Notebook to learn Elixir/Phoenix?

Questions / Help
1

Hello,

Moderators: Didn’t find any category that fits, so please change if you like.

I am looking for recommendations for the following situation:
I already have a notebook (windows), but it’s more a replacement for a personal computer. When the weather is warm enough, I rather want to sit in the garden learning Elixir and Phoenix. But my notebook is cumbersome to carry it outside and I think it would be better to use linux for development.

Can you recommend a laptop that run linux for my purpose? The cheaper, the better. (I am not sure if I could code in Elixir on a Chromebook).

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5

In addition to what @cnck1387 wrote…

… the Elixir wiki has a page dedicated to Windows, in which a lot of details about installing WSL can be found.

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6

I still love my 11" MacBook Air - it’s tiny and highly portable, and I use it as my main computer (just plug it into a monitor with bluetooth keyboard and trackpad when at my desk).

You might also find this poll interesting:

:003:

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Thanks to all so far.

I definitely want to learn a new OS. I know Windows and MacOS, I seldom used Linux and never chromeOS. So I will not be a MacBook or a windows machine.

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I got a second hand Thinkpad X220 a year or so ago. Cheap as chips and easily the best keyboard on any laptop I’ve used. I put an SSD in and it runs latest Ubuntu and the full Elixir / Phoenix stack just fine. The only downer is battery life isn’t great. I do most of my paid work on either MacBook Air or Windoze laptop. The X220 is for tinkering. The excuse is making sure code builds cross platform, but really I just love the keyboard and the general feel of something built in the days where robustness trumped thinness.

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Thinkpads can usually be obtained used for cheap (e.g. when companies renew their fleet and sell the old ones) and typically have excellent Linux support. If that’s something you’d consider doing, take a look at https://www.truefla.me/free-stuff/used-thinkpad-buyers-guide (although note that price in EU tend to be higher than the US ones in the guide).

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10

2 years later I finally have decided to buy a chromebook (Acer CP713-3w).

Has anyone experience with Erlang/Elixir (+Rust for the Nx.Explorer package) on Crostini? Is it any different from developing on a Ubuntu machine?

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11

I’ve installed elixir and Phoenix on my chromebook, but I haven’t done a ton of development work with it. Just enough to know that it works. Does take a little getting used to to understand where your Linux machine ends and the chromebook begins. Getting my editor set up properly (I use emacs) was probably the hardest part.

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