46
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2023
46 points (89.7% liked)
Asklemmy
43628 readers
1123 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
With the preface of "cheap", do not ever buy a laptop under $500. They are simply underspecced by the time they get that low, and will give a bad experience.
I would also recommend something like a Lenovo ThinkPad, they are pretty damn tough. Maybe a ThinkPad E14 Gen 5 Intel. Spec it out to 16gb of memory and even the i3 processor will get your job done fine in Linux, while landing in under $650. Plus they have removable M.2 SSD's that can be changed out for a higher capacity very easily, and much much cheaper than the $300 they charge to kit it with a 1tb drive...
To add to this, if $500 is actually your budget:
Get a good second hand laptop. I picked up a 2020 model X1 Carbon a few months ago for ๐ฆ๐บ$200 and paid another $90 for a new battery for it. Came to about $300 for a great little laptop.
This was for the kid to take to school, so I didn't want to be buying a $1,000 thing that he'd destroy.
My suggestion is to get a device that can do the stuff kids want, but just barely do the things they want.
I probably spent more time tinkering around the family computer than anything else as a kid just to get games way over-spec to run on it. Throughout that process I learned programming, hex editing, and some Linux system administration, which eventually led me to my current career.
These days, it's probably a lot easier to get started with a raspberry pi. But without something to motivate people to learn tech, why would they do it in the first place?
if you do go for a thousand thing get a framework, incredibly modular pc
To add to that, a used ThinkPad can be really good even under $500. Companies mass buy and replace them so they get sold for really cheap considering their specs
I've bought sub $500 laptops several times in the last 6 years or so, and they were all great. Lenovo puts (or at least used to put) out Ideapads with Ryzen processors that are crazy cheap, and fairly upgradable.