I’m not sure if I’m trying to talk myself into or talk myself out of this stupid idea. Right now I have two computers, an Asus UX305 and a HP Chromebook 13 G1. The Asus UX305 has been my main driver for the last several years. Over all it’s a pretty good computer, 13.3″ full hd with a fanless processor 4GB of RAM, and a 128GB SSD. Has a decent battery life and a nice keyboard layout. My ideal daily driver would be 14″ 1440p, 8GB RAM, 256GB SDD, and USB-C charging. Right now the Thinkpad Carbon X1 series seems to be ideal replacement, but those computers are stupidly expensive.

The HP Chromebook 13 G1 is a computer that I bought as a replacement. It has a 13.3″ 4k screen, fanless, usb-c charging, and 32GB of onboard storage. My thinking was that I could get around the short comings of the hardware, but after trying, there are too many flaws. The main flaw is track pad. It’s tiny and over all pretty terrible. It doesn’t feel anywhere as fluid as the Asus track pad. The keyboard doesn’t stack up, and while the keys have a decent click, the Chromebook keyboard leaves out a lot of common keys like delete, page up, page down, home and end, which I use a lot. The computer will always force suspend mode when closed, there isn’t a driver for the onboard audio, and 32GB of onboard storage fill up stupidly fast.

I figured I’d go back to the drawing board. Effectively I want two computers. One computer would basically be a windows computer. I don’t use Windows every often, but there are a few occasions when it comes in handy. Specifically Daemon tools and really information from disks is a life saver. And I don’t like running Wine on Linux. If I need to do anything on Windows I prefer to have a network drive where I can drag and drop files to have something done on Windows and then copy back to Linux directly.

My thinking was to have an X220 computer and an X240 computer. The X220 would be a simple Windows computer to run stuff on occasionally and the X240 would my main driver with Debian Gnome. Either that or get a e495 and use that as my main driver and convert my current Asus into a windows computer. Though my issue is that the e495 seems pretty expensive for a minor upgrade. It has 8GB of memory, 256GB of SDD, and USB-c for charging. But basically without the 1440p screen it seems like an expensive mid-step for a year or two before I replace it again.

Effectively for my uses, the X240 with a 1080p fills the same roll as the e495 for a fraction of the price. Originally I was thinking an X220 and an X240, but I’m actually tempted to go for 2x X240’s to have one with Windows 10 and the other with Debian/Gnome. That means that I can effectively have the same power connector and have one that uses windows and one that uses Linux and share the same hardware experience between them.