9 ms·

Buy a XPS-13 developer edition.

Narann 6y ago
Honest question: Having Linux on a Mac a decade ago had sense has Mac hardwares were special enough to provide value, but now you have XPS-like hardware, why would people buy a Mac to install a Linux on it? Dual boot? What does Mac hardware have that others don't?
- pjmlp 6y ago
  I also never got the point. For various reasons my main OS is Windows, however due to my past life as Linux fanboy during the university, when I decided to buy a travel netbook, Asus were the ones getting my money for a 1215B with Ubuntu pre-installed. Sure it had a couple of issues later, more due to the way that Canonical managed the transition of the wlan and Brazos drivers, but it served the message to which vendors I wanted to support. Don't want to use either Windows or hate Apple's behaviours? Then support the OEMs trying to ship Linux on their hardware.
- Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
  They used to have a shiny Apple logo on the lid, but now they have only black logo. Still, you won't find one on non-mac hardware.
  - dijit 6y ago
    This idea that anyone who buys Apple products is a sheep buying it purely for the brand needs to die. It doesn’t lend itself to a conversation about why people might choose differently to you. Ignorance is not helping either side.
    - Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
      What really needs to die are attempts of attributing your own ideas to other people. No one but you was saying anything about sheep buying and that brand is the sole reason for buying Apple products. Disclosure: I own a lot of Apple products, though I still prefer Ubuntu to MacOS.
      - dijit 6y ago
        You directly implied that people are buying Apple products for the logo. I don’t believe I misinterpreted that.
        Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
        I was just answering the question "What does Mac hardware have that others don't?" in the most direct way possible. Do you disagree that everything else in Mac hardware is matched by other manufacturers? And your beliefs about what you presume other people imply should probably stay out of this discussion.
        aguyfromnb 6y ago
        >You directly implied that people are buying Apple products for the logo. Apple makes kick-ass machines, but I see Macbook Pros everywhere. How many people in the real world need a $2000+ computer? If these people aren't buying it for the logo, what are they buying it for? Apple has positioned themselves as a lifestyle brand. How can you deny that?
        inanutshellus 6y ago
        One counterpoint - Trust in quality. I'm looking at buying a laptop right now and I can either buy an apple MBP ... OR a MONSTER laptop with much better specs for the same-or-less price. I'm hand-wringing over it. With past laptops I've only been disappointed by the non-Apple laptops I've had. Bad ram, bad battery, bad battery again, bad battery AGAIN, slow-for-hardware-misfiring issues... or the Apple that has been a truly reliable machine for going on nine years. Trust in Quality. That's my "denial".
        readwind 6y ago
        You'll get more "SCSI" when you buy macs, if you're a poser, at least, or a signaller, is probably more polite. 'You' is general of course, but, I think this is how it works. You'll be rolling in the SCSI with a mac, or if you plan to hang out with lots of bald men with the Steve Jobs kind of spiel, or something. I'd guess this is how it works. If any of those things are your thing, you should go for the mac, man. But all that is a shitty landscape, opinions are mine. I meant no offense. But you see how things work out there.
    - insideBig3 6y ago
      I highly recommend taking a marketing class.
- quantummkv 6y ago
  For me, it's mostly the screen and trackpad. Non-apple screens come in two varieties - 1. Shitty 1080p TN or barely IPS panels with laughable color accuracy, horribly bad color reproduction, viewing angles that just plain suck, 300 or 250 nits brightness and no 100% coverage of even sRGB. 2. Completely overkill and expensive 4K panels with HDR, touch, OLED, all the bell and whistles that somehow forgot that they are in laptops and drain battery at ridiculous levels. Apple, on the other hand, have displays that have the perfect pixel density for laptops so their battery drain is manageable, have excellent color space coverage (even the 999$ Air has 100% sRGB) and perfect color accuracy and viewing angles. Then comes the trackpad and it's not even a contest. On a macbook, I really don't need a mouse unless I am doing something high precision like Illustrator or video editing. Even there the trackpad is workable. And then something that is more on a personal level, but no one apart from Apple has their high end devices available in India quickly. The new dell XPS might come very close to the macbook, but getting it in India is not possible, even after 4 months after launch. Even if it arrives, it will be one or two base models with limited availability or the completely overkill models. Not so with Apple.
  - fomine3 6y ago
    Do you get these advantages with Linux instead of macOS?
    - quantummkv 6y ago
      The screen will still be the same regardless of the OS. It's advantages would not change.
      - jeremyjh 6y ago
        Battery life will definitely suffer.
        quantummkv 6y ago
        That's mostly a software issue and can be rectified. The 4.18 kernel doubled my battery life
- aruggirello 6y ago
  IIRC owning a Mac is also one of the few cases (the only one?), when you're legally entitled to run macOS in a VM.
  - abrowne 6y ago
    But also legally only under a MacOS host IIRC
- jimsmart 6y ago
  A lot of folk like the trackpads on the MacBooks. No idea how the XPS ones compare? Another thing is Thunderbolt, but IDK if that’s supported under Linux? So that might be a moot point anyhow.
  - Sangeppato 6y ago
    Macbooks' trackpad are good because of macOS' drivers. On Linux, they suck just as much as any other glass trackpad.
  - insideBig3 6y ago
    I can't even imagine buying a computer for a trackpad. All my years of StarCraft have me a wiz at mouse and keyboard. Plus I doc to 3 screens. Onthego, I have touch screen which I use surprisingly often.
- heelix 6y ago
  The screen and the track pad are the best out there. From a coding perspective, the Mac is one of the few 16:10 ratio screens still out there, which means you get a bit more vertical height than 99% of the other 16:9 ratio resolutions. While 16:9 makes for better movie watching, coding/surfing/etc is far better on the taller screen. As a bonus, it is a really quality screen too. I'm less enamored with the rest. My daily driver laptop is a 32G i9 from 2018(?). While I have enough RAM to run a couple docker containers, most of the folks I work with are stuck with the 16G version, which are constantly out of resources and have no upgrade plan. For being a 'pro' spec machine, it does not have the cooling it needs to be pushed like I do.
  - ekianjo 6y ago
    > The screen and the track pad are the best out there. Aren't most Mac laptops screens glossy though? I don't really care how good the screen is if it acts like a huge mirror all the time. As for the trackpad, if you are proficient with the keyboard (or use a tiling wm) it does not really matter anymore.
    - read_if_gay_ 6y ago
      The screens aren’t matte, but they have a pretty decent anti-glare coating. There’s also no way around using the trackpad sometimes. Using i3 and Vim keybindings wherever possible, I still need my trackpad enough that its relatively poor quality is annoying.
      - 1over137 6y ago
        >The screens aren’t matte, but they have a pretty decent anti-glare coating. I guess it must be subjective, because I find they are horribly glossy. I'm still using an old matte Macbook for this reason.
        proverbialbunny 6y ago
        The earlier glossy MBPs were pretty reflective, and I stuck with a matte MBP for years too because of it, but for a while now using the current "glossy" MBP screens I do not see reflections in them if the screen is on. It's to the point I forgot the screen is glossy. Thankfully it just works the way you want it to.
- Sangeppato 6y ago
  Yeah I don't get it either. Without macOS, a MacBook doesn't make any sense IMHO
  - insideBig3 6y ago
    This is why I can't understand the appeal of a MacBook. You have the Apple burden, the Apple costs, what benefits? The touchpad? The showoff luxury of a lighted logo?
    - scarface74 6y ago
      I can’t either and besides the Mac, I’m fully onboard with the Apple ecosystem - iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, AirPods Pro, and an AppleTV 4K. I bought Macs way back in the day - my last one was a 2006 Mac Mini to use as an HTPC. But every time I get ready to buy a computer, Macs don’t seem to have any advantage. I would be installing the same software I use for Windows - Chrome, Visual Studio Code and various language runtimes, Visual Studio (or Rider), a bit torrent client, Plex, etc. I can buy a Dell a lot cheaper - of course from the MS store to avoid all of the crapware - and have more options. I still recommend Macs for other people though who have the budget. They are still slightly less of a hassle than Windows and they can go to an Apple Store if they have any issues.
      - danieldk 6y ago
        I can buy a Dell a lot cheaper - of course from the MS store to avoid all of the crapware - and have more options. A while ago I installed a pristine Windows 10 (retail) copy on my NUC, just to see where Windows is at. I'll skip the Candy Crash Saga criticism. But I was really surprised that besides the drivers, it also auto-installed some crappy RealTek application and some crappy Intel application (for tweaking GPU settings or whatever). No vendor driver CDs or whatnot. Just letting Windows idle for some time and these applications were installed. Is it really possible to get a pristine Windows install these days?
        Sangeppato 6y ago
- inanutshellus 6y ago
  Here's some anecdata: I have a 2011 MBA whose battery still lasts an hour and it can do all the "daily driver" tasks except gaming. (Meanwhile I replaced my other laptop's battery 3 times in that time!) THe MBA's mobo finally went out so I'm in the market for a new laptop NOW and want to justify buying an EIGHTH GEN i5 MBP for over $1000 when there are laptops with TENTH gen i7's and >1tb hdd's for similar money.......
  - FPGAhacker 6y ago
    Any reason you aren't looking at ryzen based laptops?
    - inanutshellus 6y ago
      Was trying to make an, uh, apples-to-Apples comparison, so yes, I'm also in the market for an AMD but that understanding long-term-quality of components isn't ... well, I guess I have no idea how to measure the "quality" of a laptop if it's not simply "go trust Apple". I mainly go back to the batteries I had to buy for one laptop.
- trimbo 6y ago
  I've been trying since the Pentium III to use Linux on a laptop and have finally given up completely. I've tried on a variety of hardware, even with official support. Driver problems and battery life have always been an issue. But... are we talking about the same XPS laptop? My wife's 13" XPS purchased ~2016 has had horrible reliability. The charging port died a long time ago, fortunately, it charges over USB-C. But now it no longer keeps a charge, won't sleep/hibernate properly (will cook with the lid closed), and more. A friend of mine bought the same one at the same time and his is also breaking down (keyboard problems). I've tried to get her to switch to Mac, but she prefers Windows, so next time I'm buying her a Surface Laptop. HTH anyone considering the XPS.
  - wpietri 6y ago
    For what it's worth, I've been running Linux on Lenovo laptops for years and years, and lately it has been fine. No weird tweaks, no special kernel builds. It just works.
    - trimbo 6y ago
      Is the battery life any good? That has always been the Achilles heel for me. The battery life is like half or 3/4 of what windows gets on the same hardware. Last I tried this was on a 2016 X1 Carbon.
      - wpietri 6y ago
        I don't run Windows, so I have no idea. On the T-Series machines I get the larger battery and it lasts long enough for my purposes.
      - kmorgh 6y ago
        Could get close to a full day of work on the X1 Carbon Yoga Gen2. T480s not so much, but also packs a lot more punch. x1s seem to have best portability
      - bproven 6y ago
        Carbon X1 (6th gen ), I can get 8-9 hours light stuff and solid 6 doing work. That is pretty much equivalent to the macbook 13. I have a macbook 15 for work and am extremely disappointed in its battery life, so I think the Lenovo matches up well.
cmurphycode 6y ago
I'm on the hunt for my next laptop and I'd really like to have a rock solid portable that runs Linux, but my past experience with Dell indicates inferior hardware and construction to Mac. I looked at the 2020 Macbook Air (the $~1300 model), and it seems to offer the same or better specs (depending how much you value the display) for the price. Are we at the point where we must pay a premium NOT to run OSX, or am I missing something? I don't love the direction OSX has headed, but I'm still content enough running it and using Linux remotely where needed.
- petepete 6y ago
  Lenovo announced yesterday that Thinkpads pre-loaded with Fedora are on their way. Their X1 Carbon line already work extremely well with Linux.
  - Barrin92 6y ago
    second this. Very happy with the Carbon.
- thedevelopnik 6y ago
  https://www.system76.com https://www.system76.com
  - bproven 6y ago
    are the system76s better? I heard the hw was kinda iffy (crap) in the past. One of the reason I decided against it about 2 years abgo when I bought my Lenovo X1 carbon (for Linux). The Lemur looks interesting (nice you can get it with more than 16GB RAM in 14")... wonder how the quality is on it though
colmvp 6y ago
I tried the 13' laptop but after getting used to the extra space around arrow keys on Macbook's for a decade, the tight configuration of keys on the 13 which have PGUP/PGDOWN adjacent to the up/left/right keys ended up annoying the shit out of me. I ended up going with a 15' XPS and installing Ubuntu. The annoying part was the wifi card which sometimes Ubuntu would stop finding, so I'd have to re-install the drivers. For simplicity sake, I didn't bother having hybrid graphics since the only time I really needed the video card was simulations or computer gaming (which I did with booting in Windows).
- bproven 6y ago
  >The annoying part was the wifi card which sometimes Ubuntu would stop finding, so I'd have to re-install the drivers. I had a 15 XPS (Skylake version?) a few years ago with Ubuntu - I just ended up buying an Intel Wifi card for $25 and replacing the oem one. The nice thing about that XPS was it was user serviceable.
kzrdude 6y ago
What's the thermal situation like? Does it have enough fans and can it run turbo boost on a core for long stretches?
asn0 6y ago
That's where I ended up (though it was XPS 7590 - for the larger battery, larger screen, and people not looking up my nose on video calls). I used a 2015 Macbook Pro to experiment with making the leap to Linux desktop (though Macbook was essentially just a Linux terminal already). I think everything worked (this was a year ago) - what pushed me to an XPS was when I realized (pretty quickly) that I have 0 interest in figuring out which arcane key sequence on the Mac keyboard was equivalent to a certain special key on a "PC" keyboard. I was a 10+-year MacOS power user, and I'd felt it would be impossible to be "happy" (more like "unannoyed") with anything else - I'd re-evaluate that question every year. I've been happily using Linux Mint on an XPS 15 since Sept last year. Cannot believe what a non-issue the change has been. I have hardly thought about my Macbook - been on it maybe 2 or 3 times to test something Mac-specific. Had I known, I would have switched a few years earlier, rather than "powering through" the unpleasant last few years.

Honest question: Having Linux on a Mac a decade ago had sense has Mac hardwares were special enough to provide value, but now you have XPS-like hardware, why would people buy a Mac to install a Linux on it? Dual boot? What does Mac hardware have that others don't?

pjmlp 6y ago
I also never got the point. For various reasons my main OS is Windows, however due to my past life as Linux fanboy during the university, when I decided to buy a travel netbook, Asus were the ones getting my money for a 1215B with Ubuntu pre-installed. Sure it had a couple of issues later, more due to the way that Canonical managed the transition of the wlan and Brazos drivers, but it served the message to which vendors I wanted to support. Don't want to use either Windows or hate Apple's behaviours? Then support the OEMs trying to ship Linux on their hardware.
Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
They used to have a shiny Apple logo on the lid, but now they have only black logo. Still, you won't find one on non-mac hardware.
- dijit 6y ago
  This idea that anyone who buys Apple products is a sheep buying it purely for the brand needs to die. It doesn’t lend itself to a conversation about why people might choose differently to you. Ignorance is not helping either side.
  - Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
    What really needs to die are attempts of attributing your own ideas to other people. No one but you was saying anything about sheep buying and that brand is the sole reason for buying Apple products. Disclosure: I own a lot of Apple products, though I still prefer Ubuntu to MacOS.
    - dijit 6y ago
      You directly implied that people are buying Apple products for the logo. I don’t believe I misinterpreted that.
      - Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
        I was just answering the question "What does Mac hardware have that others don't?" in the most direct way possible. Do you disagree that everything else in Mac hardware is matched by other manufacturers? And your beliefs about what you presume other people imply should probably stay out of this discussion.
      - aguyfromnb 6y ago
        >You directly implied that people are buying Apple products for the logo. Apple makes kick-ass machines, but I see Macbook Pros everywhere. How many people in the real world need a $2000+ computer? If these people aren't buying it for the logo, what are they buying it for? Apple has positioned themselves as a lifestyle brand. How can you deny that?
        inanutshellus 6y ago
        One counterpoint - Trust in quality. I'm looking at buying a laptop right now and I can either buy an apple MBP ... OR a MONSTER laptop with much better specs for the same-or-less price. I'm hand-wringing over it. With past laptops I've only been disappointed by the non-Apple laptops I've had. Bad ram, bad battery, bad battery again, bad battery AGAIN, slow-for-hardware-misfiring issues... or the Apple that has been a truly reliable machine for going on nine years. Trust in Quality. That's my "denial".
        readwind 6y ago
        You'll get more "SCSI" when you buy macs, if you're a poser, at least, or a signaller, is probably more polite. 'You' is general of course, but, I think this is how it works. You'll be rolling in the SCSI with a mac, or if you plan to hang out with lots of bald men with the Steve Jobs kind of spiel, or something. I'd guess this is how it works. If any of those things are your thing, you should go for the mac, man. But all that is a shitty landscape, opinions are mine. I meant no offense. But you see how things work out there.
  - insideBig3 6y ago
    I highly recommend taking a marketing class.
quantummkv 6y ago
For me, it's mostly the screen and trackpad. Non-apple screens come in two varieties - 1. Shitty 1080p TN or barely IPS panels with laughable color accuracy, horribly bad color reproduction, viewing angles that just plain suck, 300 or 250 nits brightness and no 100% coverage of even sRGB. 2. Completely overkill and expensive 4K panels with HDR, touch, OLED, all the bell and whistles that somehow forgot that they are in laptops and drain battery at ridiculous levels. Apple, on the other hand, have displays that have the perfect pixel density for laptops so their battery drain is manageable, have excellent color space coverage (even the 999$ Air has 100% sRGB) and perfect color accuracy and viewing angles. Then comes the trackpad and it's not even a contest. On a macbook, I really don't need a mouse unless I am doing something high precision like Illustrator or video editing. Even there the trackpad is workable. And then something that is more on a personal level, but no one apart from Apple has their high end devices available in India quickly. The new dell XPS might come very close to the macbook, but getting it in India is not possible, even after 4 months after launch. Even if it arrives, it will be one or two base models with limited availability or the completely overkill models. Not so with Apple.
- fomine3 6y ago
  Do you get these advantages with Linux instead of macOS?
  - quantummkv 6y ago
    The screen will still be the same regardless of the OS. It's advantages would not change.
    - jeremyjh 6y ago
      Battery life will definitely suffer.
      - quantummkv 6y ago
        That's mostly a software issue and can be rectified. The 4.18 kernel doubled my battery life
aruggirello 6y ago
IIRC owning a Mac is also one of the few cases (the only one?), when you're legally entitled to run macOS in a VM.
- abrowne 6y ago
  But also legally only under a MacOS host IIRC
jimsmart 6y ago
A lot of folk like the trackpads on the MacBooks. No idea how the XPS ones compare? Another thing is Thunderbolt, but IDK if that’s supported under Linux? So that might be a moot point anyhow.
- Sangeppato 6y ago
  Macbooks' trackpad are good because of macOS' drivers. On Linux, they suck just as much as any other glass trackpad.
- insideBig3 6y ago
  I can't even imagine buying a computer for a trackpad. All my years of StarCraft have me a wiz at mouse and keyboard. Plus I doc to 3 screens. Onthego, I have touch screen which I use surprisingly often.
heelix 6y ago
The screen and the track pad are the best out there. From a coding perspective, the Mac is one of the few 16:10 ratio screens still out there, which means you get a bit more vertical height than 99% of the other 16:9 ratio resolutions. While 16:9 makes for better movie watching, coding/surfing/etc is far better on the taller screen. As a bonus, it is a really quality screen too. I'm less enamored with the rest. My daily driver laptop is a 32G i9 from 2018(?). While I have enough RAM to run a couple docker containers, most of the folks I work with are stuck with the 16G version, which are constantly out of resources and have no upgrade plan. For being a 'pro' spec machine, it does not have the cooling it needs to be pushed like I do.
- ekianjo 6y ago
  > The screen and the track pad are the best out there. Aren't most Mac laptops screens glossy though? I don't really care how good the screen is if it acts like a huge mirror all the time. As for the trackpad, if you are proficient with the keyboard (or use a tiling wm) it does not really matter anymore.
  - read_if_gay_ 6y ago
    The screens aren’t matte, but they have a pretty decent anti-glare coating. There’s also no way around using the trackpad sometimes. Using i3 and Vim keybindings wherever possible, I still need my trackpad enough that its relatively poor quality is annoying.
    - 1over137 6y ago
      >The screens aren’t matte, but they have a pretty decent anti-glare coating. I guess it must be subjective, because I find they are horribly glossy. I'm still using an old matte Macbook for this reason.
      - proverbialbunny 6y ago
        The earlier glossy MBPs were pretty reflective, and I stuck with a matte MBP for years too because of it, but for a while now using the current "glossy" MBP screens I do not see reflections in them if the screen is on. It's to the point I forgot the screen is glossy. Thankfully it just works the way you want it to.
Sangeppato 6y ago
Yeah I don't get it either. Without macOS, a MacBook doesn't make any sense IMHO
- insideBig3 6y ago
  This is why I can't understand the appeal of a MacBook. You have the Apple burden, the Apple costs, what benefits? The touchpad? The showoff luxury of a lighted logo?
  - scarface74 6y ago
    I can’t either and besides the Mac, I’m fully onboard with the Apple ecosystem - iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, AirPods Pro, and an AppleTV 4K. I bought Macs way back in the day - my last one was a 2006 Mac Mini to use as an HTPC. But every time I get ready to buy a computer, Macs don’t seem to have any advantage. I would be installing the same software I use for Windows - Chrome, Visual Studio Code and various language runtimes, Visual Studio (or Rider), a bit torrent client, Plex, etc. I can buy a Dell a lot cheaper - of course from the MS store to avoid all of the crapware - and have more options. I still recommend Macs for other people though who have the budget. They are still slightly less of a hassle than Windows and they can go to an Apple Store if they have any issues.
    - danieldk 6y ago
      I can buy a Dell a lot cheaper - of course from the MS store to avoid all of the crapware - and have more options. A while ago I installed a pristine Windows 10 (retail) copy on my NUC, just to see where Windows is at. I'll skip the Candy Crash Saga criticism. But I was really surprised that besides the drivers, it also auto-installed some crappy RealTek application and some crappy Intel application (for tweaking GPU settings or whatever). No vendor driver CDs or whatnot. Just letting Windows idle for some time and these applications were installed. Is it really possible to get a pristine Windows install these days?
      - Sangeppato 6y ago
inanutshellus 6y ago
Here's some anecdata: I have a 2011 MBA whose battery still lasts an hour and it can do all the "daily driver" tasks except gaming. (Meanwhile I replaced my other laptop's battery 3 times in that time!) THe MBA's mobo finally went out so I'm in the market for a new laptop NOW and want to justify buying an EIGHTH GEN i5 MBP for over $1000 when there are laptops with TENTH gen i7's and >1tb hdd's for similar money.......
- FPGAhacker 6y ago
  Any reason you aren't looking at ryzen based laptops?
  - inanutshellus 6y ago
    Was trying to make an, uh, apples-to-Apples comparison, so yes, I'm also in the market for an AMD but that understanding long-term-quality of components isn't ... well, I guess I have no idea how to measure the "quality" of a laptop if it's not simply "go trust Apple". I mainly go back to the batteries I had to buy for one laptop.
trimbo 6y ago
I've been trying since the Pentium III to use Linux on a laptop and have finally given up completely. I've tried on a variety of hardware, even with official support. Driver problems and battery life have always been an issue. But... are we talking about the same XPS laptop? My wife's 13" XPS purchased ~2016 has had horrible reliability. The charging port died a long time ago, fortunately, it charges over USB-C. But now it no longer keeps a charge, won't sleep/hibernate properly (will cook with the lid closed), and more. A friend of mine bought the same one at the same time and his is also breaking down (keyboard problems). I've tried to get her to switch to Mac, but she prefers Windows, so next time I'm buying her a Surface Laptop. HTH anyone considering the XPS.
- wpietri 6y ago
  For what it's worth, I've been running Linux on Lenovo laptops for years and years, and lately it has been fine. No weird tweaks, no special kernel builds. It just works.
  - trimbo 6y ago
    Is the battery life any good? That has always been the Achilles heel for me. The battery life is like half or 3/4 of what windows gets on the same hardware. Last I tried this was on a 2016 X1 Carbon.
    - wpietri 6y ago
      I don't run Windows, so I have no idea. On the T-Series machines I get the larger battery and it lasts long enough for my purposes.
    - kmorgh 6y ago
      Could get close to a full day of work on the X1 Carbon Yoga Gen2. T480s not so much, but also packs a lot more punch. x1s seem to have best portability
    - bproven 6y ago
      Carbon X1 (6th gen ), I can get 8-9 hours light stuff and solid 6 doing work. That is pretty much equivalent to the macbook 13. I have a macbook 15 for work and am extremely disappointed in its battery life, so I think the Lenovo matches up well.

cmurphycode 6y ago

I'm on the hunt for my next laptop and I'd really like to have a rock solid portable that runs Linux, but my past experience with Dell indicates inferior hardware and construction to Mac. I looked at the 2020 Macbook Air (the $~1300 model), and it seems to offer the same or better specs (depending how much you value the display) for the price. Are we at the point where we must pay a premium NOT to run OSX, or am I missing something? I don't love the direction OSX has headed, but I'm still content enough running it and using Linux remotely where needed.

petepete 6y ago
Lenovo announced yesterday that Thinkpads pre-loaded with Fedora are on their way. Their X1 Carbon line already work extremely well with Linux.
- Barrin92 6y ago
  second this. Very happy with the Carbon.
thedevelopnik 6y ago
https://www.system76.com https://www.system76.com
- bproven 6y ago
  are the system76s better? I heard the hw was kinda iffy (crap) in the past. One of the reason I decided against it about 2 years abgo when I bought my Lenovo X1 carbon (for Linux). The Lemur looks interesting (nice you can get it with more than 16GB RAM in 14")... wonder how the quality is on it though

colmvp 6y ago

I tried the 13' laptop but after getting used to the extra space around arrow keys on Macbook's for a decade, the tight configuration of keys on the 13 which have PGUP/PGDOWN adjacent to the up/left/right keys ended up annoying the shit out of me. I ended up going with a 15' XPS and installing Ubuntu. The annoying part was the wifi card which sometimes Ubuntu would stop finding, so I'd have to re-install the drivers. For simplicity sake, I didn't bother having hybrid graphics since the only time I really needed the video card was simulations or computer gaming (which I did with booting in Windows).

bproven 6y ago
>The annoying part was the wifi card which sometimes Ubuntu would stop finding, so I'd have to re-install the drivers. I had a 15 XPS (Skylake version?) a few years ago with Ubuntu - I just ended up buying an Intel Wifi card for $25 and replacing the oem one. The nice thing about that XPS was it was user serviceable.

kzrdude 6y ago

What's the thermal situation like? Does it have enough fans and can it run turbo boost on a core for long stretches?

asn0 6y ago

That's where I ended up (though it was XPS 7590 - for the larger battery, larger screen, and people not looking up my nose on video calls). I used a 2015 Macbook Pro to experiment with making the leap to Linux desktop (though Macbook was essentially just a Linux terminal already). I think everything worked (this was a year ago) - what pushed me to an XPS was when I realized (pretty quickly) that I have 0 interest in figuring out which arcane key sequence on the Mac keyboard was equivalent to a certain special key on a "PC" keyboard. I was a 10+-year MacOS power user, and I'd felt it would be impossible to be "happy" (more like "unannoyed") with anything else - I'd re-evaluate that question every year. I've been happily using Linux Mint on an XPS 15 since Sept last year. Cannot believe what a non-issue the change has been. I have hardly thought about my Macbook - been on it maybe 2 or 3 times to test something Mac-specific. Had I known, I would have switched a few years earlier, rather than "powering through" the unpleasant last few years.