41–50 of 63 posts
I would recommend you buy from a specialist retailer rather than ebay though. You may pay a bit more but you are more likely to get a good quality, ex-corporate machine that has been properly checked and with some sort of guarantee.
I used it for developing a game app, teaching my daughter programming over the summer holidays. The machine did pretty well for this purpose, running all the applications we required decently. Even Blender runs and can be used for simple tasks but I wouldn't want to work with such a heavy app nine to five on the little machine. Godot for a 2D game is absolutely fine though, we haven't used 3D much but that was OK too.
A nice thing was, that we could open and analyze competing Android games on the same machine. We couldn't have done this on a pure Linux machine.
I'd say Chrome Books are a very good fit for your stated requirements if you can live with the privacy implications of owning a Google device.
HARDWARE SIDE: The cheapest will be to ... not buy laptop. You can go for 2 in 1 and use your Android phone (if you have one) or buy one. Any Android phone will do the job, but best look for one with USB3.1 (these will support display port on phones USB socket) as it carries video signal as well. Here you have phones released in 2021 and 2022 supporting it: https://www.gsmarena.com/results.php3?nYearMin=2021&sFreeTex…
What the heck, why did get -1 ????
buy some cheap thinkpad, put on programmer socks and install arch. im joking but this is actually a pretty good idea for very cheap
I bought Thinkpad T440p for about 200 eur used. It was actually pawned by someone so I bought it locally no shipping was needed. It is an excellent device and hardware wise very powerful - i5-4300M, 8GB of RAM, 250GB SSD. Got lucky and it had battery with still 85% capacity left so that makes it run for about 2 hours, which is great. Only drawback it has is low resolution screen.