacs + elixir/javascript/react/python), running my side business (Shopify store), along with book keeping (plain text accounting), and general web surfing. Suspend works well. Battery life is good enough (not as good as my m1 macbook). Wifi and everything else works fine. The only annoyance is the sound card doesn't get reset correctly after suspend. This required setting up a script to reload the module + a systemd unit to run it when coming back from suspend. It is cheap enough that I'm not worried about throwing it in my bag or taking it overseas. It also seems to get a lot of attention in public as it has no markings on it at all! I've thought about expanding the hard drive (as 64G isn't much), but it forces me to push everything to my home server/NAS which is a good thing.

creakingstairs 4y ago

I know it will never happen but I'd love for Apple to bring back 12 inch MacBook with the new M1 chip and the newer keyboard. It would be perfect for light note taking/ productivity on the go.

oynqr 4y ago
I'm not so sure Apple is stoked on bringing back the Macbook that was regarded as the worst by many.
- Sunspark 4y ago
  If they think it was rejected because of the screen size and not the incredibly shallow travel of the keyboard, they need to poll better. They have been bad for years with laptop keyboards.

grecy 4y ago

I ran MacOS X on my Dell Mini 9, it was a close to flawless as you could get back then in such a tiny portable. From memory, sleep was the only thing that didn't work 100% correctly - I always just shut it down.

Cockbrand 4y ago
Same here, on an Eee PC 901. It was a bit slow compared to a real Mac, but ran surprisingly well, resulting in quite a fun little machine with OS X.

marttt 4y ago

+1 for the Dell Mini 9. In fact, I use it daily for most things, as I got one in mint condition for only a few euros. Tiny Core Linux, framebuffer mode, text-only browsing, Ali G. Rudi's framebuffer tools [1]. I also added a matte screen protector, which is fine against eye strain. I really don't want to go back to neither a traditional GUI experience, nor, somewhat surprisingly, to a bigger screen. This is a bit odd, but it is much easier to stay focused with a small screen. You'll write more one-liner scripts to help your workflow. A machine the size of an A5 writing pad. It's a nice experience. The keyboard is also surprisingly tolerable. And, due to being fanless, the machine is spookily quiet, which helps even more with the focusing. There should be a lot of old netbooks lying around. I imagine they were often used only a few times and then forgotten in that bottom drawer, because, maybe you do need to be somewhat a geek to use one of these in a dedicated manner. I couldn't imagine using my Mini 9 with a traditional GUI, or even a mouse. For terminal-only work, though, it is really great. So I guess all these old, peanuts-prized machines could be interesting to frugal computing / retrocomputing people, which seems to be a growing niche among younger folks. 1: http://litcave.rudi.ir http://litcave.rudi.ir

notyourwork 4y ago

The Asus was perfect during undergraduate, in fact I actually mined bitcoin on it in a class when we first heard of cryptocurrency. Pretty wild stuff, I miss that bugger. Only downside was the ram soldered to the board preventing upgrade.

themodelplumber 4y ago

You got me thinking...I still run my MSI Wind netbook (RIP Zareason!), and it's worked great with both Haiku and Q4OS recently. The keyboard is a near-disaster in some ways but after configuring a bunch of workarounds it's reasonably comfortable. I took it on a trip to Sicily soon after purchasing and have fond memories of using it and my n810 "media center" for that trip. I didn't have WiFi at the guest house where I stayed so I ended up getting my work done from the front of a tiny cafe in Noto, stooped over the tiny screen, but very much geeking out. The form factor is still really kind of cool when I'm in the mood to play with it, but once anything with cords needs to attach to it, it starts to look kind of overwhelmed IMO. Still, to this day I'd rather build stuff on it than on my phone. But that probably has a lot to do with things like muscle memory, maybe in addition to the fact that a properly-configured desktop OS (esp. with keyboard workarounds) is just something else when you're ready to work.

marttt 4y ago
"... I still run my MSI Wind netbook ..." Were the MSI Winds fanless, or did they have a fan? And the hard disk, I assume, wasn't a SSD? I ask because I just noticed kids of our relatives using an abandoned Wind as a toy (to play "work"). They claim it is "broken", but who knows. I sneaked behind their back and tested the keyboard for typing -- it felt really good! A pity to see a potentially useful machine simply lying around like this, especially when my country needs to help out close to 50,000 war refugees from Ukraine. Our CS students refurbish laptops for the refugees -- this one could make an excellent machine for an Ukrainian hacker, or any other user with modest needs. Another excellent netbook was the Samsung NC10 [1]. Really good keyboard (93% of full size), sturdy build in general, screen hinges reach about 180 degrees, and a "fanless mode", that is, you can adjust the fan speed with a hotkey. Unfortunately, the one I tested suffered from its symptomatic "white screen problem" (described in the Wikipedia article). 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_NC10 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_NC10
- themodelplumber 4y ago
  That's interesting, yeah mine has a fan but it is normally impossible to notice if the noise level in the room is even just a little bit above "quiet". Same with the original HDD, which on mine was spinny. I don't recall ever hearing it in operation. I replaced that with an SSD (be sure to clean the fan venting area while you're in there if you do that) but the before/after change didn't exactly blow my mind. For a hacker it could be great. You could do a LOT with it. Most development and scripting tasks are easy. However I would strongly recommend a separate pointing device, as it's a pretty substantial upgrade to the user experience. For web browsing, Falkon and 3-4 tabs max can work pretty well but modern JS SPAs probably wouldn't be very fun (if they'd even work in Falkon). I use Dillo a lot myself. I remember hearing about the Samsung, that's too bad about the white screen problem. I think the biggest problem I've had with the Wind was that the power button's blue LED failed, but all the other LEDs work and the button itself is fine.

wodenokoto 4y ago

> I don't think netbooks will be back. When you look at something like the Raspberry Pi 4, it's way more powerful than the old Eee 701 was and the Pi is a very small form factor. If a manufacturer thinks there is a market for it, they could encapsulate something like that in a keyboard and screen and give it Linux as an open OS. So why won't this happen you ask? Roughly speaking, that is exactly how netbooks started and then they very quickly switched to Windows. I don't know if it was consumer pressure or pressure from MS that caused this, but I do think it was Microsoft that pressured producers to switch.

Marazan 4y ago
Combination of MS and Intel. MS offered a massive discount on windows XP for netbooks as they saw the Linus writing on the wall. Intel choked of supply for people who wanted to build more fully feature netbooks - thus the constrained specs on things like memory)
Beltalowda 4y ago
I used to work at a computer store at the time; mostly doing tech stuff but also sales sometimes when it was busy. We sold a lot of Netbooks, both running Windows and Linux. "This model runs Windows" was a real selling point for many customers. You have to realize that many people just don't give a flying hoot about their computers, they just want something to access a few websites and such, and Windows is what they were familiar with. We sold a lot more Windows EEE machines than Linux ones, in spite of being quite a bit more expensive. Was there also pressure from Microsoft? I don't know; I wouldn't be surprised. But there certainly was a real consumer demand as well.
- Nursie 4y ago
  The specific linux on the eeepcs was pretty bad too, IIRC. I couldn't use it. So you really had to be someone interested in messing around with them to get the best out of them.
awiesenhofer 4y ago
I wouldn't call it "pressure" - MS just started to give away Windows for free if the device was under certain specs[1]. At that point it became a nobrainer for OEMs to just use Windows if it costs them the same anyway. [1] up to 11" and 4gb RAM IIRC

nvrspyx 4y ago

Now I'm feeling nostalgic. My main laptop in high school was a tiny Eee netbook (don't remember the model) running CrunchBang. I ended up using it as a headless server for a makeshift home lab during my freshman year in college.

grudg3 4y ago

I had one as well and loved it. One day someone broke into the flat and it got stolen. I still think about it sometime. It was really a great form factor.

otabdeveloper4 4y ago

https://www.asus.com/Laptops/For-Home/Everyday-use/ASUS-E203/ https://www.asus.com/Laptops/For-Home/Everyday-use/ASUS-E203... How is this not a netbook in everything but name?

mkl 4y ago
It has an 11.6-inch screen. Netbooks were tiny, more like 7-10".

ant6n 4y ago

I had a Dell Mini 10 (actually 1012), and it was a bit larger, so keyboard was actually useable. Plus it had a useful screen resolution (1300s vs 1024 for width).

wirrbel 4y ago

I think I have never seen a chromebook in real life.

gtirloni 4y ago
It's heavily used at schools these days. Also, a local college has thousands of them here.
Random_Person 4y ago
I've got one. I use it only for writing. It's been great for that because it's terrible at everything else. It is essentially a modern-day word processor for me. I can work for hours and hours unplugged and if I need to do a bit of research, I can without having to pull out my distraction machine (phone).
decafninja 4y ago
Same. Then again, outside of work I seem to rarely see any laptop in use that isn't a Mac these days. I know that's not representative, but still.

amadeuspagel 4y ago

You have a linux container on chromebooks, where you can run anything. Doesn't feel locked down to me.

timw4mail 4y ago

Netbooks are kind of back, though. 11/12" screens, N3000/N4000 series Celeron processors, 32-64GB of storage, sd card slot, and Windows 10.

type0 4y ago

> The Dell Inspiron Mini 9 was the next really good netbook. After those, Apple introduced the Macbook Air which came in a 11.6" size. Lenovo S10 could run Hackintosh

jwommack 4y ago

Windows updates on older Eee PCs got/gets brutal a few years in. Mostly due to them needing to take up more and more hard drive space. I remember there was a significant security update a few years back that would just constantly retry on Eee PCs because it needed like 20Gb of storage it would basically never get. Made it essentially unusable.

GekkePrutser 4y ago

The EEEPC 701 was not great in terms of maximizing usability for the form factor. The screen bezels were huge as were the speakers beside it. The vertical resolution wasn't even enough to show some control panel dialogs in Windows XP. I had one myself but there were just too many corners cut to take make it work out. Later models solved these issues and more and were much more bang for the buck. And maximized the usability for the size and price point.