5 ms·

Currently also looking at Framework+AMD. I want Mac hardware but Linux software. The other makers build quality is horrendous. Especially in the 13inch segment

by canpan 2y ago

Currently also looking at Framework+AMD. I want Mac hardware but Linux software. The other makers build quality is horrendous. Especially in the 13inch segment which is my favorite. Using a pretty old laptop because there is no replacement right now. The new Ryzen AI looks really interesting! Sadly there is no Framework shop for me to look at it and they not ship to Japan..

adastra22 2y ago
Asahi?
- canpan 2y ago
  Yeah, I heard good things about it. I do a lot of gamey development stuff and x64 makes that easier. But Asahi seems to be catching up a lot recently, maybe I should look at it again! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41799068 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41799068
  - MillironX 2y ago
    Asahi is an adventure. I am in the same camp where I got a MacBook for the hardware, but am really a Linux guy. I got really excited when the fex/muvm patches came out for Asahi, and switched to mainly booting it for a couple months. 80% of what I needed to do worked, but that 20% still wasn't there. It was mainly the little things too: 1. Display output from USB-C didn't work 2. Couldn't run Zotero 3. Couldn't compile Java bioinformatics tools 4. Container architecture mismatches led to catastrophic and hard-to-diagnose bugs There were things that worked better, too (better task management apps, and working gamepad support come to mind). Overall, even though I only needed those things once or twice a week, the blockers added up and I erased my Asahi partition in the end. I really appreciate the strides the Asahi project has made (no really, it's tremendous!), and while I would love to say that Linux lets me be most productive, features like Rosetta2 are really integrated that much better into MacOS so that I can't help but feel that Asahi is getting the worst of both worlds right now. I'll probably try again this summer and see what has developed.
noisy_boy 2y ago
The biggest issue Framework have right now is shipping. I can order a ThinkPad practically anywhere. No so with Framework - they are literally leaving money on the table from what I would assume their core segment: affluent tech savvy users trying to get off the planned obsolescence cycle.
- jpk 2y ago
  I'm not sure I follow. Your complaint is that Framework only sells direct and not through retailers?
  - capitol_ 2y ago
    No, there is a lot of us who live in countries that framework doesn't ship to.
    - xarope 2y ago
      ditto (insert sad puppy face here)
    - throw-the-towel 2y ago
      And if you use a mail forwarder, they deny your warranty.
  - yesbabyyes 2y ago
    Tell me you're from the US without telling me you're from the US. Jokes aside, I had to wait years for Framework to finally allow shipping via a friend in Berlin. I think they ship to Sweden now—they seemed to have an unfortunate misunderstanding that they needed to produce a Swedish keyboard and translate their website before shipping here, which of course is poppycocks.
    - prmoustache 2y ago
      I am pretty sure that if you have reached the point that you are ordering a laptop online from a brand unknown to the general public, it means you are past the point you need the actual physical keys to match your keyboard layout on your OS settings. You could just have blank keys.
sofixa 2y ago
> The other makers build quality is horrendous Out of curiosity, what are you basing this on? From having spoken to people who manage IT fleets, and being the person regular people ask for advice for what device to get, with the occasional exception (which Apple also had plenty of, cf. the butterfly keyboard), you get what you pay for. A 1k-1.5k+ Asus/Dell/HP/Lenovo will get you decent and good build quality. The cheapest $500 Acer won't.
- BoingBoomTschak 2y ago
  At work, our Windows devs use expensive XPSs that are complete crap failing constantly, both hardware and software. As someone who used Latitudes and Precisions when these were the reliable workhorses you seem to describe, the new stuff is just outrageous. (My personal laptop is still an e6440). My work machine is an M2 Pro MBP and except the shitty input HW (compared to the golden era of Thinkpads/Latitudes without chiclet keyboards) and MacOS being quite bad compared to Linux, it completely trounces the neighbouring Dells that constantly need repairs (mostly the USB-C ports and wireless cards failing).
- nottorp 2y ago
  Maybe if you run a fleet that's statistically true. If you're a regular person you can have incredible bad luck with specific models. Got two "2k" Lenovos at 4 year intervals. The first one worked fine but that model was known to have a weak hinge. Had to replace it three times. The second one had a known problem that some units simply stop working with the internal display and the only solution is replacing the motherboard. My unit worked about a week for me. Seller refunded me instead of repairing because it was end of the line and they didn't have replacements. Got a "2k" Asus ordered now, let's see how that goes :) Compared to that, even the one emoji keyboard macbook pro that i had worked for years. The keyboard on those models is defective by design and kept degrading, and I still think Cook should take his dried frog pills more regularly, but the rest of the laptop is still working. Not to mention my other, older apple laptops that are still just fine(tm), just obsolete.
  - goosedragons 2y ago
    I think price isn't the only thing. PC gaming/consumer laptops lean pretty heavily on price to performance ratios and I think they cut build quality to do it. Business lines like Thinkpad/EliteBook tend to offer worse performance dollar for dollar but they are built better.
Daneel_ 2y ago
Thinkpad line from Lenovo. Amazing build quality, and you can order them with Linux. I have a P1 Gen 7 and it’s fantastic. It feels premium, and it’s thin, light, powerful, has good connectivity and 4K OLED touch screen. I’d take it over Mac hardware any day.
- regularfry 2y ago
  Non-Thinkpad Lenovos have some standouts too. I'm running Debian Stable on an AMD Yoga Slim 7 from a couple of years ago and sure, it's not an Apple, but for the £800 or so I paid for it, it's a really polished machine. Loads of ports, and it's approximately performance-competitive with a Dell XPS13 from about the same time that cost literally twice as much. The one snag I ran into was that when it was new, supporting the power modes properly needed a mainline kernel rather than the distro default. But in the grand scheme of things that's relatively trivial. I have an M1 Macbook Pro from work and honestly I'm not tempted to get one for myself. I am tempted by the M3 and M4 beasts as AI machines, but as form factors go I'm just not sold.
- mzmzmzm 2y ago
  Aren't the only Thinkpads with displays in the 4k neighborhood 16-inches? The 14-inch Macbooks are 3024*1964 and have all been like that for a while. I don't know why the PC world (and Linux ready by extension) undervalues high DPI so much, because it makes it hard to consider going back.
  - thewebguyd 2y ago
    The screen keeps me on macbooks as well (well, and the touchpad, the speakers, and the lack of fan noise). But it is baffling how 1920x1080 (or 1200p) are still the "standard" elsewhere. If I want an X1 carbon, the best screen you can get at 14" right now is 2880x1800 (2.8k). Spec it with 32GB of RAM and it's clocking in at $2700, for a laptop that still has a worse trackpad, worse sound, and worse screen than a 14" MBP at $2399. And the Ultra7 in the thinkpad still doesn't beat the Mac, and it'll be loud with worse battery life. There truly is nothing else out there with the same experience as an Apple Silicon MBP or Air. So, my only options for the foreseeable future is wait for Asahi Linux, or suck it up and deal with macOS because at this rate I don't think there will ever be a laptop with the same quality (across all components) of the mac that can run Linux. The only one that came remotely close is the Surface Laptop 7 with the Snapdragon elite, but no Linux on that.
dsego 2y ago
Consider a thinkpad or lenovog yoga pro. I don't think the difference is is that pronounced anymore, maybe it never was, but you always need to look at the premium segment. Somehow people end up comparing budget pc laptops and macbooks.

by canpan 2y ago

adastra22 2y ago

Asahi?

canpan 2y ago
Yeah, I heard good things about it. I do a lot of gamey development stuff and x64 makes that easier. But Asahi seems to be catching up a lot recently, maybe I should look at it again! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41799068 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41799068
- MillironX 2y ago
  Asahi is an adventure. I am in the same camp where I got a MacBook for the hardware, but am really a Linux guy. I got really excited when the fex/muvm patches came out for Asahi, and switched to mainly booting it for a couple months. 80% of what I needed to do worked, but that 20% still wasn't there. It was mainly the little things too: 1. Display output from USB-C didn't work 2. Couldn't run Zotero 3. Couldn't compile Java bioinformatics tools 4. Container architecture mismatches led to catastrophic and hard-to-diagnose bugs There were things that worked better, too (better task management apps, and working gamepad support come to mind). Overall, even though I only needed those things once or twice a week, the blockers added up and I erased my Asahi partition in the end. I really appreciate the strides the Asahi project has made (no really, it's tremendous!), and while I would love to say that Linux lets me be most productive, features like Rosetta2 are really integrated that much better into MacOS so that I can't help but feel that Asahi is getting the worst of both worlds right now. I'll probably try again this summer and see what has developed.

noisy_boy 2y ago

The biggest issue Framework have right now is shipping. I can order a ThinkPad practically anywhere. No so with Framework - they are literally leaving money on the table from what I would assume their core segment: affluent tech savvy users trying to get off the planned obsolescence cycle.

jpk 2y ago
I'm not sure I follow. Your complaint is that Framework only sells direct and not through retailers?
- capitol_ 2y ago
  No, there is a lot of us who live in countries that framework doesn't ship to.
  - xarope 2y ago
    ditto (insert sad puppy face here)
  - throw-the-towel 2y ago
    And if you use a mail forwarder, they deny your warranty.
- yesbabyyes 2y ago
  Tell me you're from the US without telling me you're from the US. Jokes aside, I had to wait years for Framework to finally allow shipping via a friend in Berlin. I think they ship to Sweden now—they seemed to have an unfortunate misunderstanding that they needed to produce a Swedish keyboard and translate their website before shipping here, which of course is poppycocks.
  - prmoustache 2y ago
    I am pretty sure that if you have reached the point that you are ordering a laptop online from a brand unknown to the general public, it means you are past the point you need the actual physical keys to match your keyboard layout on your OS settings. You could just have blank keys.

sofixa 2y ago

> The other makers build quality is horrendous Out of curiosity, what are you basing this on? From having spoken to people who manage IT fleets, and being the person regular people ask for advice for what device to get, with the occasional exception (which Apple also had plenty of, cf. the butterfly keyboard), you get what you pay for. A 1k-1.5k+ Asus/Dell/HP/Lenovo will get you decent and good build quality. The cheapest $500 Acer won't.

BoingBoomTschak 2y ago
At work, our Windows devs use expensive XPSs that are complete crap failing constantly, both hardware and software. As someone who used Latitudes and Precisions when these were the reliable workhorses you seem to describe, the new stuff is just outrageous. (My personal laptop is still an e6440). My work machine is an M2 Pro MBP and except the shitty input HW (compared to the golden era of Thinkpads/Latitudes without chiclet keyboards) and MacOS being quite bad compared to Linux, it completely trounces the neighbouring Dells that constantly need repairs (mostly the USB-C ports and wireless cards failing).
nottorp 2y ago
Maybe if you run a fleet that's statistically true. If you're a regular person you can have incredible bad luck with specific models. Got two "2k" Lenovos at 4 year intervals. The first one worked fine but that model was known to have a weak hinge. Had to replace it three times. The second one had a known problem that some units simply stop working with the internal display and the only solution is replacing the motherboard. My unit worked about a week for me. Seller refunded me instead of repairing because it was end of the line and they didn't have replacements. Got a "2k" Asus ordered now, let's see how that goes :) Compared to that, even the one emoji keyboard macbook pro that i had worked for years. The keyboard on those models is defective by design and kept degrading, and I still think Cook should take his dried frog pills more regularly, but the rest of the laptop is still working. Not to mention my other, older apple laptops that are still just fine(tm), just obsolete.
- goosedragons 2y ago
  I think price isn't the only thing. PC gaming/consumer laptops lean pretty heavily on price to performance ratios and I think they cut build quality to do it. Business lines like Thinkpad/EliteBook tend to offer worse performance dollar for dollar but they are built better.

Daneel_ 2y ago

Thinkpad line from Lenovo. Amazing build quality, and you can order them with Linux. I have a P1 Gen 7 and it’s fantastic. It feels premium, and it’s thin, light, powerful, has good connectivity and 4K OLED touch screen. I’d take it over Mac hardware any day.

regularfry 2y ago
Non-Thinkpad Lenovos have some standouts too. I'm running Debian Stable on an AMD Yoga Slim 7 from a couple of years ago and sure, it's not an Apple, but for the £800 or so I paid for it, it's a really polished machine. Loads of ports, and it's approximately performance-competitive with a Dell XPS13 from about the same time that cost literally twice as much. The one snag I ran into was that when it was new, supporting the power modes properly needed a mainline kernel rather than the distro default. But in the grand scheme of things that's relatively trivial. I have an M1 Macbook Pro from work and honestly I'm not tempted to get one for myself. I am tempted by the M3 and M4 beasts as AI machines, but as form factors go I'm just not sold.
mzmzmzm 2y ago
Aren't the only Thinkpads with displays in the 4k neighborhood 16-inches? The 14-inch Macbooks are 3024*1964 and have all been like that for a while. I don't know why the PC world (and Linux ready by extension) undervalues high DPI so much, because it makes it hard to consider going back.
- thewebguyd 2y ago
  The screen keeps me on macbooks as well (well, and the touchpad, the speakers, and the lack of fan noise). But it is baffling how 1920x1080 (or 1200p) are still the "standard" elsewhere. If I want an X1 carbon, the best screen you can get at 14" right now is 2880x1800 (2.8k). Spec it with 32GB of RAM and it's clocking in at $2700, for a laptop that still has a worse trackpad, worse sound, and worse screen than a 14" MBP at $2399. And the Ultra7 in the thinkpad still doesn't beat the Mac, and it'll be loud with worse battery life. There truly is nothing else out there with the same experience as an Apple Silicon MBP or Air. So, my only options for the foreseeable future is wait for Asahi Linux, or suck it up and deal with macOS because at this rate I don't think there will ever be a laptop with the same quality (across all components) of the mac that can run Linux. The only one that came remotely close is the Surface Laptop 7 with the Snapdragon elite, but no Linux on that.

dsego 2y ago

Consider a thinkpad or lenovog yoga pro. I don't think the difference is is that pronounced anymore, maybe it never was, but you always need to look at the premium segment. Somehow people end up comparing budget pc laptops and macbooks.