I am a 39 year old single man living near Blackpool in England.  I desire to buy a laptop to run Linux or perhaps FreeBSD.  I want to ensure the laptop is clearly fully compatible with a Linux distro before buying.
 
I want to run gcc, clang, make, subversion, nano, bash and other tools for the purpose of learning C programming.  I also want to browse the Web, visiting websites such as Facebook, Twitter and so on.  My favourite distro is Ubuntu, with an honourable mention to Debian.
 
It is really important to me that the keyboard is suitable for programming.  The screen must be good for programming.  It must be comfortable to balance on my lap while I'm lying on my back with my knees bent.  I think the optimum screen size is 13 or 15 inches.
 
I have no need for a lot of storage.  I don't desire to play DVDs on this thing.  I'm not going to play the latest games on it, but I would like to do OpenGL programming and have the desktop environment feel snappy.  It will be connected to the Internet via Wifi only.  I don't see the need to spend over a thousand pounds on this machine.
 

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