

Ask HN: The state of non-mac laptops? - CJefferson

I am considering a new laptop, to replace my ageing MacBook, and would like to move to Linux.<p>Does anyone have any recommendations for quality developer machines? I am suprised in particular it seems hard to get a machine with a small (up to 64GB?) SSD and also tradition HD. I would like an SSD, but can't imagine living in 128GB of space (which seems where SSDs start to get unreasonably priced).
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quangv
I'm currently using a Lenovo Thinkpad L512, running Linux-Mint.

There's some little bugs, not as refine as a MacBook, but it has a trackpoint!

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Any higher-end thinkpads you'd still be in good shape. My research (a month
ago) lead me to these models:

-Lenovo Thinkpad

-Dell Latitude or Precision

-HP EliteBook

-Toshiba Tecra

why these models? You'll notice that the higher end laptops that aren't Macs
have trackpoints... I think I'm bias btw...

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polyfractal
It's true, once you go trackpoint you can never go back...

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corydominguez
Trackpoints are awesome simply because the state of non mac touch pads is so
terrible.

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khyryk
I posit that their awesomeness is independent of any touch pad.

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ImprovedSilence
I was in the market for a laptop this fall. I looked at the system 76 ones
pretty heavily: <http://www.system76.com/> They seem to be pretty good, come
with Ubuntu, are very customizable, and one option is the hybrid harddrive,
both ssd and HD.

Disclaimer, I went with the Macbook Air. Worth every penny if you ask me.
Comes with tons of developer tools (yeah yeah, gotta get their developer app)
Except that I've been jaded by Mac Ports in some cases, but I guess I should
try fink or the likes. But that's more the tools like Ocatve and gimp I've had
trouble with, not the predominant developer tools.

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bartonfink
As someone who's been looking at system76 for a while, what made you pull the
Apple trigger?

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ImprovedSilence
Nicer, more polished complete package. The MBA is small, thus more portable,
battery lasts long (just look at the brick of an adapter to the system76
laptops, those batteries suck power). Plus Imma sucker for shiny things, and
that backlit keyboard is NICE.

My desktop runs Ubuntu, and I don't have any other of Apple's products (sans
an iPod, that I haven't synced in over 2 years...) I was basically looking for
something Unix based, that is rock solid.

People say Macs are underpowered for their price, but I really didn't see
anything from the PC side that could compete with the Air's complete package.
(fromfactor, hardware integeration, 10second boot time.) Plus I really didn't
want a windows machine, and go through the painstaking process of making sure
Ubuntu supports all its hardware, so I wanted something with a pre-loaded OS I
was going to use (my decision came down to system76, or Apple). Plus when you
get xTools, or whatever Apples dev suite is, you get more pre-packaged
developer tools than you do on Ubuntu, (all the python, perl, php, c, Ruby,
etc you could want) Also, being completely new to Mac, I have zero gripes with
Lion, unlike lots of other people, I love the way they use gestures, I love
the fullscreen views (especially for browsing in chrome), I rely on several
desktops, and I find myself using the launchpad often for applications that
don't run in the terminal.

The only thing I regret is not getting the 256 GB SSD for an extra $400...

[edit]: I realize the original question about non-mac laptops. What I liked
about system76 was it came pre-packaged with a Linux distro, so I wasn't going
to have to fuss about with hardware integration. Their website is clean, easy
to navigate and understand options, unlike every PC company out there (just
looking at Dells and Lenovos websites gave me headaches and I found it
impossible to sort through the rubbish to find any computer I would like.) I
also emailed support at system76 when I had a question, I got back a very
helpful and friendly answer, and they even invited me to stop by their shop if
I was in Colorado. I'll defiately look at them when I in the market for a
power desktop next.

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revorad
Plug: I'm working on this exact problem. Are you based in the US? I only have
UK laptops at the moment, and the data needs updating, but have a look at
<http://giniji.com>. Sign up to get notified when I add more laptops -
<http://giniji.com/newsletter>

Meanwhile, I can help you find a laptop manually. What's your budget and size
preference? Do you have any other specific requirements?

Would you be interested in buying a pre-installed Linux laptop?

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CJefferson
Your site is quite interesting, and I am in the UK. I find it quite useful.

On an iPad 1, I found editing the 'lower' value for the price seemed to drive
the iPad browser mad, making it slow and then crash.

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revorad
Hey, thanks for trying it out. I'm glad you like it.

The slider acts a bit funny on touch devices, so yeah I need to fix that. For
now, you can get around that by editing the price fields directly by typing
into them.

I'm updating the laptops dataset now, so if you check back on Monday, it will
have many more new options. If you don't mind, I'd like to get a bit more
feedback from you. Please email me at hrishi@giniji.com or let me know your
email.

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blcArmadillo
Like other's I'd definitely recommend a Thinkpad. I've had my current Thinkpad
(an x61) for almost four years now. I'm in college ATM so as you can imagine
it gets dragged around everywhere. Haven't had any issues with it other than
having to replace the battery but that's standard. I'd recommend staying away
from the Thinkpad Edge though; not a huge fan of them personally.

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manuscreationis
I would also like to know this.

Sadly, the only advice I have is: Anything but Lenovo.

I've had a few over the years from different jobs, and they typically always
seem to have exceptionally poor performance.

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revorad
I'm surprised to hear about your bad experience with Lenovo. Most people seem
to really like them. What went wrong for you?

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manuscreationis
Replying to both questions about my bad experiences:

One of my first work laptops was a handed-down lenovo, so that may or may not
have been lenovos fault... However the person doing the handing down was
certain not buying a new lenovo. It performed ok, but never anything stellar.

It had a lot of weird quirks - it would suddenly flip it's CapsLock state, so
i'd need to turn it on to shut it off. It would stay like that till I
rebooted.

Eventually, the red button died... but it didn't just die, it forcibly dragged
my mouse to the bottom of the screen. I had to fight with the thing to find
the option to disable the button in the control panel before I could regain
control of the computer. Plugging in an external mouse didn't help, the red
button overrode all mouse commands.

Finally ,the thing all but gave out on me. I got a 2nd hand me down laptop, a
Dell, before finally getting a real PC to work from.

That was my old job...

This current job, I have a T410, and I hate the thing. Everyone here has the
same laptop (one guy has a slightly better model, but he hates his as well).
They lock up, they have poor performance, they come with worthless bloatware,
things fail for no reason... it goes on and on. Here are some examples:

Performance: It came with 4GBs of RAM. My old Dell had 4GBs, and I could keep
2-3 Visual Studios open at a time, no problem. This thing struggled to keep a
single instance open. Keeping 2 open, damn near unusable. It would routinely
take me 40-50 seconds to switch applications around (this is not an
exaggeration. It would lock up and become unresponsive for a number of
reasons, mainly switching between applications). For a developer, this is
killer.

Sometimes while typing, the USB port my keyboard is attached to will die.
Sometimes redocking fixes this. Sometimes I need to reboot.

Same thing for my bluetooth mouse. Sometimes I can pull the nub out and re-
insert it and fix the problem, other times I have to reboot. Unlike the
keyboard, the bluetooth nub stays with the laptop itself, so it isn't just
that the dock has issues (Although it could... it was made by Lenovo)

Speaking of undocking, sometimes the screen goes dark, and never comes back.
Other times, when I redock it, it's forgotten the video settings.
Occasionally, it will only partially forget them, and turn on one of the 2
external monitors. I'd say I need to fix the monitor setup atleast 2-3 times
per week.

Sometimes when it goes to sleep, it can't wake up.

When it isn't docked, and I'm using the built in screen, the color pallet gets
off-kilter, and there is massive dithering over wide portions of the screen.
Whole swaths of things get dithered, with green and red dots filling in the
blanks. The severity of this seems to change day to day - sometimes it's fine,
sometimes it's the entire screen, sometimes it's just a portion...

This isn't just my issue, mind you - Every single person in our team has these
laptops, and experiences these issues.

ThinkPads used to be great, when IBM owned the brand. They were rock solid
tanks.

Lenovo destroyed the name and the quality.

If I never use another Lenovo for as long as I live, I could die a happy man

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polyfractal
Wow, that's pretty crazy. Honestly, of the problems you mentioned I've only
encountered the "trackpoint drift", on my old T60. It tended to happen because
the rubber trackpoint would get stuck, not because of the hardware itself.
Could be different in your case.

The Lenovo bloatware isn't too horrible in my opinion, are you sure there
wasn't extra (non-Lenovo) crap loaded? I routinely run two VS instances on my
Edge 420 and it only has an i5 & 4Gb memory

Maybe the T410 is just a shitty model. Sorry you had such a bad experience
with Lenovo, I can totally understand why you'd never want to try them again
=(

