$499 at BestBuy –> Lenovo Ideapad 330S-15IKB 15.6″ Laptop – Intel Core i5 – 8GB Memory – 1TB Hard Drive
Full review: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-IdeaPad-330S-15IKB-i5-8250U-UHD620-Laptop-Review.332226.0.html
Ignore the know-nothings in the comments of the review. This all aluminum build is a good deal for an upgradeable Linux machine. 8th gen Core i5-8250U, 8GB RAM upgradable to 20GB. The 16GB Intel Optane SSD drive used as cache to speed up the slow HDD can be changed in the BIOS to run as a normal and fast M.2 PCIe SSD, and Linux can be installed on this tiny, yet fast drive for a bootup in less than 7 seconds. I’d put the OS/root on the SSD and the /home/user on the 1TB HDD (yes, 16GB is plenty for LinuxMint/Manjaro root). So far I’ve run LinuxMint MATE 19.1, Manjaro 18.0.3 XFCE, and MX-Linux on it and have yet to find anything that does not work. Perfectly usable machine while you save your pennies for that 1TB Samsung 970 EVO Plus NVMe drive 🙂 The AC-wifi adapter works fine (Atheros QCA9377) but isn’t the greatest but is slotted so you can replace it. Graphics is just Intel 620 so not great for gaming. But there are AMD Ryzen and discrete graphics versions of the 330S but I can’t speak for how well they run Linux.
Things that suck? No ethernet port. Battery only lasts around 4-5 hours. No backlit keyboard. Speakers/audio is weak on Windows though you can drive them over 100% with the Linux audio mixer.
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