Lenovo flex 14

if ur not gonna be gaming, id really recommend any of the surface products. they're pretty good and its really nice to take notes on provided u get the pen

Keys are really important, youre gonna be typing thousands of words on this thing, try and test the keyboard out before you buy. Having to put up with a keyboard you hate for years is insufferable.

if you're just doing notes, essays, papers, and a little coding you can go much lower than 1000 canada bucks. in my experience with surfaces the biggest drawback is the keyboard, the detachable keyboard thing sucks. if you don't end up going with a touch screen there are loads of good used laptops (thinkpads or similar specs/build quality) that are far below your budget and are nothing to scoff at.

1000 bucks for a college laptop is extremely wasteful

go the your local used electronics shop and drop 200 bucks on a business class laptop with a removal battery so you can hot swap them if you run out of juice

Are there good touch screen laptops for 200$ ? I haven't seen any

if you're gonna b coding make sure it supports linux... there are laptops out there that make installing linux really hard. In school I liked to dual boot with windows for video gaming and linux for programming

13 inch surface w/ student discount

Wouldn't installing VirtualBox/VMWare and running a Linux distro on that suffice?

buy a t440

if ur 100% not playing games on it id still just get a macbook because its way way way less work

normally id agree cause if u have a grand to spend on a laptop no reason not to buy a macbook really but he wants touchscreen

i've never tried. sounds slow though

ooh good idea. didn't realize macbooks were that cheap

tf2 runs really well on linux too if thats the only game you play

i recently got the baseline surface pro 6 for school but i noticed that whenever i would be running firefox or chrome, it would take up roughly 75% of my memory. i also am taking a ml course in python and mainly used wsl to host my programming environment, which would put my ram constantly around 90% usage. having all of this stuff open and running ml programs did take a toll and i noticed a drop in performance. i didn't mind it at first but over time it started to get annoying. i talked with a cousin about my issue and he recommended that i try looking into a installing linux since it is overall a lighter operating system.

i took his advice and have been running ubuntu 19.10 on my surface pro for the past 3 weeks. i installed a custom linux kernel that allows the touch screen, the pen, and the battery indicator to word as intended. i havent fully tested the pen yet but so far my experience has been solid drawing and should be good for notetaking. my overall experience has been I am able to have countless tabs open and run programs without it eating more than 60% of my memory. but linux does have a bit of a learning curve when it comes to installing and setting up certain programs. thankfully ubuntu does make it easier compared to other distros. i havent tried playing tf2 on it yet but i imagine it won't have any input lag compared to windows.

if you like and know how to use the macos/linux command line and would be fine with maybe voiding your warranty, i recommend you buy a baseline surface pro 7 and install a linux distro on it like ubuntu(since it has good documentation and is easy to use) if you are willing to spend extra money for all features of the device, a good development environment, and not kill your ram. sadly i am not aware of any other solid semi cheap laptops (besides buying secondhand) with touch screens and pens. once you set up your os, install this linux kernel that will get all the features you want on a surface pro to work. ultimately wanting a device with a good touch screen and pen does come at a premium and if you are willing to spend the extra buck, go for it.

tldr: i installed linux on my surface pro and it suits developing and drawing needs and recommend trying it out.
hope this helps, and if you decide to go down this path, i would be happy to help you :)

if you’re an autist with lots of time linux is hella fun to configure and use

There is nothing more painful than writing code inside a virtual machine.

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Yeah I imagine compilation times would be atrociously long and interpreted language performance would be abysmal