Coding class. Computers. Part 2.

posted in My Coding Class on by

Earlier I intended to purchase Raspberry Pi 400 and displays, but waiting for the stock I tried another solutions.

Chromebook

I bought a Chromebook for 300 €, here’s what pros and cons I found.

Pros

  • Very low price.
  • Run any Android application.
  • Have an OS ready to work.

Cons

  • It does’t have functional buttons (F1-F12).
  • Very limited support of Linux distrubutives.
  • It requires the internet connection.

I decided to try something else.

Lenova Ideapad 3

It cost me 329 €. Slightly more that Chromebook. It doesn’t have OS.

The specs

  • 15.6" 1080, IPS
  • 8 GB RAM
  • CPU 1.1 MHz Celeron, 2 cores
  • SSD 256 GB

The first thing I did is I installed Elementary OS on it. I like that OS, it’s well developed and polished, so the quality is comparable to Mac OS. If you choose Linux for you computer, it’d be a very good choice.

After installing the OS, everything was working immediately. The keyboard, mouse, sounds, camera, bluetooth, and WiFi. I didn’t have to install any drivers. That’s the Linux we deserve.

Next I tried is to running Scratch. Elementary OS compatible with Flatpak, so I just installed from Flatpak Hub. Without any issues it started up. Works much faster and smoothly than on our Raspberry Pi 400. Just found one issue with Text-to-Speech block. I suppose it’s because Flatpack package contains older Scratch version 3.18. I planned to investigate that deeper later.

Also, I tried some other apps

  • PyCharm works, but I found some performance issues.
  • VS Code works smoothly.
  • GIMP works good.
  • Blender works too.

I was so satisfied, so I canceled the order on Raspberry, and ordered four more laptops.