[vittore]

I don't get it, just go on ebay (http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2050601.m5...) or amazon ( http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1/191-8083913-3793561...) and get yourself old motorolla atrix/bionic lapdock , it has hdmi + usb and basically would work as hdmi external screen + usb keyboard and usb mouse for any device that supports it.

UPDATE: well, apparently price jumped a lot, i got myself two of those 10 and 12 inches models for like 30 and 70 dollars 2 years ago.

but anyway, there is existing piece of technology from almost 5 years ago, just was a bit ahead of it's time. People used that with rasberry-pi for quite some time too (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-9l1rPNCgo)

[bydo]

You can get an entire functioning laptop for under $100 these days.

http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msusa/en_US/pdp/Acer-Asp...

It doesn't run Windows 10 very well, with only 2GB of RAM and 16GB of storage (neither of which are user-upgradeable), but is actually a surprisingly nice with a light Linux distro.

[viewer5]

Holy cow, I never knew that was a thing! Do you have one? I need a cheap laptop/tablet/something that runs well enough for PDFs with ~200 pages (for pen-and-paper RPGs) and that's about my only use case. My poor little lenovo T60 from 2007 is just not up to the task, even after I took Windows off and put on Mint.

[tracker1]

You should be able to find similar hardware in Chromebooks as well... though not sure about PDF usage, they've been great for my parents/grandparents. Many of them you can load a full linux distro on.

[oAlbe]

Take Mint off too and try with Lubuntu or Antergos, the latter with the XFCE Desktop Environment (or OpenBox, but I never tried this one personally).

[Animats]

That seems to be "out of stock" or "discontinued" from Microsoft, or $189 at Acer.

What PC World calls a "budget laptop" is from at $178 to $450.[1] There are lots of low-end tablets below $50, but add a keyboard and the price takes a big jump.

[1] http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2371334,00.asp

[lukifer]

I own one of these, and it's super-useful, but I still want a NexDock. The ports are awkwardly placed, requiring weird adapters (I had to shave off plastic to get both HDMI and USB to fit at the same time.) The USB port is also powered, and so tries to power the Pi, except at 500 mA, for some reason over-riding the 1A power input. And it has weird issues with not waking up if only the USB and not HDMI is attached.

The experience has been "good enough", but in my mind only justified the existence of a dedicated device for this purpose. It's incredibly useful to have a portable, self-powered screen+input that works with any arbitrary computer.