I've owned heaps of laptops, probably over 20 if I sat down and wrote a list, and almost all of them have been 2nd hand. In fact I've only ever bought a couple of laptops new and, until this one, the Starlabs Mini Lite MkIII, I've never bought bought a new laptop with factory installed Linux. In fact Starlabs offered a list of Linux distributions that could be preinstalled. I've used lots of different distributions over the years but I've become a bit lazy with them and tend to just stick to Ubuntu. I know, it's a bit bloated, but I like the interface and stuff seems to just work for me.
So any company that's creating Linux laptops gets some attention from me but what really made me want to own one and support Starlabs is that they are pretty great in terms of repair and hacker friendliness. So for a start, opening the Star Lite doesn't void the one year warranty. HELL YEAH. Secondly they have made a point of making their products simple to work on and the only tool you need is a Phillips screwdriver. I love this stuff, it's important in terms of actually owning the things you own and it's important in terms of keeping hardware alive longer.
So to the Star Lite MKIII. It's great! It's small and super thin and has an 11" screen. I've always lent towards portables/UMPC and road warriors rather than larger desktop replacements so it's perfect for me. Specs wise, it's interesting, with a Pentium Silver N5000 processor that on paper doesn't look like the faster thing ever but paired with fast RAM and a blazingly fast star drive SSD, so far this machine absolutely zips along!
It's all aluminium chassis wise and super lightweight, yep it's definitely one of those laptops that falls into the "I'm checking my bag twice to see i it's actually in there". The keyboard is good, which I think as my daily driver for years has been an old Thinkpad X220 with arguably one of the best ever keyboards, is fine praise. The keys have a nice stroke length and the keyboard is back lit (with a couple of adjustable brightness levels) which is a feature I've wanted on a daily driver laptop for a while. The matt screen is also worthy of mention, it's a total joy! I find it much less fatiguing on the eyes than other screens.
So coming from a background of usually installing Linux on machines it's nice that seemingly everything works well on the Star Lite. I know that might sound odd, but I've usually had something on a Linux'd machine I've needed to sort. A small script to stop Bluetooth turning on at boot or perhaps the hardware keys for screen brightness have needed solving etc. So far on the Star Lite, none of these things apply.
In use I've mainly hammered it with browser tabs, multiple terminals and a fair bit of Libre Office Writer which I do most of my writing in. I've also been playing with the FreeCAD app image on it and it's actually a very good experience and certainly capable of handling most of my CAD needs. I imagine, if you are designing hugely complex geometries and assemblies this may change, but for my needs most of the time it's perfect. Battery life is good, not sure I'm getting the stated 7 hours, but certainly 6 hours which will do me. All power related stuff, hibernation, wake from sleep, are all working as they should as well.
So rounding out this... yep, they get my vote! At £400 this is a cracking little machine and if you want a laptop that replaces the windows key with a "super key" you should buy one today!
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