Ordinary people don’t buy laptops any more, let alone desktops. It’s touchscreens and Android all the way. That’s the picture outside the bubble of middle-class Europe and North America. The facts are stubborn.

Sure, but in terms of hardware preferences I would argue that I am a lot more ordinary than the average geek in this forum. Like most normies I am not interested in hardware, I want it to be small and light and cheap.

Completely agree on all counts. I’m not at all a gamer but I keep hearing things about Valve and Steam (whatever the hell they are!) and the vibes I’m getting is that these things may end up saving the day for free software. Hope that’s right.

Yeah, you’re right, but just allow me to say that it’s really irritating to have to write as if for children rather than for adults. I actually toned down the title in anticipation of exactly that. I love Linux and personally I am not “triggered” by this title, it remains a mystery to me why people are so sensitive to such things. Especially geeks.

Yes, but at this rate in 6 months it might be an even worse time to buy it!

Linux-incompatible means non-Intel hardware, basically. Mediatek chips in particular, which seems to be what powers most of the things I want to buy. If they have a Chromebook OS on top, then you can probably make something work with effort. If it’s Android, forget it, you’ll be writing the drivers yourself. All this bores me silly, I’m not interested in hardware, I just want to run Linux.

Interesting take, and maybe you are a kind of pioneer.

Actually, I’ve done something a bit similar in that I use my mobile device (“smartphone”) a lot less than a decade ago. It had got to point where I was doing everything on Android (i.e. like most people today). I said STOP to that and moved gradually back to the laptop. Now I have a tiny smartphone (4-in Cubot) which I use for the same things as 15 years ago: mapping, photos, podcasts and that’s about it, certainly nothing social (nothing at all, including messaging, if you can believe it). Pretty radical but it’s been a liberation, similar to your experience.

In 2026 a normal computer user is a guy on a street corner playing with a touchscreen toy.

I will always listen to advice or constructive observations (see other comments for proof). But perhaps I was also looking for mutual support or even consolation, yes. You can call that “complaining for the sake of complaining” if you prefer.

Obviously you’re right about the economics of it. The problem is the arbitrariness factor. I personally don’t much like that. In 25 years I only ever bought a secondhand computer once (a Compaq laptop!) and… it ended up failing on me (HDD). Then there’s the battery issue. I am very careful with my hardware (including keeping the battery within its range) and I know that I will get X years out of it if nobody else has touched it. I agree that secondhand is cheaper overall and certainly greener.

PS: I like that Yoga a lot!

Secondhand is a band-aid because (1) some people will never buy secondhand and (2), a piece of hardware inevitably has a life expectancy. Seems self-evident to me that these things are a problem if we care about still having FOSS computing in a decade or two.

Not because of the price of the hardware (see my previous remark) but because I see little reasons to be optimistic about the future of the “general purpose” computers in general. And even less reason to be optimistic about the respect of our freedom and privacy on that computer. It almost already is a lost fight on our mobile devices. And it’s a fight we are losing on the political/societal level. At the same speed we’re being un-learned, so to speak, of the core values of what being a citizen in a democracy is supposed to mean.

But that is a whole different story.

It’s the subtext to my whole post. I completely share your take.

As hinted, what I’m looking for is smaller, lighter, fanless, basically a glorified tablet. What lives in the niche occupied by netbooks a decade ago. There are more and more options. But this time the hardware is all but incompatible with Linux.

For slightly more serious hardware your plan is decent. Pretty green too.

Interesting. The Framework is indeed fairly acceptable, apart from price. I guess next time I might have to dig deeper.

Here’s what I would have bought if I could easily get Linux onto it:

https://www.wired.com/review/lenovo-chromebook-duet-gen-9-11-inch-mediatek/

OK points taken, but I’ll push back a bit about these definitions of “normal”.

What I aspire to is a tablet with a keyboard. I would argue that this makes me very normal indeed. This is not “abnormal hardware” any more, it’s basically the step up from smartphones, which is what ordinary people do their computing on these days.

These days desktop computers are bought by corporations and gamers only, and laptops are bought by students and rich people. Ordinary people use Android. Hence my whole issue.

Starts at about 40% higher than my budget with nothing in the convertible category, or fanless, or just small. All of which is available today from any electronics retailer, but basically incompatible with Linux.

Hopefully specialist sellers like this will begin to move downmarket into these new niches.

Fair points. I actually earned more 20 years ago than I do today, but that’s on me. In retrospect the real golden age IMO was the netbook era. Those things were Linux-compatible and there was tons of competition so they were cheap as dirt. I had an Asus that cost next to nothing and ended up taking 6 years of constant abuse (in a backpack).

Yes, I’ve heard about Lenovo T line and I don’t doubt they’re great. A bit too heavy and frankly high performance for me. And it still feels like a temporary solution, like driving a 1980s car because they don’t make them like they did.

If the Pinebook Pro was in stock I probably would have bought that.

I don’t. The fundamental issue is that low-end computing is increasingly incompatible with free software. It’s not breaking news.

Yep, good summary. And correct, the keyboard bit was ambiguous - I would totally buy a “big tablet with a keyboard” if I could easily put Linux on it. But they’re more or less all Android now, and even Chromebook laptops are dying out.

The Framework is just too expensive to justify but otherwise it would be an okay compromise. I just paid literally half that price for the same specs and weight (less modular, sure). A decade ago I paid even less (230€!) for an Intel netbook. Non-existent today.

Cost: 2x, 3x, 4x what normies are paying for laptops. To repeat myself: unlike 10-20 years ago, you cannot easily put Linux on a low-end commercial laptop any more. I say that’s a problem.

The teardown video is available. It’s a 100-stage process involving specialized tools. I know my limits.

But even if you do, it’s just “buy laptop, install Linux”.

Not for less than a grand it isn’t. Not today. For reasons outlined. Go and check. The situation has changed.

buy a Mac

So you don’t think it’s a big deal if non-techie users without 1000 bucks to spare cannot use a computer with an OS under their control? I do.

Disappointed with the flippancy (not to mention predictable bitterness and mockery) of the comments here. I want FOSS to succeed. I thought people here too did.

Yes, for 1000€-plus. A decade ago you could go to a big-box store and get a Linux-compatible computer for a fraction of that. Today you cannot.