Reddit reviews Acer Aspire One Cloudbook, 14-Inch HD, 64GB, Windows 10, Gray (AO1-431-C7F9) includes Office 365 Personal – 1 year

This is 14 inches, but it has 12 hour battery life. It's Windows, but you can wipe it and install the Linux distro of your choice.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B014YN6YZ8/

Don't leave school documents on any computer that can break or be stolen. Upload everything to a private cloud storage site like google docs or google drive with a separate backup vault. Only copies should be on your local computer. Professors aren't very lenient with excuses like those for files that go missing. It's the student's responsibility to have multiple backups of assignments and work.

The question isn't whether to get a laptop or not. The question is whether to buy an expensive gaming laptop instead of gaming desktop, or to get an inexpensive laptop at a good value while having a much better gaming desktop computer. So I'm not arguing against getting a laptop or tablet. I suggest getting a small, thin, laptop with very long battery life as a priority, with no extra expense for gaming capability, and then use the desktop for anything requiring a powerful CPU or GPU. It's a matter of getting the most for your money. Now if a student had an unlimited budget, then sure, an expensive gaming laptop and a top-of the line desktop with overclock Skylake i7-6700K + GTX 1080 would be fine.

Long battery life to last through a full day of classes is really useful because you won't have to carry around the power dongle and cables.

Here's an example: Acer Cloudbook for $219, delivered.

That model of laptop is trash anyways.


Source: Previous owner of this exact model