In yesterday’s post “Try before you buy” I listed some examples of hardware vendors who include free and open source software. Today, The Register reports about the Spanish vendor Slimbook who offer a notebook in two different screen sizes and with KDE Neon pre-installed. They also link to the hardware page of KDE which in turn has many vendors who ship with that desktop in case you like it, from games consoles to phones to notebooks starting at around the 200$ range, you’ll get it. Of course, at some of those vendors you are free to choose whatever distribution you would like, an example for a German-based shop like this is Tuxedo computers. Very much like my own German division of ZaReason (RIP).
I’d still rather build computers myself, but if I was in need of a cheap alternative to a Chromebook or something like that right now, I’d have a closer look at the Pinebook Pro… maybe you could even order this with Debian, or with a standard Arch installation? If not, Manjaro with KDE Plasma would be perfectly fine as well…
As always, thanks for reading.