11 ms·
All i want is a laptop with similar build quality, battery life, and Ubuntu.
by Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
All i want is a laptop with similar build quality, battery life, and Ubuntu.
- yoavm 4y agoMy X1 Yoga from 5 years ago still answers all the above, IMHO. I replaced the battery (myself) about a year ago. Build quality is great, and I think you can even get it preinstalled with Ubuntu. If you're not into the touchscreen-yoga thing, the X1 Carbon is pretty similar.
- archon810 4y agoI have the new X1 Yoga, and I like it better than any other Windows laptop I've ever owned, but battery life is just trash. I'd be lucky to get 3 hours out of the thing.
- jacooper 4y agoI think you should be hopeful for Aeshi Linux.
- AYoung010 4y agoDo you mean Asahi?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- cevn 4y agoAsahi Linux. And it is awesome, the future is here. Just waiting for the GPU driver and ... suspend... and brightness and sound.
- gigatexal 4y agoYeah. As soon as it’s got feature parity I am getting an m1 Mac to run Linux with i3. And no don’t mention magnet it’s not the same.
- least 4y agoYou could try Yabai [1], but it's a bspwm clone not an i3 clone. Still not as zippy as the TWMs on linux, but a pretty decent experience overall. There's also Amethyst [2] which kind of replicates xmonad. In most ways they're worse than using the linux ones, though at least you retain the full features of Aqua and Quartz, while trying to integrate i3 or other TWMs with a proper DE in linux remains to be a hassle. [1] https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai [2] https://ianyh.com/amethyst/ https://ianyh.com/amethyst/
- gigatexal 4y agoI am familiar with both projects. And both are doing amazing work working around the limitations of MacOS to being some sensibility to the OS’s window manager. But yabai from what I remember requires you to disable SIP or to get it to fully work and on top of that I have cooled on my zealotry for MacOS over the years. I used to be a huge fanboy. But now I am a bit creeped out by all the ways Apple is trying to make it hard to leave the ecosystem. By how interconnected everything is. Also I love and support the brew project but … it’s not as fast or as robust as a proper package manager. (Maybe nix could come into play here.) But ultimately I am most keen on using proper Linux for the container tech, the customizability, the freedom, that containers run without the need for a VM —- that being said I hear arm64 VMs run super well on the M1s and … I dunno maybe I will revisit the Apple side of things. I just wish I could get the amazing Apple hardware and M1 or M2 performance and just run my own OS on it. The asahi folks are helping with that.
- dheera 4y agoThis. I hate MacOS with a passion.
- kristiandupont 4y agoEverything about it or the developer experience? I use a VM for my dev work and then run the rest (which pretty much means "a browser", these days) in MacOS. Which works perfectly.
- thayne 4y agoNot the original poster, but for me, everything. I'm the sort of user who likes to customize everything, and Mac (and other apple products) makes it hard to customize anything. And I'm the kind of developer who will make pull requests to fix bugs that bother me, so everything being proprietary rather than open source is also a big pain point.
- mrweasel 4y agoNothing wrong with that, and I have no point other than I’m facinated by your approach to computing. I customize my iTerm2 theme, tweak Vim a bit, increase the cursor size and I’m done. What I want is to be able to get a new laptop, login to my password manager and be working within 15 minutes.
- kaba0 4y agoI’m a long time linux user who recently got a Mac, and I found it much more customizable than I ever thought. At least compared to ios it is seriously just a very old “linux” kernel with a better integrated user space.
- speed_spread 4y ago
- stjohnswarts 4y agoThat's a lot of anger you're packing around there for an operating system lol
- mathstuf 4y agoI like the XPS 13 line myself. The 93xx line lasted all night when I forgot to shut the lid one evening (9+ hours) with Fedora (after running `powertop` and doing its tweaks). But I'm also a "weirdo" who doesn't like Apple-made hardware (the trackpad, touchbar, keyboard, mouse, etc. are all inferior IMO), so maybe you're looking for something different there.
- mikepurvis 4y agoI'm currently on my first and last XPS, a 9570. I really wanted to love it, but there's just too much about it that is a complete disaster, particularly around power management, wake behaviour, and thermals. I know I haven't exactly babied it, what with it having been plugged in in my home office for basically two straight years during the pandemic, but the battery is shot at this point— getting barely an hour of life. Often it'll be supposedly sleeping in lid-shut mode but be cooking itself for no reason. Then it'll wake up and immediately go into a power-panic shutdown, only to assert that the battery is full after all when it reboots connected to juice. And now the HDMI port is also toast (verified under multiple OSes to be a hardware issue). Maybe I just got a bad year, but this is supposed to be Dell's premium machine and I don't think I can justify giving them another chance after this. It's just nowhere near reliable enough to be used on the road, and not performant enough to be a true desktop replacement. So I don't know who is using this machine and for what.
- wrycoder 4y agoI’m thinking, that since your battery has passed its cycle limit, maybe the increased internal resistance of what odd causing all the heat issues. Maybe, change the battery?
- jcranberry 4y agoI had a 9520 for about 5 years. I had two issues, which was a broken left hinge (4k touch screen was two heavy for that part, I believe in the XPS 15 actually didn't suffer from the same issue), and swelling batteries, which caused various knock on issues. I also experienced the same issue with batteries from the dell latitude I got from work. Seemed to be a dell thing for laptops left plugged in constantly. I never had to deal with overheating issues despite having a Xeon (although it did get quite hot). Its a shame because otherwise I really liked the laptop. Gorgeous screen, good trackpad and keyboard, and a perfect size imo.
- slaw 4y agoI am waiting for HP Dev One. https://hpdevone.com/ https://hpdevone.com/
- yoyohello13 4y agoI wish I could get something like this from System76.
- jotm 4y agoMy honest advice: Don't get HP. Except for the highest end ZBooks, maybe. They all have severe drawbacks in some way. They even used the Elitebook brand to make cheap shit and now no one likes it. Gamers wanted the Omen, turned out to be shit. I bet the thermals are horrible, the keyboard sucks and/or will break in a year or two, the battery life will be bad, the BIOS updates will cause problems with no way to revert, the drives may suddenly fail and Linux still won't work properly on them :D
- watmough 4y agoMaybe consider a ThinkPad P1 Gen 4. $$$ but can be had for 40% off. A good spec with the nice screen and discrete graphics is < $3k. Upsides: Great for Ubuntu, everything just works. Screen is beautiful. Keyboard is brilliant. Downsides: Can get hot. Battery life sucks. Still 11th gen - Tiger Lake.
- fungi 4y agomeh monitor previous gen cpu only 16gig pretty underwhelming to be honest
- slaw 4y ago1000 nits not glossy laptop monitor. Which company makes better? 2 SODIMM, so 64 GB RAM.
- fungi 4y ago1000nits is great, but 1920x1080 is underwhelming. most of the thinkpad range is advertised as available with higher res (but other then the x1 carbon seems unavailable). > 2 SODIMM, so 64 GB RAM sweet :D this looks more interesting https://wccftech.com/hp-unleashes-zhan-x-a-14-inch-laptop-up-to-amd-ryzen-9-pro-6950hs-cpu-starting-under-1000-us/ https://wccftech.com/hp-unleashes-zhan-x-a-14-inch-laptop-up...
- david_allison 4y agoWould a Ubuntu arm64 VM running under macOS be worthwhile?
- lynguist 4y agoI work on an Ubuntu VM running in Parallels on a Mac M1 to target a Raspberry Pi. It’s the very best such setup possible.
- corrral 4y agoA major factor in achieving excellent battery life coupled with relatively good performance & responsiveness, on Apple products, is the OS. That holds for both Macs and iDevices.
- nicoburns 4y agoYes, although I think a lot of the issue is generic hardware drivers that don’t necessarily configure things correctly, and it looks like the Asiago linux people are paying a lot of attention to power management, so it may end up having decent battery life too.
- smlacy 4y agoSo you're saying that BSD has better power management than Linux? Would love to see some real research and analysis on this.
- corrral 4y agoMy claim is that macOS and iOS have far better power management than Linux or Windows, or Android, respectively. Possibly that's directly due to their BSD heritage, but I doubt it.
- ladyanita22 4y ago
- mwcampbell 4y agoApple's kernel isn't merely one of the BSD derivatives. And of course their userland is mostly proprietary.
- atq2119 4y agoIt's not a BSD vs. Linux thing. It's the entire software stack including user space, e.g. how much is the CPU woken up by silly background tasks doing useless things. That thing can be fixed regardless of the underlying kernel if people care enough. The total investment in desktop Linux is tiny compared to what Apple puts into macOS.
- flatiron 4y agoFramework is the closest I believe. Personally I buy used thinkpads. Huge bang for the buck and they are pretty much bullet proof. That being said my daily driver is a 2013 MacBook Air running arch now.
- Andrew_nenakhov 4y agoYes, I think so too now. But they don't ship to where I live, and their battery life is reportedly 3-4 times shorter than Air's. I understand that processors are a biggest cause of it. (No AMD option for Framework is also a very big minus in my eyes)
- dheera 4y agoFor hardware specs and upgradeability yes. I have one. I love how I paid market price for third-party 4TB SSD and 64GB of RAM and not Apple's 4X market price. For build quality I think they're still behind Asus, Lenovo, and Samsung.
- whalesalad 4y agoI am on a 2015 Macbook Pro also running Arch/KDE and it is a pretty solid daily driver.
- rvz 4y agoChoose two features between: 'Similar build quality', 'battery life', 'Ubuntu'.
- freedomben 4y agoI really think that's what the Framework will be in a couple of years. I use one now and it's pretty great, but does have a few (totally acceptable to me) rough edges that they're working on.
- mnholt 4y agoI don’t mean to discredit Framework in the slightest but they are still leagues away from Apple when it comes to build quality. The entire industry struggles to match Apple’s fit and finish, it will be an uphill battle for a hardware based startup. I do hope they succeed.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- micromacrofoot 4y agoApple runs an entire supply chain, for a small company it’s fantastic to be half as good bonus: it’s a niche I can’t imagine Apple going after any time soon!
- freedomben 4y agoYes true, I was probably too optimistic with "a couple of years."
- dheera 4y agoYep, I have a Framework laptop. I really hope Sand Hill Road doesn't kill it. They will almost definitely need another round or two at to hit profitability.
- duped 4y agoAs a framework owner, there's maybe two orders of magnitude difference in build quality between a mac and a framework. The track pad and display suck for a laptop in 2022. The display has issues with calibration and resolution (understandable from where they're at right now, but still it's trash compared to an XPS or MB). The trackpad has mechanical issues that cause it to wiggle, its been reported on the forum (and personally to staff a few times) but they don't seem to have a decent way to fix it. Its been a nightmare calibrating the touchpad to my liking, on my XPS and Macbook it has always "just worked" (even on Linux!)
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dr-detroit 4y ago
- baxtr 4y agoThe really interesting question: how much would you be willing to pay for it?
- hedora 4y agoI'm pretty price insensitive, but nothing on the market comes close to what I'd like: - One week suspend, resume under linux (reliable). - Keyboard and trackpad centered under display, and as good as best of class from 10 years ago. - 4K / hidpi display - no/minimal fan, cool running - 12+ hour "typical" battery life; at least 4 when running slack and zoom (and maybe compilation jobs) - as fast as a 10 year old midrange desktop e.g. i7: 2700) - don't care about video acceleration, but video out must reliably work. - No dual GPU switchover garbage. - not intel brand (the last N Intel machines I have used have had severe chipset/cpu issues) - ability to not run systemd in a supported config. All the laptops I have found fail on multiple of these points. My pine book pro meets as many of them as most high end laptops do (so, not all that many), but at least it was cheap and worked out of the box. Still waiting for a "real" laptop to replace it, but everything I've seen has glaring fatal flaws.
- intrasight 4y agoHow about replacing with a "real" computer? I stopped accepting these compromises around 2004, and since then have built my own computers from discrete components.
- mwcampbell 4y agoAs semiconductor technology advances, increasing miniaturization and integration become normal and expected. I imagine that in the 70s and early 80s, some people thought that the only "real" computers were minicomputers such as those made by DEC, or even mainframes. Highly integrated computers such as the Apple Silicon Macs are the logical continuation of the trend that began with the first microcomputers. Having said that, the desktop form factor has its place. My next PC will be a desktop. But it will also be a Windows PC. I wish there was a Windows PC that had the same level of integration, and performance per watt, as the M1 Mac mini.
- lynguist 4y agoWhat about the very same laptop running native Debian? How to install: https://git.zerfleddert.de/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi/m1-debian/ https://git.zerfleddert.de/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi/m1-debian/
- AviationAtom 4y agoI find this most interesting. I feel Apple went to Intel chips originally to be able to offer users the best of both worlds: both Windows and OS X. Naturally Bootcamp came along to bring that functionality. Now that Apple is back to a RISC chip, what is stopping them from offering a RISC version of Bootcamp? Windows runs on ARM chips, as do many distributions of Linux, so why not officially offer the ability to run alternate OSes?
- musictubes 4y agoApple originally went to Intel because IBM was unable to deliver a Power chip with any semblance of power efficiency. IIRC Windows compatibility took some time before it was available. Apple has said that Windows availability on the M series processors is up to Microsoft. Bootcamp is no longer needed, you can now install alternative OSes on the same drive and boot into whichever you want. At least that's the way Asahi works. Apple's hypervisor API is the way to go in any case. If companies use that Apple will take care of all necessary drivers. Doing things on bare metal will require a lot of work and Apple won't help with that.
- etse 4y agoI think Apple was motivated to switch to Intel because of the stagnated development of PowerPC. You may be thinking further back, like in the 90s, regarding Macs that could dual boot into PC
- Waterluvian 4y agoI’ve found that Ubuntu is the problem variable when it comes to battery life. I’ve never gotten it to behave comparably to MacOS or Windows on any hardware.
- michaelcampbell 4y agoHoping for Asahi Linux soon!