Meson Linux 14" Ultrabook

I'm writing this review about 1 month after I bought it. Overall, the laptop is very good for its price. But of course, I faced several issues which took quite a bit of research to resolve, but I was finally able to put together something that works. I am running Arch Linux on it, the only distro I could find that worked reasonably well.The laptop came in a completely plain brown cardboard box, and the laptop itself has a total of 3 logos on it: an Intel sticker, Insyde when you boot it up, and the Ubuntu logo from the default installed OS. Not extremely important, but it's nice to not have corporate logos and ads shoved in my face when I first obtain the computerThe laptop is very easy to open. Simply unscrew the 10 or so screws on the bottom and pop it open and you have access to all the innards. It's easy to snap it back as well. Unfortunately, only the hard drive is swappable and the frame around the hard drive is a bit flimsy. But at least access is easy! Not many ultrabooks allow this sort of thing.This laptop comes with 3 USB ports, one of which is a USB 3 port, a HDMI port, an Ethernet port, an Audio output port, and a SD card reader. Product features didn't make this clear for some reason.Some of the hardware is a little difficult to work with Linux. Wireless card worked reasonably well with most distros, but the audio, camera, and trackpad will need some configuring to get them working. Arch Linux and its derivatives (Manjaro, Arch Bang, Antergos) will come with all the drivers necessary to make all these work at least.Here are some stuff I had trouble with over the last month, and how I resolved them:- Trackpad will be treated as a standard mouse and can't be configured because the OS doesn't detect drivers for it. It will also tick upward about once a second, which is very annoying. To fix, in /etc/default/grub, edit line GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT to include i8042.nomux=1. For example:GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quite splash resume=/dev/sda3 i8042.nomux=1"then run update-grub and reboot, and you should be able to configure the trackpad and all that.- Linux boots to a completely black screen. All the functions and keys work, but you can't see anything. I'm not sure what the configuration is that causes this, but sometimes KDE Plasma will just shut down the display. You can just avoid KDE, or perhaps you can figure out why KDE behaves this way.- If you want access to the BIOS menu, hold the Esc key when you see the Insyde logo on boot.If I think of more, I'll be sure to update this list.

Edit: I've had to revise my initial review after using this laptop for about a month. After just a month of moderate use, I have one dead pixel on the screen and three screws have randomly fallen out of the body of the laptop. I don't expect this laptop to last through the rest of the year, though as long as it can last for another few months it will have been worth it for me since I only need it for use during a coding bootcamp.Additionally, this laptop has very low performance, and it is starting to bother me a bit despite the fact that I only use it for web development/coding. The cursor frequently lags behind my typing and it takes 30-60 seconds to wake up when I open the screen.Original reivew: I bought this laptop mainly to use during a three-month coding bootcamp where I will be studying web development. I was a little nervous due to the extremely low price, but when it arrived I was very pleased with the appearance. It's very lightweight and thin and has a nice screen. It feels like if I ever dropped it it would probably break, and the keyboard could be more responsive, but for what I need, the price vs. durability trade-off is absolutely worth it.When I first booted it up, there was an issue with the touchpad where the mouse would slowly tick towards the top of the screen, as described in another review. However, doing an apt-get update and restarting fixed the problem for me as well.Additionally, the customer support I have received from Hadronization has been excellent. I couldn't figure out how to disable the touchpad while typing (I'm a complete beginner to linux), and they responded promptly and provided me with a bash script to fix the problem.

What can you expect from a sub $200 laptop? More than I expected! I was looking for a cheap laptop for web development. Nothing fancy or powerful, just text processing and a web server. My first impressions after using this laptop for a few hours are very good. What I was expecting was basically a cheap tablet with a keyboard attached. On opening the box (no-frills packaging) I was impressed with how it looked and felt. Decent build quality and visually pleasing. On turning it on I set up my account and got started with the first wave of updates. I was disappointed and annoyed at first by the mouse cursor. At 2 second ticks it would move up the screen about a half inch until it hit the top. This became annoying when I tried to click buttons or links as the cursor would usually move before I could hit the mouse button. After a final apt-get update and reboot that problem went away and I was quite relieved.I installed PHP5, Apache2 and MySQL and my favorite editor and got to business. Very pleased with the results! I actually like this system! And it's cheap enough that I don't fret over losing or damaging it. Big plus.The specs that were not in the description are on the processor. It's an Intel Celeron N2840 @ 2.16Hz x 2. With 2Gb RAM and a 500Gb drive this is a good light duty laptop. I would recommend it for use when horsepower is not needed and you just want to bang out emails or surf the web. An excellent option for traveling when you don't want to put your main system at risk. Ubuntu 15.04 is the cherry on the top. A definite thumbs up.

Works great for a $188 linux laptop. I had to reinstall Ubuntu 15.04 from scratch and was amazed that absolutely everything works immediately without tweaking or searching for drivers. If one takes care to open few applications or tabs in a browser then the responsiveness of this machine is fine.I have not experienced the twitching track pad issue.