You know the dilemma: you are going on holiday, want to take a laptop to potentially do a little bit of light work or even some browsing, but really worry about what happens when your expensive piece of aluminium from Cupertino is stolen (or, in my case, left on a train), potentially full of sensitive information (though to be fair to Apple, cracking a locked down MacBook is pretty tricky). The alternative is taking something with you that might be less disastrous to loose, so maybe an old machine or, in my case, the cheapest new laptop with a 14 inch screen one can find. Step in a large South East Asian provider of electronic goods and an unnamed seller of reasonably priced laptops. In this case a 14 inch laptop with an alleged Intel N3700, 16MB of RAM and 128MB of SSD for 160 Euro. At this price one has to expect a bit of subterfuge, and indeed the processor was a slightly slower (though newer) X5-E8000 and the RAM turned out to be 8MB, but hey, it arrived on time, had Windows 11 on it and worked. Windows 11 laboured a bit with a 9 year old processor, so Debian 12 came (as ever) to the rescue. LXQt runs smoothly, video/audio playback and streaming works well and all internal hardware instances are supported out of the box (so to speak). Work works (?), as its quick enough to let Firefox run the office applications in the browser (if Libre-Office is not your thing).

So yes, thanks to Linux it’s perfectly doable to use a light, cheap but underpowered laptop for the price of an Apple ac-adapter for work and (a little bit of) play. If it’s sensitive information you’re carrying around, the encrypted home folder will sort that.

Just don’t have ‘user’ / ‘password’ as your login credentials.