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Ask HN: System76 Laptop with Pop _OS as an Alternative to a Macbook for Dev?
I'm in the market for a new development laptop. I've been doing my development on MacOS the last few years and originally was very happy with this. However, I develop mostly in Python for work, and C for some personal projects, and development environments on MacOS have been deteriorating on both ecosystems over the last few years. The Python which comes preinstalled is approaching end of life, and Homebrew has steadily become less and less "plug and play" with Python packages, requiring me to manage an increasingly complex balance of pip, homebrew, and conda, with unclear boundaries as to which should be used to install packages. But the real killer is that Valgrind still doesn't work on the latest releases of MacOS, and there's no sign of this changing. So I'm looking at other systems.
I've played around a bit with System76's Pop!_OS, and in short-term use it looks like a viable replacement. The OS/hardware integration seems similar, the apt packages are fairly up to date, and all the tools I use seem to install smoothly from apt or pip. However, I'm lacking long-term experience with using it, so I'm soliciting opinions from the HN community.
- db48x 7y agoThis is what I use. Even if I didn't dislike OSX, it would be far too limiting to give up valgrind and rr.
- tlb 7y agoI'm using one and I like it. I got the huge one with 4K display, 64GB RAM, and a GTX 2080 GPU. It's definitely big to carry around. The desktop environment (Gnome + Wayland) is adequate. And not having to write portable code between Mac and Linux makes my life easier.
- kerkeslager 7y agoYeah, I'm looking at the Galago Pro, the Apple laptop I'm replacing is the Macbook Air. The Galago comes in a similar size and with an aluminum case I'm hoping is similar.
- joshbaptiste 7y agoI mean for myself a recent Chromebook that supports Android/Linux containers is good enough for my Vim/Python/Go work flow.
- kerkeslager 7y agoI spend ~40 hours a week on my laptop. The only things I spend more time are is my bed/sheets/pillows/etc. So there's really no reason for me to spare any expense on my laptop--the per-hour cost is negligible. So really the concept of "good enough" doesn't apply here--if it can be better I want it to be.
- gaspoweredcat 7y agoi have to ask what exactly draws you to them specifically? im not familiar with their OS but i assume its just a debian based linux. the systems themselves dont look particularly impressive if you ask me, the casing looks chunky and a bit dated on most of them (they remind me of the sort of thing Acer were knocking out about 5 years ago) i may be biased as ive had a preference for them for some time but id argue youd get a much better experience spending that money on a thinkpad, you get the best keyboard available on any laptop, solid build quality and a very good warranty program
- kerkeslager 7y ago> im not familiar with their OS but i assume its just a debian based linux. It's Ubuntu-based (so, indirectly Debian-based) but they've done a lot of hardware integration work to make sure that device drivers not only work, but are fairly optimized. My impression so far is that they do a better job than Windows on that (which isn't really impressive until you compare it to hardware integration on other Linux systems). Most reviews seem to back this up--stuff like fan speed and processor management are pretty well-tuned according to most reviewers. My biggest fear going back to Linux from MacOS is that I'll be stuck with software that never quite works well on the hardware, which is how things were when I used Debian/Ubuntu variants from maybe 1998-2008. I can fix my computer, but I'd rather not have to. So something with tight hardware/software integration like Macs have is a big selling point for me. > the systems themselves dont look particularly impressive if you ask me, the casing looks chunky and a bit dated on most of them (they remind me of the sort of thing Acer were knocking out about 5 years ago) That's true for some of them, but some of them (i.e. the Galago that I'm looking at) have aluminum cases and what looks like pretty nice trackpads. > i may be biased as ive had a preference for them for some time but id argue youd get a much better experience spending that money on a thinkpad, you get the best keyboard available on any laptop, solid build quality and a very good warranty program I have an older Thinkpad and while I agree with you on the keyboards, I've never liked their trackpad, and I find the little nub thing annoying. I also would prefer an aluminum case, though that's not a dealbreaker if there were other factors. Maybe there have been some improvements since the last time I used Thinkpads, though, so I'll see if I can find one to play around with in the store.