Best laptop for linux (probably Ubuntu)? | Hacker News Reader

Best laptop for linux (probably Ubuntu)?

24 pointswheresvic133 comments

I'm looking for a new laptop for programming (Java, JavaScript, CSS, MongoDB, etc.) and would love to have some input!

If you want something with good hardware support for Linux Lenovo is always my first choice. I have a Thinkpad x220 that runs Linux flawlessly. I've also got an ASUS UX305CA which isn't too bad either. The brightness controls didn't work out of the box, but I've got it all working now. It's thin and light, comparable to a Macbook Air. I use it as my personal development laptop. Easy to take anywhere since it's only 13 inches, but it has a QHD touchscreen so there is plenty of space to have multiple code windows open at the same time. Battery life isn't too bad either and it's cheap (about $700 USD new).

Yeah, I like Lenovo too - this is currently my third Lenovo laptop, all ran Ubuntu pretty much without a hitch.

I've had the Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition with Ubuntu installed for a few weeks now and love it. It works as well as you could hope any Linux laptop could work.

I've heard that the only hardware difference between the standard + developer edition is the WiFi card (Broadcom vs. Intel) and that a lot of people just buy the standard edition and replace the substandard Broadcom card for the better Intel one.

I've been using the standard version with Ubuntu (Kernel 4.4) and the Broadcom driver is also perfectly stable for me.

I've had 3 hand-me-down computers, all with Broadcom drivers and they all exhibit bizarre behaviour which rendered the computers unusable. For one of them, the solution was to switch to the proprietary drivers and the other two just had to be replaced with equivalent Intel cards.

tl;dr mileage depends, but it's universally accepted that Broadcom cards are shit.

Got myself the XPS 13 standard and it seems to work well. Fonts at 3200x1800 looks as great as on a smartphone and I was dubious about the touch screen but it has won me over.

Lazily poking the screen for browsing the web is a mobile paradigm that I welcome on the desktop.

The only thing that annoys me is not having a dedicated home, end, page up and page down buttons. They're mapped to the arrow keys + Fn.

Speaking of Thinkpads. My first is a T450 which I got for work recently. It's solidly built but lacks a premium feel to it. Also the display has awful viewing angles.

The Linux laptop of choice is the Lenovo ThinkPad X Series.

The only thing I can share is my experience with Thinkpad E130. I've got it for about 3years and I'm really happy about how it's working with Arch Linux. I remember I had a little problem with installing bootloader (EFI), but now everything's fine except SD card reader (but I've read that there is alternative driver to fix this).

It's totally enough for everything I do: web, movies (OK, very high quality happens to be a problem), music, programming, photo/video editing and even games (Half Life 2, Civilization V and Oblivion are level expected to work very well on high details). I don't know how It would manage with full blown KDE/GNOME desktop though (I prefer terminal+tiling WM). If you don't mind small size (I love it) I recommend it. Really the only thing that doesn't work well is that for some reason shutdown works like reboot so you have to turn of using power button, but who cares If you usualy just swith to the sleep mode.

I've been extremely happy with zareason; System76 is also very good if you're willing to remain Ubuntu-only.

OK, so a month ago I was thinking of going all out and getting myself a sweet System76 laptop but then I thought about it and since I am doing most of my coding for web and apps, there is no need for a super kickass system. Decided I would try it instead on an older laptop. I picked up a thinkpad X220 for $200 and added an SSD drive, and I got to tell you, the thing has been pretty solid. I think I am going to upgrade again shortly and was looking again at the thinkpads... 20+ years of refinement has produced a solid machine.. Even the older models. That my 2cents.

Acer Chromebook (CB3-111) with crouton. Nodejs and MongoDB work fine (redis, also). Perfect for coding everywhere in the home/city/world (mine went to Europe with me!). I also have Python 3 and LaTeX installed so my chromebook is 95% full.

Best battery-time vs price ratio ever.

However, you'll have to learn to live with small disk space.

To find disk usage:

    df -h

Also, this is useful to find large files:

    du -h . | grep "[0-9][0-9]M"

Since chromebooks have SSDs, these commands run faster than you would imagine.

Any laptop, and I say that only half facetiously. I have 2 Identical computers. One with Ubuntu 16.04 and the other Win10. When the windows PC is on, the average temperature in my room rises a noticeable amount compared to its Ubuntu twin. Not the most scientific of tests but it does demonstrate that Windows 10 is doing a lot more background tasks than Ubuntu which will adversely effect battery life.

I have a Google Pixel LS that was at some point a choice of Linus Torvalds himself, running vanilla Ubuntu natively. Works like a charm.

Looks way too expansive for specs. How does it justify 1.600$ ?

Thanks all for the helpful comments - it seems like the Thinkpad T420/T450 seem to be the preferred choice although I am really happy to see that there are also quite a few other options.

System76 also sounds great because they specialize in Ubuntu and I've worked on dell laptops before and love their build quality so it's going to be a tough choice :)

I have a T420 I bought on woot for $200 that runs ubuntu perfectly out of the box. Upgraded to 16GB memory.

Take a look at System 76 (https://system76.com/) machines which are sold as Linux (Ubuntu) machines. I bought one to use as a work travel machine. It has been (and continues to be) a good machine.

I too have a system 76. It is overall pretty solid. It has trouble with 2 external monitors though (more a ubuntu issue then the company). I also wouldn't want to travel with it too much as the chassis is all plastic and pretty flexible. I would worry about accidentally bending the screen or something. I love the company though, and hope that they can keep improving their stuff.

I'd like to know experiences using a newer model Thinkpad T460S or T460P with discrete graphics experiences using any distribution of Linux. Does sleep, suspend, hibernate work well? Dual display? The retina (? pixel scaling?) work well? What doesn't work?

I have a t450s running Ubuntu and it's awesome. Plan on buying a 16GB DIMM, obviously. I wish they'd add more slots for RAM. Also, get the option where you can cram 3 SSDs into it. Then you can swap to "slow RAM" if you blow out the 20GB. Just a little 20-40GB slice of an SSD but it can save you a lot of hassle if you start to thrash while running simulations or merging huge tables or the like.

I have a T440p and dual boot Win10 and Ubuntu. Everything works out of the box, except the Nvidia GPU. Switching between Intel and Nvidia is possible, but for some unknown reasons I can't boot with Nvidia activated. Configuring the Xserver was not straight forward for my use cases (dock with 1 monitor/laptop only).

The time tested affordable solution will often be the Lenovo Thinkpad series. But if your looking for the trendier high end stuff, everyone is making a ruckus about System 76.

Another vote for Thinkpad. Specifically P50. You can add up to 64 GB of RAM, PCIe SSD and a Xeon processor.

I love my Zen Book, no moving parts, 8MB Ram, 3 USB and 6-8 hours battery.

Whole 8MB of RAM? Wow! ;-)

He said development, not 256 open tabs in Chrome :)

Lenovo T460

What I find painful in modern laptops are the crap chiclet keyboard layouts. Why can't we just have a classic, compressed keyboard like on the thinkpad t420 or x220? I get cramps from the keyboard of my dell e5570 I have from the workplace, I started using external keyboards 2 days after starting on it.

Here's hoping for a retro thinkpad next year. Until then, I'll hold onto my money or just invest in an ergodox keyboard.

Exactly this is why I still keep my T420s. Also, the new lenovos tend to have absolutely terrible touchpads that move (tilt instead of having proper buttons) etc.

I use a well specced out Dell E6440 at work (i7-4610, 16GB ram, 512GB SSD, 1080p IPS screen) and it does have a classic non chiclet keyboard. Besides the weight and size of it due to the integrated DVD drive it found it to be an amazing machine with a great keyboad.

Personally I still use a ThinkPad X220 and I would not consider the Dell's keyboard significantly worse (I prefer the key placement of the page up/down keys etc of the X220 though).

I never understood why people didn't like chiclet keyboards until I recently bought a T420. Now, I don't want to go back ;-)

For the past 8 years, I have used 2 Lenovo Thinkpad models (the current one is E series, don't remember the exact model of the previous one). Used both of them with a Linux OS. I have had no issues with either of these over the past 8 years and their performance too has been excellent - I use these just for development activities which involves working on IDEs, running multiple servers (for coding and testing with them) and for the usual browsing and other things. I am not a video/gaming user.

The only issue that I sometimes have with them is that they heat up really quick, so using them on your laps is a problem. It's not a problem for me, because, most of the times, I use them connected to an external monitor, keyboard and a mouse - it's pretty much on my table with its lid closed down.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com