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Comment by simonbarker87 | Hacker News Reader

I would pay a silly sum of money for an eInk laptop so I can code outside in the sun. We get so little sun here in the UK that my side project productivity plummets in good weather because I was to sit out and enjoy it. It doesn’t need to have a high refresh rate, it just has to be able to display text and browser the internet in some semblance of reasonable.

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What do you think is the lowest acceptable refresh rate to make typing feel smooth? If you're a 60wpm typer, that'd be 60hz to display every character as you type it, might feel disjointed otherwise.

This screen is a different kind than you are used to. The pixels actually wear out after a remarkably small number of changes (~10k). So "60Hz" doesn't mean much. It can update the small number of pixels you actually want changed pretty quickly, but it takes a noticeable fraction of a second. The key is changing only those and leaving all the rest the hell alone.

Running Gnome on it is possible. But you do not want to.

I guess the letter rate is more important with this than the word rate, I would say 0.5 seconds would be the low end of reasonable (so 2 hz), if it could get to maybe 5-10hz that would be super

60 wpm == 1 hz

1 hz per word - but people type a character at a time. A word per second isn't great.

There are some laptops still with the transflective display technology that the OLPC used. Fewer than I'd like, since I have the exact same situation as you.

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