Any Recommendation of Ultra Portable Laptop Dual Boot Ubuntu & Windows

[jd-2]

Hi

I am looking to replace my ageing Toshiba NB100 mini laptop (dual boot Ubuntu & XP) which has worked brilliantly for many years. I could do with something a little more powerful (it has 2bg ram, 2x 1.6ghz). I started looking at 10"-13" laptops, then checking tutorials for installing Ubuntu on it. It seem like the newer the laptop the more problematic installing Ubuntu is, and even harder to dual boot. It looks like I might be better buying a used, couple of years old laptop as the newer ones have more unfixed issues. It appears than in recent years dual booting with Ubuntu has got much more difficult.
I hoping there are some people in the ubuntuforums community who have managed to successfully dual boot an ultra portable laptop (ubuntu & windows 8/10), who would be kind enough to tell me the model and point me in the right direction for tutorials, fixes etc so I can do the same.


Ideally it needs to be:


10"-13" screen,
Significantly faster than my NB100,
Good battery life,
Hard drive would need to be at least 60gb, preferably over 100gb,
Sensible price (be able to get a used one for under $250)

I realize this might be a bit of a vague question/specification as there are many laptops to choose from but it is more important for me to find a one that I would be able to install Ubuntu without spending many hours / days trying to fix it, so one which there is a tutorial for, and fixes are available for, is more important than exact laptop spec etc.


(I need windows occasionally for a couple of specialized programs to do with my work which don't run under wine)


Many thank

JD

[wildmanne39]

Moved to the cafe because it is really not a support request.

[kurt18947]

I'm not certain how you define ultraportable but I have a Thinkpad X201 off Ebay. They often come without hard drives so I added a 240 GB. SSD. Make sure it comes with caddy & door or you'd have to buy them. Install Ubuntu 16.04 and everything works as expected. Mine came with a 1st gen Core i5 2.6 Ghz. & 4 GB. RAM. I replaced a 2 GB. sodimm with a 4 GB sodimm so total of 6 GB. RAM. Perfectly adequate for my purposes. I think replacing the spinny HD with an SSD made the biggest difference in 'perceived quickness'. I don't run demanding applications, just web browsing, LibreOffice, Thunderbird that sort of thing.

[jd-2]

Hi Kurt,
Thank you for your reply. It's a definite possibility, the spec's are more than enough, the only obvious down side is that it's quite heavy at 1.75Kg. Did you ever try dual booting with windows? From what I gather this can sometimes be problematic.

[Wild_Duck66]

Shame you need windows, a Chromebook is cheap lightweight and amazing battery life, mine has a touchscreen and Android play store.

[kurt18947]

Hi Kurt,
Thank you for your reply. It's a definite possibility, the spec's are more than enough, the only obvious down side is that it's quite heavy at 1.75Kg. Did you ever try dual booting with windows? From what I gather this can sometimes be problematic.

No problem here with dual booting. If you get a machine that was born with Windows 7, the odds are that it doesn't have UEFI. UEFI properly implemented isn't much of an issue but some manufacturers or even models from the same manufacturer implement UEFI differently and can cause real grief when trying to boot linux. Install Windows first then linux and you should be fine. If it's necessary to reinstall Windows that will likely break dual boot. There is an iso available, boot-repair that should replace the Windows only boot loader so dual booting is restored.

[mörgæs]

We could also try to speed up the Toshiba. Have you tried running other distros than Ubuntu on it?

[jd-2]

Thanks Kurt,
Good to know it will dual boot. I have heard so much about UEFI being a real problem.

[jd-2]

Hi mörgæs
Thanks for the reply. I am currently using Ubuntu-Mate which works pretty well on my NB100, I did buy an SSD for it but haven't got around to fitting it (it's quite a job to get to the drive). The only annoying problem is that the screen resolution is low which means some pop up forms don't fit the screen and there is no scroll bar, plus some website don't format properly. The battery is now dyeing so I figured it would be a good time to upgrade.

[kurt18947]

Thanks Kurt,
Good to know it will dual boot. I have heard so much about UEFI being a real problem.

I wouldn't know ;). I'm hoping by the time I need to replace what I've recently purchased (off lease from Ebay) UEFI will be a bit more standardized. I believe when clone BIOSs came out they went thru some of the same growing pains.

[justen_m]

I don't have recommendations, but I don't think dual boot will be a problem. I bought a new laptop a little over a year ago. It came with Windows 10. It now is dual-boot, running 16.04.2LTS, 4.8 kernel, in addition to Windows. No problems at all installing Ubuntu alongside Win 10, both on its SSD.

[duck.flambe]

Dell XPS 13 ???