If the RAM is user-upgradable, this will make for an excellent dev machine. Given it's a chinese laptop, it will surely not be locked, so Ubuntu will run well as well.
If you intend to run Linux on the thing, buy things that Linux supports out of the box. That probably means sticking to the working Intel stuff for now. You'll thank me later (or not, because you won't miss the problems you don't have).
The binary blob provided by Nvidia have been quite reliable across the years (and I think they've been available for more than 10 years) while the open source ATI/AMD drivers have frequently failed to deliver.
My current (and only) working solution is to disable the Nvidia GPU on a host and use it PCIe passthrough to assign it to another Linux or Windows VM. That's the only stable solution that doesn't break the world when enabling/disabling the discrete GPU.
We shouldn't have to revert to such extreme measures...
Both are somewhat annoying, but far less than only being able to use it in a VM. That said, I'm curious about how you manage the VM output, considering that PCIe passthrough requires a dedicated screen.
In the even rarer case that I wish to play a game, I have an HDMI connection between the GPU and my projector, which I can enable with a remote control.
Learning how to use qemu is a bit of a pain (hint: use qemu directly, virus is a huge waste of time) but after the initial learning curve the setup is seamless for my use case - and I feel safer without the GPU drivers having access to my normal desktop. I much prefer this setup to dual-booting Windows for gaming. The VM spins up in a few seconds and shuts down when not in use (turning off the GPU in the process).
In my experience, the open-source radeon drivers are significantly more stable. Fglrx was a stinking pile of crap that has officially been abandoned - the whole driver team has switched to the open-source drivers, now.
Linking to Theano-CUDA is always a nightmare.
Forget about optimus. That has never worked correctly on Linux.
The only reason I can see someone wanting nvidia on linux is for CUDA. And in that case, you can't just use the ubuntu pre-built version of the drivers.
If you are not doing neural nets locally on Linux, you shouldn't get a discrete graphics card. And if you do get a discrete one, make sure it's not Nvidia since their open source drivers are much inferior to AMD's.
This is an honest question, and I appreciate your answer in advance.
I have a desktop with an HD 6850 and the radeon driver has always worked well, I used to play DOTA2 on it.
But this is a very old GPU now, and all newer models (HD7xxx and up) were having performance issues with the radeon driver last time I was reading the forums.
Not sure about compatibility with the recent OSX, though. I used lion and mountain lion, and those worked well. AFAIR I’ve used vmware tools from Fusion.
Legally no. VM or not, the real hardware needs to be made by Apple.
In the host machine, you need reasonably fast Intel CPU, hardware-assisted virtualization enabled in BIOS/UEFI, enough RAM, also unofficial VMWare patch to unlock OSX guests on PC hosts.
In the guest OS, you need VMWare tools for OSX, they exist because VMWare supports OSX guests when running on OSX hosts.
If you do web development it is also a much better development experience than using Windows.
Bluetooth devices work much better in Linux than Windows (at least the ones I have).
USB devices are also much better handled in Linux. I never see an 'Installing device driver for this USB stick' message.
I plug my kindle in Ubuntu, it opens Calibre. I plug my kindle in Windows, it shows a folder.
I lose all these niceties if I run Linux inside a VM.
* WTF, why isn't my NIC registering? I thought we had a standard for this stuff by now.
* Download NIC drivers from secondary computer
* Put NIC drivers on a USB stick
* Install NIC drivers
* Nothing happened, turns out you found the drivers for the wrong revision of the chipset, go back to square one
* Download Nvidia drivers
* Try to install, nope, you need to find the Intel drivers first
* Download and install Intel drivers
* Install the Nvidia drivers again
* It's 2AM already, go to sleep
* You forgot to turn off Windows Update, and now you're stuck with Windows 10
* Reformat again, and start over
As opposed to:
$ sudo pacman -S nvidia bumblebee && sudo usermod -aG bumblebee $(whoami) && reboot
The linux comparison isn't recent either. That was the exact same procedure I had to do on an nVidia-stricken laptop (thankfully not mine) four years ago.
http://www.extremetech.com/mobile/221881-apples-a9x-goes-hea...
Things that really hurt are short battery life which is ~1.45hrs, and that it misses the modern CPU extensions which will obsolete it soon. Both of this issues obviously won't be present in a Core M3, so I see no reason why you wouldn't dev on an M3 unless you compile big native projects with great frequency.
[1]: https://m.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/45q90s/is_anything_b... [2]: https://m.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/2uxt46/rust_vs_c_inc_co...
http://www.zdnet.com/article/the-other-hidden-cost-of-runnin...
I'm not sure how true his thought is in relation to china,but neither here nor there.