Ask HN: Ultrabook for programming?
I recently bought the Xiaomi Mi Air 12.<p>tl;dr, it&#x27;s the best ultrabook&#x2F;notebook I&#x27;ve ever had and run Arch on it.<p>I was looking for a light notebook also for programming for a long, long time (and I wanted this time Linux because of tiling window managers like i3). I finally got this Chinese model and what can I say, inside it&#x27;s all Intel (Wifi, BT), Arch works flawlessly, touchpad is a glass trackpad and is for a non-Macbook just great, smooth and responsive and with Synaptics generic Linux driver you can really configure every tiny piece. I like the keyboard very much and the 176ppi screen is fantastic. It&#x27;s also fast for a passive cooled device (it has a Skylake m3), and I get with Arch and &#x27;powertop --autotune&#x27; easily 11 (!) hours surfing, sshing and coding. Only drawback it the 4GB RAM but it still works surprisingly well with the 4GB. And it has two SSD slots and one is even with the fast NVMe protocol. There&#x27;s also a 13 inch model with 8GB and an i5 but way less battery time and it&#x27;s slightly heavier (I always wanted a real ultrabook which also stays cool).<p>I got it directly from a Chinese shop for €450 in an xmas sale. I think now it&#x27;s around €530.<p>However, it was so hard to find a notebook in this space. I you want a really light but somewhat powerful notebook you look at the Thinkpad X1C which is in some countries priced ok but in many, especially Europe super expensive (as the X260). But the X1 is still a great piece of hardware and as light as the Xiaomi at 14&quot;. Then we have the Macbook which is light, powerful but super expensive and runs well with macOS and Windows but people have mixed experiences when running Linux on that device. I looked also at HP (not really bad but also not exciting, the last gen Envy 13 is ok though), Acer have some new light ones but they are expensive and ASUS has the light Zenbook series which is ok but not that cheap.<p>So considering that this was Xiaomi first gig in the notebook space they did it quite well.