That sucks, I was hoping to hear how you liked the EZBook. I still want to get one at some point myself, although I will try not to as I have far too much already. I admit I do have issues with wanting to try almost all hardware that has a good (on paper, at least) lcd, the LCD is literally the most important feature when I'm buying a laptop.

Just on a quick look, GeekBuying.com has a decent price on the EZBook 3. I have never heard of that site, never used that site, have no idea if they ship to your country, if there'd be major VAT issues, or if they're even a trustworthy site. Just looked at a quick search for prices on that laptop. Might be worth looking into, maybe not.

If you were located in the US, I'd say you should just buy my Aspire that I've had for sale for like 4 months now!!

they allow me to browse by warehouse, which is pretty cool.
i could not find the jumper ezbook 3 pro though, only the 3X which is very similar.
from china though.
but thanks for the tip.
i'm not in a hurry with the laptop ordering, and i'm not attached to that particular model/manufacturer.

is that this one:
???
sorry but i got my mind set on a smaller size (screen and bezel) for mobility.
thickness is of minor importance.

Congratulations, you are 3USD (or maybe 6USD) richer now ;p
Yes, pretty ridiculous indeed, including the HDMI adapter matter...

No biggie, even if you DID want it, shipping to you would make it prohibitively expensive.

no, i'm not.
they are not putting that on my bank account, just on my gearbest account.
and the only way of using this credit is ordering something from gearbest, and i'm certainly never going to do that again.

i got another answer to my last demand.
note how it doesn't seem to relate to the topic at hand and probably just uses some preselected phrases:

Ohhh OK, I read too quickly...
Compensation for a next purchase is even more a shame!

I got a used thinkpad x250 a few days ago.
Bargained down to 200€. I am a happy camper. It ticks all the boxes from my OP - small enough, all intel, a nice matte IPS display, battery life seems good enough (had it on standby - not hibernation! - since wednesday).
It can hardware-decode HEVC (I'm not getting hung up on one particular codec, it's just my yardstick for GPU capabilities) - although it's a borderline case and I had to do some research to decide whether this CPU supports it or not - apparently "Clear Video" is the keyword.
And the connectivity! Ethernet plug, WiFi and a working WWAN modem, i.e. a SIM-card slot for mobile data!

I installed system76's Pop_OS just to get going. Everything works. But I cannot use GNOME, so let the bikeshedding commence:
What distro should I use on this?

My biggest concern is power management and all sorts of laptop-specific things.
I am undereducated in that department and do not trust myself to set that up manually.
I wonder which distro is very good with these things.
Distrowatch does not have a "Laptop" distribution category (only "Netbook", but that's a very different story).

Meanwhile I am also getting aquainted with the thinkwiki.

It's a bit silly to mention this now, but the only real hardware recommendations I can generally give is Intel graphics and SSD. Intel graphics works well with GNU/Linux, and SSD makes a ton of difference generally.

Personally I also like a lightweight laptop with good battery and minimal fan noise etc. Good materials also matter IMO.

^ I have the hardware.

FWIW, I am currently using bunsenlabs on it. I am used to the openbox/tint2 combination and it works well on the smaller laptop screen.
Technically, it also works well so far.
The fingerprint reader was tricky to set up, I have no idea why it just started working after a couple of reboots... but it does. Login & elevated privileges via fingerprint, how cool is that!

But we still have to see about battery life. I am currently deliberately leaving the laptop on standby. Last full charge was sunday, early afternoon (my timezone).

I read a little on the page. Anyways. Fingerprinter readers are sketchy, even full print size ones. I think the small ones delivered with some computers nowadays are not exactly very high quality and that reading has a bigger error margin than those of a full print size, which also have error margins. I know from experience that those also fails.

I guess it's purely a physical matter, and the reads have to match the first read (pretty exact), which is not always easy to do.

Glad to read you've found what you were looking for!
I hope you will be luckier than me with my ThinkPad X390 (https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPa...on/m-p/4565133). It's a shame...

^ That is sad.
And no removable battery...

But I'm sure you'll get it fixed one way or another, esp. if it's under warranty: Lenovo have a reputation to lose. Make them work for it!

May I ask what Linux you're running there, and how does Linux fare on it (when it works), esp. wrt battery life?

Do you have IRS (Intel Rapid Start) working? How is the SSD partitioned?

Don't I recall that you're a Slackware fan? If I'm remembering correctly, why not run -current?

Yes probably, warranty is on because I bought the laptop only 5 months ago, but it means that I'll have to let my laptop go to Lenovo after-sales service and not be able to use it meanwhile...
More, I don't have the feeling this is something that can be repaired once and for all. Some users complain that the laptop is not functional some time after getting it back once again. If I have quite understood, there seems to be an issue with a connector on an electronic component. Nothing too bad (a kind of faulty contact), but it's enough to make it not work.
In other words, I can't be 100% sure, everything will be definitely all right after I get my laptop back from after-sales service and I can't send it to Lenovo after each occurrence. However, if I decide to do this little fix by myself, I'm not sure I won't void the warranty...

NB: according to https://download.lenovo.com/pccbbs/m...390_hmm_en.pdf, I think I should not void the warranty just by opening the back cover. There should be some CRU (Customer Replaceable Unit) accessible only by opening the laptop...

I've been running Debian 9 stable (Stretch) for some months. I upgraded to Debian 10 (Buster) last week (really simple/straightforward as long as you don't have too many 3rd party softwares installed with their own repositories).
No really bad OS issue so far. Only wifi and trackpad were trickier to be fully recognized otherwise everything has been working out of the box.
X390 is kinda powerful (Intel core i7, SSD, 16Go RAM) so I'm delighted.
Battery life is OK. I think the latter lasts at least 3 hours (lots of browser tabs, multiple running GUI applications...) but you can probably hold ~7hours if resources are not heavy used.

I'm not aware of IRS so I can't tell you.
Partition scheme is the following:

• original Windows partition (dual boot)
• /boot
• /
• /var (I'm not sure)
• /home