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Ultralight Convertibles Approaching Desktop Performance
MojoKid writes Laptops with fully articulating hinges are starting to show up from more vendors than just Lenovo, though the company certainly got some mileage out of their Yoga brand of machines. Now it appears HP is getting in on the action as well, with the new HP Spectre X360 that's powered by Intel's new Core i5-5200U Broadwell-based processor with integrated Intel HD 5500 series graphics, along with 8GB of DDR3-1600 memory, a 256GB Solid State Drive (a Samsung M.2 PCIe SSD), 802.11ac WiFi, and a 13.3" Full HD (1920x1080) multi-touch screen. The Spectre X360 has a geared and spring-assisted hinges. The hinges swing open easily, and then offer more resistance as the screen is moved into an upright position, or swung around into tent, stand, or tablet modes. What's also interesting about this new breed of convertibles, beyond just its ability to contort into tablet mode and various other angles, is that performance for these ultralight platforms is scaling up nicely, with faster, low-power processors and M.2 PCIe Solid State Drives offering up a very responsive experience and under 10 second boot times. It has gotten to the point that 3 pound and under notebooks feel every bit as nimble as desktop machines, at least for mainstream productivity and media consumption usage models.
You need to go into the BIOS and disable secure boot.
You don't even need to do that if you pick your linux version properly. I just finished installing Sabayon/Linux on my Lenovo U430p laptop after I decided I was going to reformat it anyway because of the recent Superfish fiasco. We've had a working secure boot shim for over 2 years now. No need to disable secure boot. Red Hat and Ubuntu both support it as well if you're looking for something a little more mainstream. At worst you may need to register a key with the BIOS (I did for Sabayon), but I'm not sure you even need to do that with Red Hat since their shim is actually signed by MS.