Comment by segphault
16 hours ago
I bought one of these last year, specifically looking for a modern take on the netbook form factor. I run PopOS on mine and absolutely love the machine. It’s a perfect travel laptop and it has largely replaced the iPad mini that I previously used as my travel companion. I sometimes use it with XReal glasses, which is great. I’ve found that a 35 watt phone charger is sufficient to charge it over USB C, so I don’t even need to carry a laptop-class charging brick.
I will note that I also had the screen rotation issue described in the post, but it was easy to solve at the desktop environment level in COSMIC. I didn’t bother dealing with it elsewhere because I honestly don’t mind if the grub menu is sideways.
The complaints about the keyboard sound more significant than the screen.
Yes, I’d be wary of going anywhere near this for that reason alone. You can’t just say “the keyboard is terrible” but then that you still like it overall -- more detail needed!
Yeah, in particular it looks like the complaint was about having to hit the center of the keys exactly, which seems quite bad.
I’ll learn a weird layout for a netbook, some compromise is expected to get the small size (side note: I think “unfamiliar layout” issues are over-represented in reviews because they usually describe the reviewer’s experience when they are first getting used to the device, I get used to a layout in the medium term anyway and then it isn’t really a problem anymore (side side note: we should separate out the concepts of unfamiliar and bad layouts, they are different things, the former is overcome over time, the latter gives you repetitive stain injuries over time)).
Having the nail the keys in the middle, though, is just a sign of poor keyboard design. That probably won’t be overcome, if anything it is a sign of bad build quality and will probably get worse over time.