e-ink laptops suggestions?

[Geremia]

What are some good laptops with B&W e-ink displays, preferably that come without an OS pre-installed or with Linux?

[Quoth]

None.
It's an unworkable idea. Get one with a matt surface on the screen and turn the brightness down so the peak white is similar to a piece of paper in the local ambient light.

There are screens almost as good as eink. The eink is really only good for reading novels.

No wordprocessing software will paginate. Even pages smaller than the window scroll inexactly with page-up and page-down keys.

Only PDF viewers and ebook viewers will work nice on eink with paging.

[Geremia]

Laptops with e-ink displays exist (like Lenovo's ThinkBook, which has both an IPS display and, on the flip-side, a B&W e-ink touch display), but I'm wondering if there are any like System76 (no OS installed or Linux pre-installed).

[Geremia]

Originally Posted by Geremia

Lenovo's ThinkBook, which has both an IPS display and, on the flip-side, a B&W e-ink touch display

Actually, Lenovo's is a color e-ink…

Modos Paper Laptop is an open-hardware and open-source from Jan. 2022 with solely a B&W e-ink display:

[Quoth]

And they are useless except to read pdfs and ebooks.

They doing it for a niche market.

By "none" I meant none that are good (worth having). I know they exist and knew after getting my first eink reader they would be useless. I suspected it earlier.

[ChrisHistorian76]

Originally Posted by Geremia

What are some good laptops with B&W e-ink displays, preferably that come without an OS pre-installed or with Linux?

Do you want something truly 100% portable, or do you mostly use your current laptop in one location? I ask because if you don't want something 100% portable, there's the e-ink monitor from Dasung.

At $698 USD, their 13" e-ink monitor is absurdly expensive new, but it's much cheaper than the new Lenovo 13x Gen 4 SPE with e-ink that sells for $1,399 USD. You might even be able to fihd a used monitor.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by ChrisHistorian76

Do you want something truly 100% portable, or do you mostly use your current laptop in one location? I ask because if you don't want something 100% portable, there's the e-ink monitor from Dasung.

At $698 USD, their 13" e-ink monitor is absurdly expensive new, but it's much cheaper than the new Lenovo 13x Gen 4 SPE with e-ink that sells for $1,399 USD. You might even be able to fihd a used monitor.

It's also not very good except for ebooks and PDFs.

[rowe]

E-ink monitors are very good for email, document editing, reading docs, and coding. Which is a large part of how many people use their computers. They can eliminate eye strain for people who are really suffering using regular screens (this can be from many causes and it varies between individuals - reflection, PWM, refresh rate etc...).

E-ink monitors have massively improved this year with the release of colour options, and people figuring out how to optimise their OS e.g. switching off temporal dithering.

Still nowhere near good enough for fast moving things like video, so I use hotkeys to use my laptop screen for this kind of content.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by rowe

E-ink monitors are very good for email, document editing, reading docs, and coding. Which is a large part of how many people use their computers. They can eliminate eye strain for people who are really suffering using regular screens (this can be from many causes and it varies between individuals - reflection, PWM, refresh rate etc...).
.

No, they are not, unless paginated.

Also there are plenty of paper like desktop monitors that are flicker free, no reflection (which isn't an inherent eink thing) and give no eyestrain. They are from €150 to €350 depending on size and resolution.

You can buy rubbish shiny ones, or have the brightness too high.

The biggest advantages for eink are for reading mono novels on a portable dedicated ereader in ambient light. An eink desktop monitor is seriously inferior to a much cheaper 4K 23″ HDR flicker free screen that can be adjusted to be like coloured print on quality paper.

I do a lot of document editing and none of the programs are suitable for eink. They have no paginated mode like a PDF viewer or ebook viewer.

I'll stick to reading novels on eink. A desktop monitor is an affectation by someone that's never bought a decent monitor and adjusted it properly.

Even some 17″ and 19″ CRTs thirty years ago had flat non-glare flicker free screens.
My ACT Sirius 1 (Victor 9000 in USA) had long enough persistence green phosphor, a matt black nylon mesh bonded to CRT and nearly flat faceplate. That was 1981 and it was also 800 x 400 graphics, and 80x24 or 132 x 24 texts. The official IBM screen was text only, Mono TV white phosphor and very curved and shiny.

Because there are poor monitors is no reason to get an overpriced eInk monitor which has very limited application.

[rowe]

Mail, document editing, reading docs, and coding are all straightforward to scroll a whole page with a single interaction on almost any OS (I rarely have to manually scroll anything). The software on e-ink monitors is designed around them being used like this and it works well.

E-ink is a good solution for much more than novels now. The Paperlike experience is often much better than traditional monitors (even good, well setup ones) for people with eye strain problems.