Free University & 1k$ laptop? No way

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If you follow this blog, may be you can notice that al the courses i’ve listed in my online cs degree are totally free, from start to finish, and you can get a really good background in cs without spending a dollar, using only an inernet connection and a pc.

Well, truly speaking, the pc part is awkard with this “strategy”. If you don’t have any money, you NEED to save every pence also in your coding machine.
So, what’s the deal, how can you code like a pro without spending money on your laptop? The solution may seem hard, but really it isn’t. In this 2 years i’ve found many ways to be a cheap good programmer, and i’ll list all of’em here.

 Online IDE

 If you can afford a chinese tablet (for the portabilty) or even a 25 dollars pc like a raspberry pi, with only a keyboard and a mouse you can code easily, free and everywhere. Sure, you can’t code work with gargantuan ammount of data (like in algorithm design and analysis done by stanford, at least i’m not sure about it), but probably for the code snipplest and many other code courses this can be a really good solution to your problems. Sites like c9.io, koding, codeverywhere and codenvy are the best imho. Try’em!

 Chromebooks (and you to setup a really good one)

What i’ve done to solve this problem is buy a chromebook. Chromebooks are netbooks built by many factories like acer, toshiba, asus, lenovo (and even google himself). I know what you are thinking: “why should I buy a netbook if what I need is to code? it’s pointless, you dump freak”. You, my friend, may be right, but in this case, you’re wrong. A chromebook can be a “powerfull” linux machine, using chroots (as i’m doing right now!) and setting ups lightweight linux environments like LKDE or XFCE, and they work really well. My laptop right now is a shitty 2gb ram brashwell lenovo chromebook with xfce 16.06, which I use to code (and it’s not really great). But it costed me less than 140 bucks. Not bad, right?  An acer cb3 isn’t really costfull and starring 4gb RAM and a 32gb SSD. Here is also how to setup a good chroot
  • 1. Download crouton (downloadable on the github page https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton )
  • 2. Switch to developer mode
  • 3. Open terminal, shell, cd into Downloads and type sudo sh crouton -r xenial -t xfce4 (or something like that) and after the install, enter using sudo startxfce4 (if u have a better computer now, u can use (may be) the elementary freya desktop, foundable here https://github.com/hypersymmetry/crouton and use the instructions here https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton/pull/2973 but imho xfce4 in beautiful and stable)
  • 4. In the desktop environnement download the ubuntukylin (sudo apt-get install ubuntukylin-theme) theme or the numix theme (sudo add-apt-repository ppa:numix/ppa then sudo apt-get update and then sudo apt-get install numix-gtk-theme)
  • 5. Intall macubuntu/dockie (just follow the installation guide here https://sourceforge.net/p/macbuntu/discussion/1205032/thread/43a67eb4/ or use tar xvf on the tar.gz file and simply run ./install.sh)
  • 6. Toggle off the shadow of the dock window going into settings->windows manager tweaks -> compositor/composition -> unshow shadows
  • 7. Install all the softwares u need
  • 8. Set the top bar as u want
  • 9. Use this awesome wallpaper as desktop ( https://wallpaperscraft.com/image/switzerland_alps_mountains_night_beautiful_landscape_99817_2560x1440.jpg )
  • 10. ????
  • 11. profit

 Superbook and powerfull phone bundle

That’s is the next thing I really want to try. The superbook is a kickstarter project (and now a reality you can order online here https://www.sentio.com/preorder) which let your smartphone be a laptop. The superbook in fact is only a screen and a keyboard, and uses the specs of your phone to run programs. Luckily, right now phone are more powerfull than 2008 pcs, which isnt’ bad. You can by a chinese great specs phone (like a xiaomi, doggee, honor, exc…) and use a 3gb RAM phone to code, which is probably a really more powerfull solution then my current laptop. At the cost of nearly 300$ you can by a new phone AND a new laptop! Also, the superbooks offers a really good battery life, and good full HD screen and it looks gorgeous!!

 A lucky sale on amazon/ebay/somesite.com
Maybe you’re lucky, and you can find a great offer on an online site and buy a nice laptop from here (I sincerely prefer an “empty one” without an OS, so you can install linux instead of something else). Good for you (needs a luck S.P.E.C.I.A.L. of 8)
Rupees? Maybe?
An interesting option is buying a laptop from India, but i’m not entirely sure on how much is the cost reduction due to the rupee-dollar change. You can try it, may be it’s your lucky day

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