4 ms·
What kind of developing and what are you looking for in terms of specs? I run Xubuntu on a 13" MacBook Air, which is only ~$1100 and does everything I need. Fo
by graue 14y ago
What kind of developing and what are you looking for in terms of specs?
I run Xubuntu on a 13" MacBook Air, which is only ~$1100 and does everything I need. For web developers, I feel like the Air is almost the default option. That your budget is so high (“under $1700” would seem to include the vast majority of laptops) suggests you may be doing something that needs serious CPU/GPU performance, in which case our goals are different.
For me, portability was paramount (otherwise why get a laptop?), so I wanted it lightweight and no bigger than 13". Second, I wanted it to have an SSD so it'd be fast. I had read that replacing hard drives with SSDs makes a huge difference in responsiveness and that turns out to be absolutely true. All other specs (CPU, RAM, ...), I didn't care about because I felt confident they would be good enough.
Those goals narrowed it down to either one of the PC ultrabooks (which System76 does not make, unfortunately) or the Air. Out of the PC ultrabooks, the ThinkPad X1 Carbon was the best contender, and w1ntermute's comments in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4849781 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4849781 have convinced me that if I were buying a laptop today, I'd probably pick the X1 Carbon over the Air. Either one's great, though, and supports Ubuntu just fine.
- factorialboy 14y agoI can't seem to get a good display with any Ultrabook.
- zcrar70 14y agoThe Asus UX32VD has a 1920x1080 resolution. I have one and love it. You'll have to change the default HDD to an SSD, and upgrade the RAM to 10GB though. Jeff Atwood also has one - his review is here: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/09/the-last-pc-laptop.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/09/the-last-pc-laptop....
- aclimatt 14y agoWhat is your battery life like?
- Jean-Philipe 14y agoAlso have it and did the same upgrade. It seems the only (or one of the few) upgradable Zenbooks. Others have SSD or RAM soldered on the board. Needed some special screw drivers though (torque 5) in order to open it. Ubuntu is running on it, has some quirks currently, but runs quite well, although I had to remove the splash from the UEFI boot options to have it boot from a USB stick. Without any special power saving options used (like having the dedicated graphics chip turned off) I get between 3 and 4 hours of battery. Once I have time I will try to tweak the Linux a bit to consume less energy, turn a few things off (keyboard backlight, bluetooth, lower screen brightness) , I should be able to get up to 7 hours of battery or so. On text-mode only I might even get more. The screen is really bright and has nice colors. Only thing I didn't like was the trackpad, so I'm mostly on keyboard.
- jkaljundi 14y agoAsus Zenbook Prime now has full HD 1080p screen IPS FHD (1920x1080): http://www.asus.com/Notebooks/Superior_Mobility/ASUS_ZENBOOK_UX21A/ http://www.asus.com/Notebooks/Superior_Mobility/ASUS_ZENBOOK...
- tapan_pandita 14y agoDoes ubuntu/xubuntu work well on a macbook? Any problems? Can you dual boot with OS X? Do you need to like go into conf files to make it work well or is it just an install and everything works?
- graue 14y agoI commented on this a couple days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4849092 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4849092 In short, it works great. A few very minor annoyances I haven't fixed yet. You can dual boot with OS X using rEFIt: http://refit.sourceforge.net/ http://refit.sourceforge.net/ You do need to dip into config files just a little bit to get the fans working properly and to make the touchpad not suck.
- goldenchrome 14y agoI know you said you don't need serious performance but a decently spec'ed MBA goes for about $1700. That's with 8GB RAM, the i7 processor and 256GB SSD. You can do web development on a lower end MBA but large compiles or even using bigger IDEs like Eclipse calls for the extra RAM and processing power.
- graue 14y agoThanks for offering a different perspective. To me, the basic MBA — which outperforms my previous machine in every spec — clearly has more computing power than I could conceivably need. I never thought of it as low end, but compared to the options you describe, it certainly is.