
Thanks Mr. Jobs, But it Seems I Can Use a Linux Laptop Now - gpapilion
http://blog.hypergeometric.com/2012/09/20/thanks-mr-jobs-but-it-seems-i-can-use-linux-laptop-now/
======
blrgeek
1\. What's the battery life like?

2\. Are all devices supported with drivers - Bluetooth, 3D, graphics,
sleep/wake, 802.11n, webcam, internal mike, ...

3\. Does it do instant sleep/wake like a Mac - 100s of times without
crashing/rebooting?

4\. How does it handle external displays? Plug and play like a Mac? Does it
handle display rotate? The internal display is only 1366x768 ?

5\. Does it detect a headphone and switch from speaker to headphone
automatically (speaker driver?)

6\. How's the trackpad compare to a Macbook Pro?

7\. How's the keyboard compare to a Macbook Pro?

Asking because I moved from Linux->OSX a long time ago, and I wouldn't mind
switching back if the hardware is right and more importantly the Linux drivers
work well.

~~~
wisty
I use Linux on a VM, running under OSX.

OSX is ... finicky ... with dev tools. Apple does the compilers, and the bolt-
on distributions (brew, Macports, fink) seem to have trouble keeping things
compatible. Linux distributions don't end up falling behing their own
compilers every time the compiler gets updated. I'd rather stay off the
bleeding edge compilers, and have everything just work.

There is the "Apple tax", but it's hard to find a good lightweight laptop
which is _much_ cheaper than a MBA. A few hundred dollars cheaper, but you
lose that on the resale value. For a desktop, there's no comparison (a $600
white-box will thrash an iMac, and if you pay for a nice monitor it's better
to keep it than sell it bundled with an obsolete machine).

~~~
dchichkov
I can really recommend having an i7/64Gb desktop with native Linux OS as your
primary development environment. It is like 20x faster than a Macbook Pro/8Gb
with Linux VM.

And you could keep your Macbook Air for looks [and ssh to that box] ;)

~~~
andyzweb
this is what I do now at work. It has totally changed the way I do
development. Instead of having a "build farm" or separate box to run continual
tests on it's all in the same machine. SSHFS makes a world of difference too.

------
ars
Why are people voting up this article? There is nothing interesting in it. I'm
genuinely curious about what people are finding interesting here.

~~~
gbog
I, for one, find it refreshing to see a community of hackers (HN) going back
to its roots and upvoting the struggles of a major anti-hacker corporation
(Apple).

Because, sorry, but Apple's spirit is in direct opposition with the natural
grain of hackers, even in a broad and "entrepreneurial" sense of the word.

~~~
endlessvoid94
I'm pretty blown away by your opinion that Apple's spirit is in opposition to
hackers. It's the only beautiful unix environment that's easy to use; I can
worry about things when I want to, but when I don't want to, I don't have to,
and it _continues to work_.

For some reason, people have begun confusing "hacker" with "tinkerer".

~~~
gbog
> "easy to use"

I don't think it is in the hacker spirit to trade any bit of said "ease of
use" against their control over the hardware or software tools they own.

Heck, even Windows is much more in line with hacker spirit than Apple. In PC
boxes you could plug your own cards, develop your own driver, etc. Just look
at an Apple product, from last month or from 10 years ago: you cannot open it,
you are not supposed to install another OS, you can't even change the battery
on their phones. And I even didn't start scratching the surface.

------
fingerprinter
I have a Lenovo x220 running Ubuntu 12.04. Aesthetics of the machine aside, it
is the best setup I've ever used for a development machine. Ubuntu is by far
(we're talking leaps and bounds) better than OSX for dev work and I LOVE,
LOVE, LOVE the keyboard on the x220.

I don't have a XPS 13, but I can see any reasonable machine loaded with Ubuntu
being a developers dream. Honestly, any machine loaded with Ubuntu these days
would be more than reasonable for a most anyone.

PS. Did I say I love the keyboard on the x220? Because I do.

~~~
blrgeek
Fingerprinter - same questions for you on the Lenovo x220 you use

1\. What's the battery life like?

2\. Are all devices supported with drivers - Bluetooth, 3D, graphics,
sleep/wake, 802.11n, webcam, internal mike, ...

3\. Does it do instant sleep/wake like a Mac - 100s of times without
crashing/rebooting?

4\. How does it handle external displays? Plug and play like a Mac? Does it
handle display rotate? The internal display is only 1366x768 ?

5\. Does it detect a headphone and switch from speaker to headphone
automatically (speaker driver?)

6\. How's the trackpad compare to a Macbook Pro?

7\. How's the keyboard compare to a Macbook Pro?

Asking because I moved from Linux->OSX a long time ago, and I wouldn't mind
switching back if the hardware is right and more importantly the Linux drivers
work well.

~~~
fingerprinter
> 1\. What's the battery life like?

Very typical to get 6-7hrs. If I turn down brightness and don't use power
hungry apps (Chrome, Firefox), 7-9hrs.

> 2\. Are all devices supported with drivers - Bluetooth, 3D, graphics,
> sleep/wake, 802.11n, webcam, internal mike, ...

Everything works out of the box. I haven't had to tweak a thing. I don't game
at all, though, so I can't speak to the 3D in games.

> 3\. Does it do instant sleep/wake like a Mac - 100s of times without
> crashing/rebooting?

Yes. I had some crashes in wake just before 12.04 went final, but nothing
since. Hibernate works as well, you just need to turn it on.

> 4\. How does it handle external displays? Plug and play like a Mac? Does it
> handle display rotate? The internal display is only 1366x768 ?

Seamlessly. I haven't rotated the display, but I've heard it works.

> 5\. Does it detect a headphone and switch from speaker to headphone
> automatically (speaker driver?)

Yes.

> 6\. How's the trackpad compare to a Macbook Pro?

I prefer the nub, however, the macbook pro trackpad is still the best I've
seen. I don't think this one compares, but it isn't bad, just not great like
the MBP.

> 7\. How's the keyboard compare to a Macbook Pro?

100 thousand million times better. I've never liked the MBP/MBA keyboards
since they went chicklet style. I don't hate them, I just don't like them. The
Lenovo/IBM keyboards are, quite simply, the best out there. I even bought an
external Lenovo keyboard to use at my desktop I like it that much.

> Asking because I moved from Linux->OSX a long time ago, and I wouldn't mind
> switching back if the hardware is right and more importantly the Linux
> drivers work well.

The reason I bought a Lenovo x220, tbh, is because I had a friend tell me that
they were at UDS in Oakland and the Ubuntu kernel team all had them. When you
think about that, makes me feel pretty confident things will work correctly.

~~~
wpietri
Another vote for the x220. I Have the tablet version, and some of the tablet
stuff isn't perfect yet. But I mainly use it as a laptop, for which it is
solid since 12.04.

------
lsiebert
I'm on a thinkpad t530 dual booting Mint 13 (which is Unbuntu based for those
that don't know) and Windows 7. screen is 1920 by 1080.

The disadvantage Linux has to Windows or Mac OS X at this point is mostly
small ease of use issues and polish. Sometimes to have to do stuff to make
stuff work, though most stuff worked out of the box.

The stuff that is easier to do in Linux is really easy to do. The stuff that
is hard to do is sometimes really hard, but I've yet to find anything to be
impossible. Where as with Windows and Mac OS X, some simple things are easy,
some simple things things are difficult, and some things, especially anything
unusual, seem impossible to do.

I think where Ubuntu occasionally falls is in a lack of unity a focus on
functionality before ease of use, and a tendency towards a tabla rasa. I'd
probably be on xmonad (a tiling window manager) now if it came with a nice
setup to start and then let you select from built in user set ups, tweak
existing setups, OR make your own. But that's also part of the strength of the
linux ecosystem, people build things to be interoperable and flexible and
hackable. And for a Developer, the latter is preferable anyway.

tl:dr Linux isn't the same as windows or OS X. But it is perfectly viable as a
desktop OS. And where it rocks, it rocks hard.

------
expralitemonk
I go to a coffee shop often and among other things, I notice people's machines
and how they interact with them. Two observations:

1\. People with non-Mac machines always plug their laptop into AC power before
starting work (unless it's a netbook). My previous Windows laptop had battery
life of about 2 hours while my Macbook Pro has about 5 hours.

2\. People with non-Mac machines have to be very careful where they sit, or
the glare from the outside makes it impossible for them to see their screens.
This was my experience with a Windows laptop as well.

With every new release the Mac operating system becomes, in my opinion, more
complex and harder to use. Mac hardware on the other hand, just gets better.

~~~
kami8845
This is pretty crappy generalization.

Much more accurate would be to say "people with shitty laptops" or even better
"people with laptops that have short battery life or glare screens".

I have a non-Mac and I don't have to do either of the two things you listed.
That's because I put great care into selecting my machine and because I don't
like paying out the ass for Apple's overpriced laptops, although I know a lot
of people who do. (I do have an iPhone 4S, but not because of the hardware)

------
bravura
tl;dr: I've been using Mac for ten years. "Two days ago I got my Dell XPS 13
as part of a Dell beta progam called project Sputnik." After two days of use,
I haven't run into any serious roadblocks, so I'm not using Mac anymore.

a) Is writing this blog post a requirement of the Sputnik program?

b) Regardless of the answer to a), how do I get into the Sputnik program?

~~~
gpapilion
a. They would like us to be vocal, but there is no strict requirement.

b. Its as simple as installing this image you can find here on an XPS 13 :
<http://hwe.ubuntu.com/uds-q/dellxps/>

------
perfunctory
"I spend 70% of my time in a terminal, and 30% of my time in a web browser"

One didn't have to wait till 2012 to be able to do that.

~~~
dredmorbius
There was a period there in the early-mid 2000s in which an unfortunate number
of websites, and rather more corporate / enterprise web-based tools (intranet
or external portal) were very highly MSIE dependent. There were workarounds,
and some of us stayed largely independent (absent a few VMs or Windows
Terminal Server sessions), but it was fairly ugly.

The embrace of Web standards by major players (thank you Google, and I don't
say this often, Facebook) and availability of cross-platform standards-
compliant browsers (thank you Mozilla and Google), and even the resurgence of
Macs (thank you, Apple) have helped.

That and the fact that proprietary application format usage for standard
desktop functions (word processing, spreadsheet, presentation) has dwindled
dramatically. I won't say it's gone by any stretch, but even Microsoft touts
open standards, and far more often you'll encounter Wikis, Google Docs, or
git.

------
nicpottier
Ironically the biggest reason for me to stick with OS X is Microsoft Office.

If you are working with other organizations, they will use Office. Excel seems
to run the world and is used for accounting, specifications, I've even seen
customers give us mockups they have made of the website they want in Excel.

The various tools on Linux or the web for reading Word docs have come a long
way and I'd say are mostly good enough, but when it comes to complicated Excel
spreadsheets, you have to use the real thing.

If it wasn't for that I'd see Linux as a viable alternative. I'd miss
Photoshop, but could get by with the Gimp. But for the time being MS keeps me
solidly in the OS X camp.

~~~
vetler
If I need Windows, I use a virtual machine. Works very well, and I usually
don't need to stay in Windows-land for a long time. YMMV, of course.

~~~
ville
The problem with this for me was that I used Windows so seldom that when I
started it, it would spend a long time installing all the updates accumulated
since the last time.

~~~
wwwtyro
I just decline to install them, myself.

------
ricardobeat
So, if he spends 70% of his time in a terminal, and 30% in a browser, what is
the advantage of the Linux laptop? It probably has worse battery life, is
heavier and clunkier, has a shitty trackpad...

And those patches will bite you in the ass on the first OS update (or when
they are abandoned 6 months on). Other than it being cheaper, am I missing
something?

~~~
peterwwillis
Probably cost.

His past 10 years were on Mac, which i'm sure worked nicely for him, but (i'll
bet) was on average 1.5x to 2x more expensive. He's realizing that the old
Penguin can finally give him what he needs for less.

------
nicholassmith
Well this is a bit of a weird post. It feels almost that light on content and
discussion that it comes across a bit like a promo for Dell. I'll assume it
isn't, as everyone should get the benefit of the doubt. I'm weird. I develop
Linux applications, and I primarily do it on a Mac as I'm happier on OS X than
most Linux distros.

------
digitalengineer
This sums it up pretty nicely: "Ubuntu sucks but not on my Dell XPS 13, now I
can -finally- ditch my Mac"

------
mangler
This posted by Dell or something?! What's with the over-excitement?

~~~
fiatpandas
The Dell program he is in encourages testers to be vocal about their
experience.

------
headShrinker
You had me until here "with some kernel patches, and some patched packages for
sleep and hibernation. After an hour of struggling with making a bootable USB
drive from my Mac for my Dell"

I know how this goes. There is untold functionality that is broken. Likely you
might not know what until later. Updating your OS will likely be a bitch. I
like so many other people, don't have time to patch my computer and patch my
servers, and patch my phone. I just need shit that works. I am willing to pay
for that.

------
induscreep
Can someone explain to me what exactly is wrong with the OS X terminal?

~~~
brian_cloutier
It's been a while since I used it, but off the top of my head:

\- colors never worked right, you can certainly enable them but themes like
solarized are impossible to get working.

\- it took forever to open. as in, a terminal on my machine is just a keypress
away and it took the terminal on my osx machine a couple seconds to open a
window, and even longer to show me a prompt

\- somehow they borked mouse input, so clicking the line you want to edit from
within a vim session, for example, is a no-go.

\- this is a lion problem but terminal interacts with it especially badly,
there's no easy way to open a second terminal window. I usually have tons of
the things open and it's impossible to manage them properly.

~~~
induscreep
Hmm I faced some of the same problems:

\- Colors work perfect with the tomorrow theme, kinda similar to solarized
([https://github.com/chriskempson/tomorrow-
theme/tree/master/O...](https://github.com/chriskempson/tomorrow-
theme/tree/master/OS%20X%20Terminal))

\- I think I changed my shell to /bin/bash in the preferences, which fixed it

\- Haven't encountered this

\- Haven't encountered this

~~~
jlgreco
It's my understanding that bash has been the default shell in OSX for quite
some time now, though I can't imagine tcsh started noticeably slower than it
back when it was the default. On my incredibly underpowered machine the
difference between the two is around 0.05s.

------
christopherorr
Yet another vote for the Thinkpad X220. Made the move from a Macbook myself
about six months ago. Tried out a long list of distributions and just about
everything works out of the box if you're using a desktop environment like
KDE. I'm now running Arch and Openbox which takes a bit of configuring but it
makes for the quickest laptop I've ever owned. I won't deny OSX is a good,
polished operating system but I can honestly say there's nothing I miss about
it. I love the simplicity and the control Linux gives you over the system and
I think Apple bury a lot of the nitty gritty but that's quite understandable
really. Sure, there's been plenty of roadblocks along the way but I've enjoyed
solving problems when they come up. More than anything, running Linux has
provided a valuable learning experience.

------
cloudwalking
70% terminal, 30% browser. Sounds like he needs a Chromebook.

~~~
WiseWeasel
Yah, except he'd be 70% SOL.

~~~
cloudwalking
Na, Chromebooks have a full terminal built in.

~~~
WiseWeasel
Interesting; I did not know that was possible. But can you install AMP and do
web dev on it? That's what the author was using it for.

------
endlessvoid94
For the life of me, I can't figure out what's going on here. There's certainly
nothing wrong with moving to another platform, but the emotion flying around
here is pretty strange.

It feels like people just really, really want to find a good reason to hate
Apple.

------
keithpeter
"I got a special version of Ubuntu, with some kernel patches, and some patched
packages for sleep and hibernation."

What version of Ubuntu is this hardware specific patched one?

Are Canonical or Dell guranteeing updates? If so, for how long...

Best of luck with it.

~~~
dschep
All the custom stuff is in a PPA[1]. Some of the patches are already merged
into Quantal.

[1] [https://launchpad.net/~canonical-hwe-
team/+archive/sputnik-k...](https://launchpad.net/~canonical-hwe-
team/+archive/sputnik-kernel)

~~~
keithpeter
Good work, especially the practice of merging the patches into main kernel.

------
kyriakos
my question might sound stupid but how can you guys develop on such a small
screen? I use eclipse and running that on anything less than 14inch seems like
a struggle to work with. especially at 720p resolutions.

------
fierarul
> Two days ago I got my Dell XPS 13 as part of a Dell beta progam called
> project Sputnik.

This makes it unclear if I can actually buy this thing (in Europe).

>I got a special version of Ubuntu, with some kernel patches, and some patched
packages for sleep and hibernation.

Why isn't this in the official Ubuntu distro? I don't trust binaries from
Dell.

~~~
takluyver
Looks like they're bringing forward some fixes that the regular kernel is more
cautious with. That makes sense, because they only have to worry about one set
of hardware. There are PPAs with the patched packages:

[https://launchpad.net/~canonical-hwe-
team/+archive/sputnik-k...](https://launchpad.net/~canonical-hwe-
team/+archive/sputnik-kernel) [https://launchpad.net/~canonical-hwe-
team/+archive/sputnik-p...](https://launchpad.net/~canonical-hwe-
team/+archive/sputnik-policykit)

~~~
fierarul
Hm, I guess it's better seing that it's Canonical doing the patches although I
would prefer for these things to be part of the upstream kernel or at least of
the official Ubuntu ISO.

Right now the <http://hwe.ubuntu.com/uds-q/dellxps/> link warns you "this
image is not considered an official Ubuntu release"; "this image is for demo
purposes only". Not very reassuring.

Still, it does put the Dell XPS on my watch list.

------
iflowfor8hours
I've been running mint on my x220 for about a year with absolutely no issues.
Prior to that I was running ubuntu on an x61 for 3 years, also with no issues.
I use an external monitor every day and unplug it every night and don't have
to change a thing. It 'just works'.

------
ifmw
I'm glad to hear sleep and hibernate are improving on Linux laptops and I
really hope more manufacturers will follow suit with their own initiatives
like this.

However, will any portable laptop get 7 hours of battery life on Linux with
wifi on like the 13" Macbook Airs do?

~~~
klaasvakie
I'm getting ~8 hours with wifi with Ubuntu 12.04 on an Asus Zenbook UX31E.
Everything works out the box with no tweaking, see here:
<https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AsusZenbook>

If I had to buy now though, i'd get the UX31A (Full HD IPS in 13"), but looks
like some things there don't work yet:
<https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AsusZenbookPrime>

------
buster
The Dell XPS 13 certainly looks nice. And Linux, woohoo! But after using 13"
for the last year, 16" for 2 years and 15" for another 3 years, i think 13" is
too small for me.

Does someone know if there will be such a slick Laptop with 15 or 16"?
Preferably FullHD display?

------
mironathetin
Is my impression right: Apple stops to be cool!

Now that Apple becomes vastly popular with everybody, hackers, early adopters
and other trendsetters start bashing Apple and look for different stuff. The
parent post is only one in a growing number of others.

------
leh0n
I switched from linux to mac recently because my Ubuntu 12.04 laptop would
randomly freeze after waking from sleep. I tried like 3 different solutions
that I had googled but none of them worked.

------
lispm
What's a 'Linux Laptop'?

Wasn't Linus Torvald using a Macbook Air ... with Linux?

~~~
wwwtyro
Indeed. So do I; 12.04 runs flawlessly on it out of the box.

------
bproctor
Photoshop. For a web developer, it's pretty much pointless to even talk about
using Linux until this is taken care of.

~~~
mironathetin
Even for someone who only has to prepare presentations from time to time and
cares about the quality of the graphics, Photoshop is more or less not
replaceable.

I tried gimp for a while but it did not nearly qualify. Do you have any idea,
if there is linux-software that comes somewhat close to photoshop?

------
sigzero
Dell has done this before and the service went away. I have zero confidence
that won't happen again. Sorry Dell.

------
randomafrican
Sophos tell me that this site is blocked because of Troj/Unif-B. Did it happen
to anyone else ?

~~~
tathastu
Sophos had a false positive bug today:
[http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2012/09/19/sshupdater-b-
fsop...](http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2012/09/19/sshupdater-b-fsophos-anti-
virus-products/)

~~~
bli
had the Troj/Unif-B warning too! seems to be an other warning then the false
positive one!

------
chmars
Just as a reminder: _'Linux Is A Lemon On The Retina MacBook Pro'_

[http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=apple...](http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=apple_mbpr_linux&num=1)

~~~
lucian1900
For now. Linux DEs are very close to full support for variable DPI, much
better than Windows.

It'll change as high DPI devices become more popular.

~~~
chmars
Variable DPI is only one factor, there are apparently many other problems with
Linux on current MacBooks (and Apple is probably more to blame than Linux).
For now, running Linux in a virtual machine seems to be the most convenient
way on current MacBooks (MacBook Pro Retina, new MacBook Air).

------
bli
i got warned the site is affected by Troj/Unif-B?

------
atas
Three major grammar mistakes. And nothing interesting.

------
drivebyacct2
I, for the heck of it, tried elementary OS in a VM on my Macbook Air. I can't
stop using it. Except there's no smooth scrolling (there might be if it
weren't in a VM).

I'm tempted to grab a cheap XPS 13 and try it out for a bit.

