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Comment by dkrich | Hacker News Reader

It's not even so much about it being affordable but rather how much it costs relative to other devices on the market. $1300 is a pretty high price point for a laptop and in that range you're competing with high-end notebooks like Apple. A Chromebook fits a niche for lightweight web-browsers, but I'm not prepared to spend $1300 for a notebook built solely to surf the net.

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The thing runs linux. Like if you ever wanted a linux laptop this is for you. I just bought a toshiba cb2, and with crouton installed it's one of the best laptops I think I've ever owned (for the price).

All my laptops run Linux. Two of them came with Linux preinstalled. Two of them came with Windows preinstalled. All four had the preinstalled OS overwritten by my Linux distro of choice. So what they came with isn't really that important. (Granted, if something comes with Linux then that saves you the step of making sure all the hardware has Linux support before you buy it.)

(Random and probably a little minor) But what about those keyboards? How about those Ctrl and alt keys? Have both on each side? Actually in the same order, and spaced well for programming / emacs? That's the reason I hate my Mac pro so much, and I haven't seen a win based keyboard doing much better. The CB key layout is the best I know of.

Well, my current ASUS laptop (about $700 ~3 years ago, including the Swedish 25% VAT, Windows preinstalled) has so far worked almost flawlessly with Linux. My bottom row is Ctrl Fn Super Alt Space AltGR Menu Ctrl. Some keys are a smaller than on a full-size keyboard, but everything (except for home/end/pg/...) is in its usual spot and it works absolutely fine for me (I'm primarily writing in IntelliJ or Vim though, not Emacs).

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