Fully-functioning cardboard laptop

Spread all over this website are awe-inspiring, beautiful builds. People make 3D printed computers, or cases from brass, wood, and other great materials. We take high-performance computers and rebuild them into something even better.

But sometimes--just sometimes--it can be just as fun to build something stupid. I built everything with cardboard as a kid, and I still use it for some prototypes, as it's such a workable material. But why keep it just as a prototype material? 🤣 

Enter the cardboard laptop, the second fully-functioning cardboard laptop in existence (as far as I know). It runs Fedora Linux, with a KDE Plasma desktop environment. 

The internal components come from an HP ProBook 650 G1, which is a modern computer by almost no one's standards. Surprisingly, it actually runs reasonably fast once I installed Linux--fast enough for it to be quite usable, even for internet tasks. I got it for $20, and turned it from the picture you see above to this:

And after about a month's work (crazy it took so long, but there were reasons), it became this:

I ended up adding a cardboard strap to the back, because this thing is closer in size to a slim briefcase than a laptop. But I think, for what it is, it turned out pretty well! 🤣 

See the full build video here (no, I'm not doing this for YouTube views. This was a project I genuinely wanted to share and thought was pretty funny. The link is here for those who want to see more about it):