I had a system nearly like what the author describes after the internal SSD drive on my first generation Acer Aspire One died.  There didn&#x27;t seem to be an easy way to replace the drive with a generic SATA SSD (at least none that I was aware of), and a replacement drive was like $80.  This is for a $200 netbook, and it wasn&#x27;t a very good SSD to begin with.  So I put Knoppix on a USB stick and basically used that.  Since all my stuff is either on my personal server or in the cloud anyway, it was a workable solution.  In my case it worked reasonably well, and if I went though the trouble of identifying or putting together a bootable Linux distro with a desktop I really liked I could probably live with something like that as a permanent solution.<p>I&#x27;m not nearly as privacy conscious or paranoid as the author, so I&#x27;m satisfied with the convenience of a stateful laptop.  I don&#x27;t even have a screen lock when it wakes from sleep.  If you want to use a stateless machine like the author describes, you&#x27;re going to need a personal server or a cloud provider you really trust to keep your stuff.<p>Edit: ge0rg had already posted link to non-PDF version.