Xmonad on windows laptop

Posted by Kevin L. on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Kevin L.
Published on 2011-10-16T19:04:19Z Indexed on 2012/03/21 11:33 UTC
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laptop

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xmonad

I'm a Linux developer in the market for a laptop. 90% of my time is spent in Emacs, the terminal, and Google Chrome, and I want to use them within the excellent Xmonad tiling windows manager. Given these constraints, I can only see two options:

Run Linux on a laptop
Run Windows on the laptop, and spend all of my time working within a Linux VM.

Years of experience suggest that the first option will take many frustrating hours and probably be suboptimal w.r.t. battery life, wifi, and fn keys like screen brightness or audio adjustment.

For the second option, what would be the ideal setup? I've had a lot of luck with Cooperative Linux on my Samsung NC-10 netbook (Windows XP), but I would have to setup the X11 server myself. What about using VirtualBox (which includes the guest VM's GUI)? Has anyone tried this?

Hardware-wise, I'm looking for something in the "Macbook Air killer" category; Samsung Series 9 laptop, Lenovo IdeaPad U300s, &c. (i.e., matte screen, 5h+ battery life, 3ish pound weight). Price is not a consideration; any suggestions?

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