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Comment by brightball | Hacker News Reader

As much as I like Ubuntu, I have a significantly higher level of trust in Red Hat to get this right for some reason. Maybe it's just confidence in the company's core principles.

I've hit a point where I'm ready to move on from my Macbook Pro after about 10 years and I've been looking at Linux laptop options. It's mind boggling that it's so hard to find good options.

Everything seems to revolve around "get a Windows laptop and wipe it" or "buy some flavor of old Thinkpad" with warnings about EFI and compatibility. Then there are company's like System76 who have what looks like a good offering on the surface but I keep seeing threads about bad experiences with them.

If I could order a laptop direct from Red Hat I'd do it without hesitation.

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Dell sells a few "developer editions" of their XPS13 with Ubuntu preloaded [1].

[1] http://www.dell.com/ca/business/p/xps-13-9350-laptop-ubuntu/...

As an owner of a Dell XPS Developer Edition, with Ubuntu installed, expect every Linux application you have not to work with its high resolution display. I'm happy enough to get my terminal, Chromium and my IDE working with it, but 99% of applications are just not made for it. Also, before you enter Linux check if applications you use daily ( like Skype ) work well on Linux. Just try it on a VM first. I was really surprised to see what Skype looks like on Linux, especially in combination with the high res screen. Not only that, a load of things just dont work out of the box that you'd expect from a Windows or Mac machine ( small things like unplugging my earphones while the laptop is in sleep mode, turning it on and having no sound, until I find earphones to plug in and out again. ) Do not recommend. What I would recommend is trying out Linux for a month or so, with a dual-boot setup.

as a owner of a XPS 13 with the latest 6560u skylake and iris 540 .. and an edition that is NOT a developer edition... I couldnt be happier.

Ubuntu has been terrible. I switched to Fedora 24 on the XPS 13 and it has been brilliant. No other laptop (not even macbooks) come with that weight/power ratio.

Everything works - including skype, etc. suspend resume has worked absolutely perfectly.

I really, really recommend using Fedora. Ubuntu has not been delivering the experience that the hype expects.

except fonts...

Freetype's grayscale rendering works great on higher DPI displays, even the 1080P display on my 2013 Dell XPS 13 is sufficiently dense for me to not notice, and with some recent improvements in Fedora 24 I hardly notice the lack of subpixel rendering even on my 24" display at home (though it's still somewhat irksome, debating installing freetype-freeworld again).

I definitely noticed on Thinkpad's 14" 1600x900 display. However, after installing freetype-freeworld and configuring rgba rendering, the font rendering is better than Windows or OSX.

The fonts on Fedora 24 on the XPS 13 is brilliant. I think gnome and freetype has improved to the level that the rendering is excellent.

Can confirm, with a Thinkpad T460s. Better than Windows and OS X.

Short version: a lot of us don't even think about the fonts as long as we have and ordinary monospaced one when we edit code.

Long version: It seems there are two kinds of people here:

Some like me never think about any font that finds its way into any mainstream distro.

Others seems to care deeply about them.

I find it useful to keep this in mind as I honestly find one of the highly praised Mac a usability disaster (tried honestly to work with it or around it for almost three years).

Sure, but that doesn't mean improvement can't happen.

I personally would love to see a proper graphics application. I would use linux as my main PC in a heartbeat if a Sketch equivalent was available. I expect a lot of people have similar feelings or have one thing keeping them from completely making the jump.

Yep, my point is only that we shouldn't discourage people from trying because it looks awful and jarring - a lot of us don't recognize that and loves thise Linux distros. :-)

I'm one of those people that just can't tolerate ugly fonts. It drives me insane.

I recently got a MBP and the fonts are great. In 2016, Linux needs this fixed.

As a programmer, how can you not care? You stare at it all day.

That's like saying some art dealers don't care what paintings look like. They just sell the stuff.

I understand this might sound weird but I just don't think about fonts. In my head that is designer territory and ever since I realised I was colourweak and couldn't be one anyway I stopped even trying.

I know three types that I use: serif, sans-serif and monospaced programming fonts.

I do however care a lot about keyboard layouts, keyboard shortcuts and general snappiness of the OS so I am definitely a programmer ;-)

Edit: and I'm not a graphics programmer so I'm not an "art dealer" anyway, more like someone in logistics. :-)

There are definitely art dealers that don't care about what the paintings look like, and just want what sells. Personally, as long as it's readable...

This is one of the things I really love about Ubuntu. Ubuntu monospace is the most readable and unambiguous monospace font I've ever seen.

I ran Linux on the desktop for 19 years. I always used the same distro on the servers as I did on my desktop, just to keep it consistent. I changed a dozen machines over to a new distro, at one point, because I couldn't get my fonts to look good. So, yeah, I'm one of "those people."

Fellow font-blind person here. It's hard for me to understand the intense emotional response other people have to fonts. I couldn't care less about fonts than I do about the colour of the circuit board my CPU is soldered on.

Out of the box Fedora has ugly fonts but that is easily fixed with Fedy http://folkswithhats.org/ takes two minutes and you have beautiful fonts just like Ubuntu :)

It doesn't matter on high DPI displays by the way.

The issue that made me give up the XPS 13 for personal use was that Linux still doesn't support having a secondary monitor at a lower pixel density. I tried about 5 different distros, they all looked terrible, so I had to return the XPS and get a MacBook that I knew would work just fine. Other than that the laptop was beautiful.

They say you have to wait for Wayland for this to work correctly.

Yep, that's why I decided to return the laptop and wait until Wayland is the default on Fedora to try again. I love Linux, used it for years as my main OS, but it's hard to beat the convenience of OS X when it comes to productivity. I don't miss all the time spent trying to get music to play without audible clicks caused by faulty drivers, setting up my computer so it'd remember where my desk monitor is in relation to the laptop monitor, getting wi-fi drivers to stop dropping packets, etc.

I simply scale the external display using xrandr --scale 2x2 (or similar, you can specify fractions).

Works way better than expected and I use it ten hours a day. At some point, Wayland solves this natively, but in the meantime this is an acceptable workaround.

It's crazy there is no obvious UI for this. xrandr can do so much more than the typical monitor settings panel.

I got mine yesterday. Replaced the preinstalled Ubuntu 14.04 LTs with Arch Linux and I was shocked how well everything worked. So far I haven't found a single thing that doesn't work and having installed Linux on a lot of laptops in the past that's truly not something I would expect. Apart from the icons in the Gnome app tray I haven't seen any issues with HiDPI either.

Agreed. I run Fedora as my main VM and it has been pretty damn solid. I tried dual booting and had some NVidia problems, but otherwise it was okay.

It is 80% there, and if I didn't just get a MBP from work, I'd probably spend some more time with Fedora outside the VM.

Either way, if MS doesn't clean up their act, I'm done with Windows after a long time of daily use.

There was quite a bit of talk that Skype on Linux is dead with the move by MS to the cloud.

But there's a new official client coming based on WebRTC :

https://community.skype.com/t5/Linux/Skype-for-Linux-Alpha-a...

Skype web works brilliantly on the chrome browser on Linux. I prefer it to the desktop client.

No video yet though

Stop using Skype. Can confirm that the WebRTC client works fine however.

Jitsi Meet is a self-hosted, enterprise-grade alternative which works just as well. It even supports larger video conferences than Skype.

Stop using Skype.

Easier said than done when colleagues, friends, and family use Skype for video calling.

Works surprisingly well with Jitsi Meet, since it runs in the browser and requires no setup. Just send them the link, they click on it, done.

Public instance there: https://meet.jit.si/

Company I work for migrated from Skype to Jitsi for meetings.

"Hi, sorry, no I can't attend the Skype interview, lima on HN told me to stop using it"

Mint + Cinnamon + HiDPI On and your are set. Running on a QHD+ notebook with this for over a year, no problems.

Skype is owned by Microsoft it's not a huge surprise that it's not a smooth experience on Linux.

Linux is a different operating system with a different philosophy. There are windows-y distros, but and the end of the day the core is very different and the UX is very different.

Switching to Linux is not like switching brands of cars. It's more like switching from a car to a motorcycle. The rules are different, the ride is different, the functioning knowledge you need is different. Don't expect your car-seat to work anymore, you'll need a different product entirely to achieve the same function.

Especially if you are switching for philosophical reasons, I'd say just bite the bullet and learn to adjust. There are a lot of huge benefits, but also a lot of things you're used to just won't work anymore.

I haven't touched Windows in 3 years. You definitely don't need it.

The new web client supports audio calls in Chrom(e|ium) on Linux nowadays.

rm -rf /opt/skype

Skype is owned by Microsoft it's not a huge surprise that it's not a smooth experience on Linux.

Linux is a different operating system with a different philosophy. There are windows-y distros, but and the end of the day the core is very different and the UX is very different.

This is quite an irrelevant point. macOS is also very different from Windows, from the POSIX API (which makes it very similar to Linux) to Cocoa. And yet Skype works fine.

The real reason is more likely to be that Microsoft just doesn't want to support Linux properly. Of course, the reasons are more clouded, possible reasons are: virtually no marketshare on the desktop, large fragmentation, or they simply see Linux as a competitor that they don't want to give momentum. Given that they do support Android, iOS, and macOS, my guess would be the former two.

The high res screen (on an XPS 15, not 13) also drains the battery significantly. I opted for the "low res" 1920x1080 screen which works much better for my uses. I have an external 4k monitor when at a desk and a sufficient display when on the go.

This is all with Debian Linux btw.

You can fiddle with the settings to change the 'DPI' so that the apps look better/bigger. I'm very happy with the XPS 13 developer edition that i have.

Would second the XPS13. If you don't want to shell out for a high-end Thinkpad, it is a great option. Mine was the first "developer edition" and it is still running great. There is plenty of support for it on distros aside from Ubuntu. I have run Fedora on mine for years now.

The desktop experience of Linux in general is still a bit off, but if you are like me and spend 99% of your time in the terminal or a web browser it certainly gets the job done. You can always supplement with a VM if you have to run "that program".

Seems like the XPS is just as expensive as a T series Thinkpad.

I don't understand why the XPS is so popular compared to similar priced business grade Thinkpad and Latitudes.

My company was considering using these as our Linux option, but we couldn't enable full-disk encryption (Grub has an issue with encrypted NVME drives.) When I contacted Dell they said Linux was not supported via email, but rather through the community. (I'm now running a Thinkpad that's a few years old and it works much better than the XPS 13.)

Which Thinkpad?

I personally ran Ubuntu on the T520P and the T540P over the past 4 years. Both have yet to disappoint me.

X230 Tablet. The stylus works out of the box with Ubuntu 14.04.

Only nit is that the standby battery life is only a few days. I upgraded from the 3-cell (which was pretty old and lasted about two hours) to a 6-cell. I'm still testing it but it lasts at least 5 hours under moderate usage. I think with the brightness on low it could last 10.

I second JoshTriplett, thinkpad usually have great linux compat. right out of the box. I usually only get laptops without discreet GPU, but it seems that discreet GPUs (both amd and nvidia) are the sources of most trouble when switching to linux.

> If I could order a laptop direct from Red Hat I'd do it without hesitation.

Dell xps dev edition is the closest thing to that right now. but i definitely agree, it would be awesome to have a linux equivalent of the surface pro made by either redhat or canonical.

I think a lot of the GPU stuff has been largely solved in recent years, too. I have one and only one reason I will not use Linux on a laptop, and that is power efficiency. I have never managed to get any laptop to even 60% of the battery life it gets with Windows. Those times I've tried to use all of the PowerTOP calibrations, the end result has been unpredictable drops in performance and things like my trackpad just freezing at random intervals.

I'm on Mac for now. I really, truly want to be on Linux because I would like to use docker-compose for development sandboxing (and Docker Mac performance is unacceptable). But until I can get solid battery life, it's just not in the cards.

Odd, my battery life improved when I switched from Win10 to Ubuntu-MATE. Well, I guess I also replaced the HD with a SSD so that helped. But I have had pretty good battery life with the default install.

My GPU situation is definitely not resolved. I can't get it to switch to the discrete 90% of the time. and then when I do, I cant get it to swap seamlessly between intel for desktop and radeon for games. So my laptop is delegated to being a terminal and browser only machine.

Also, since 4.2, I can't change the screen brightness. I can change it during the BIOS splash, but once the kernel takes over, the key stops doing anything. The brightness slider moves around, but doesnt actually do anything.

It's a shame too, gaming is the one thing keeping my dad (who has the same laptop) from switching over to linux.

Can confirm on W520, W530, and W541 (I think). They all have terrible GPU support. The W530 for example has no video out muxer, so you have to use discrete graphics if you want any kind of external display, tanking your battery life. Brightness doesn't work.

Not only that, the W520, T420, and L420 [0][1] and W530 have BIOS/chipset bugs that mean you need to disable x2apic. Avoid unless you love tinkering with Linux.

[0] https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-P-and-W-Series-Mobile/... [1] https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/18/1

I agree that auto-processor-scale on Linux is not great, but I have been able to get good battery life from Linux by using LXDE and keeping the processor on its lowest setting at all times. (This may or may not result in unacceptable compilation times, etc, YMMV.)

I have an XPS 13 9350 running Fedora 24, and battery life is excellent. I have a friend with a different variant of the same laptop running Windows 10, and it has all kinds of power management issues.

(If you need a secondary monitor, the situation isn't so good, though. Linux is missing support for some i915 USB-C feature that can cause issues with some adapters.)

You don't need to buy an old ThinkPad; current-generation ThinkPads work fine, as long as you avoid nVidia GPUs. All the other hardware (including power management) Just Works.

Looking on the site, they seem to all have Nvidia?

Look at the T and X series. Unless you are buying the very high end with discrete GPUs, they all have Intel.

Do you have any suggestions? I'm currently leaning towards the Lenovo X260 or an older X220.

Get a T450s / x250 - they are very well supported.

That's the problem. I'm aiming for a 17".

That's where System76 comes in for me.

Dell's Precision 7100 workbeast comes with Ubuntu as a preinstall option.

That looks like what I need right there. Thank you.

Yep. After going through the configuration, this looks like exactly what I'm going to be getting at some point soon. Thank you.

I've been running Linux on the X220 (tablet) for 4+ years at this point; it's still a great machine (although I need to boot it up and clean the insides soon...), although obviously slightly dated in terms of hardware.

The X260 will likely work as an exact replica, but I haven't updated to Skylake yet so it's hard to say (ISTR there being some GPU buginess with Skylake at first). Otherwise everything should work almost perfectly out of the box, in my experience, though you'll probably want to tweak your power settings. The X260 will have a far superior screen, which if you're coming from a Macbook or anything will probably be important.

One of these days I'll upgrade and take my X220 down to the local hackerspace and get Coreboot put on it probably...

While I loved my X220, I don't see a good reason to get an older laptop today.

I'm a huge fan of the X1 series, which has about the same weight as the X260 but a bigger and higher-resolution screen. The X260 has the advantage of a hot-swappable, externally chargeable battery, and a better docking station; if you don't need either of those, go with the X1 and its awesome screen.

Is it really very difficult to get nVidia GPUs working with linux?

I wanted to buy a laptop with a GPU for CUDA experiments.

I was looking at Lenovo Yoga 710 (14 inch with nvidia gpu). Am I going to have a bad time dual booting a linux distribution?

I've had mixed experiences with different GPUs very hard to tell. Laptop Quadro Series? Yes 750ti desktop? No 970 desktop? Sorta. It's unfortunate but it really seems to depend not only on platform but specific version of platform.

It's a mess.

Someone else in the thread said what I completely agree with if possible just get the latest Intel HD series it works pretty much flawlessly.

I have a T460p with a dedicated NVIDIA graphics card, and it runs just fine under Ubuntu 16.04 with the newest drivers. Steam also runs fine.

For desktop PCs, not at all, Nvidia GPUs are very easy to get working and will give the best performance.

In modern laptops, you usually have the complication of 'optimus' which allows you to switch between the onboard Intel graphics and the Nvidia GPU. This can be a bit awkward to get working, but it's improved recently. I've had plenty of issues getting it working right on Windows too.

Yeah... the optimus crap has serious problems. It causes my GPU driver to crash on Windows while I'm trying to give demos at work (not exactly a great look when your screen goes black and then your application's 3d display dies). It's not exactly the most stable thing, but can be great for power consumption.

On my T530, there's a firmware option to set the graphics to discrete-only, integrated-only, or optimus. The downside to discrete-only is the power usage. The downside to integrated-only is that the displayport won't work.

All three work great in Windows of course. For Linux, integrated-only is best, followed by discrete-only, and I've never had success with optimus.

I have a W530 that allows you to set it the same way. In my experience, you are ALWAYS better off to pick one or the other and leave it there. Some folks have had success with Bumblebee [0], however.

It's my understanding that newer Thinkpads don't have the BIOS option to switch and that this is much more of a PITA to get working.

[0]: http://bumblebee-project.org

With AMD/ATI, the problem was driver fglrx driver bitrot more than anything else, but that's been deprecated in favour of the newer amdgpu drive, which actually has some hope of being maintained due to its open source nature.

You shouldn't have issues with Nvidia hardware though.

My experience over the past decade doesn't quite agree with this. For ease of setup and use, I find that it's usually Intel > nVidia >>> AMD.

When my workplace gives a developer a new desktop (one of Dell's Ubuntu offerings, seems to always use AMD GPUs), that person's first day is normally setting up dual head.

From my experience, this statement is far from true. I have both X1 Carbon (no NVIDIA) and a T460p (with NVIDIA) running Ubuntu 16.04, and some of my colleagues have X1's running Fedora.

There are various issues such as the laptop freezing when plugging in an external monitor (this can be fixed through a kernel update), crashes when waking from suspend / lock, Trackpad issues, problems with Bluetooth, problems with supporting 4k monitors through MiniDP, ...

So I'd say the stability of Linux on the new Skylake Thinkpads is far from optimal, although most of the hardware seems to be supported and runs.

it is because Intel borked skylake. Even windows users have issues.

How exactly did they "bork" Skylake? I haven't head anything about this

Something is wrong with the drivers for it. There's a long running "sleep of death" issue with Surface Pro 4s, for example, because of this.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Surface/comments/4nu355/finally_fix...

Yeah Skylake has LOTS of issues. External 4k screen with SKL keeps crashing, works fine with anything else.

> All the other hardware (including power management) Just Works.

Well, a year or two ago, at least T440s ThinkPads came by default with a Realtek wifi card, for which there were no good Linux drivers [1]. Lenovo had an option for intel wifi card at no extra cost, but you had to be clever enough to choose that option when ordering the laptop.

[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1239578

Are you sure you want to risk buying a post-2014 Lenovo laptop? If they pulled shenanigans once, they are likely to do it again.

I'd never buy a non-ThinkPad from them. But I have yet to find something as well built as a ThinkPad from anyone else. (With the exception of Purism, but they can't offer warranties yet, which is a hard requirement for me.)

Just curious, why is a warranty a hard requirement for you?

> ...as long as you avoid nVidia GPUs

You also want to avoid AMD Radeon, which is even more problematic than nVidia. I think the best advice is "as long as you go for Intel graphics".

Absolutely true, but I haven't seen any ThinkPads with AMD graphics.

They were far more common in previous years. Currently the Thinkpad E series ships only with AMD graphics. In the past ATI/AMD Radeon graphics were also found in the Thinkpad A, L, R, T, X, Z series.

Actually it works fine even with Nvidia. You don't get all of the performance benefits but you can reliably disable and even use it using either PRIME or Bumblebee.

It would be nice to have the option of something in the Chromebook or HP Stream price range built for Debian/Redhat/Arch to run.

Agreed. I use my laptop as a VNC viewer to my desktop, or a terminal. My wife uses it for browsing facebook. I only need a 200$ machine

Just get the XPS 13 - if you get one with the Iris 540 chipset, then you can play bioshock or DOTA. Yes - integrated graphics has gotten that good.

Moreover, the XPS 13 is the first laptop that can charge using a battery pack (Dell Companion ) and runs brilliantly on Fedora 24.

Ubuntu has consistently performed badly on the xps 13. There is no thinkpad that comes at the price vs performance vs size ratio as the thinkpad. Obviously, there is no comparison for the thinkpad keyboard :(

I have a t450s and have been running Fedora since last version, never had any problems that weren't related to what I changed on the OS. I'd consider the user experience overall to be more smooth than Windows, though not quite perfect. You may have an issue with nonfree binaries/codecs not working out of the box, but I've resolved all of those with rpmfind.net[0], and haven't had to worry about third party repos. Obviously that'd be a problem for some users.

I think Korona[1] is a spin of Fedora that has this stuff included by default, so if you want Linux that works out of the box, Korona + any Thinkpad is probably your best bet.

[0] http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/index.html [1] https://kororaproject.org/

I've been looking at Linux laptop options. It's mind boggling that it's so hard to find good options.

See Dell: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/06/the-xps-13-de-dell-co....

Ok people, let's go home. We have our single data point.

What are Red Hat's core principles?

Red Hat is the open source company, cheesy as that sounds. They don't lock anything but support, patent indemnification and ISV certifications behind a paywall. Don't want to pay for RHEL, they provide the SRPM's they used to build all their packages, go grab a rebuild (CentOS, Scientific Linux) and go to town (we use CentOS at work to run mission-critical loads, if we decide we need support later we can always switch). This is universally true of literally every product they have, from Satellite (Foreman+Pulp+Candlepin) to RHEV (oVirt), JBoss products, IdM (FreeIPA), storage (glusterfs+ceph).

Red Hat isn't a company that makes money by taking open source projects as a base and adding proprietary features on top, everything they make is under an open source license and anyone (regardless of whether the paid for it or not) can grab the source packages off their FTP server and build it themselves. Contrast this to Canonical who sells proprietary tools for Ubuntu (Landscape, a big sore spot for me), kept Launchpad proprietary for the longest time, Ubuntu One (though this is now dead).

And then we have the other big name in "Enterprise" Linux, SUSE, and we've got loads of proprietary software their sister companies sell (Novell, NetIQ) from eDirectory to GroupWise, the list here goes on.

Red Hat is an engineering organization dedicated to one thing. Sure, they have a sales channel and a large partner ecosystem, but at the core of their business is making fully open source products that people want to use (and hopefully buy support for).

Thank you for the detailed answer. I'm tempted to compare this to the Apache foundation (or rather, what I understand about the workings of the Apache foundation): curate well-designed, useful OSS and Free software.

Ideologically, I like this. I'll be sure to evaluate Red Hat when the opportunity arises.

Redhat was one of the first distros I used and I have the same sort of trust partly for this frivolous reason.

RH yes. Fedora i don't trust so much.

From what i understand they are hardly the same.

Fedora is a Red Hat community project, a large majority of people involved with it daily are Red Hat employees (go check out fedora-devel and see how many @redhat.com addresses there are). New releases of RHEL are usually forked directly from Fedora, if you can't trust Fedora then you probably can't trust Red Hat.

RHEL is not the same as Fedora and RHEL devs are not the same as Fedoras. From what i seen in the last few years, at least.

That they are employed by the same company, yes.

You are right that RHEL != Fedora strictly, but each RHEL release is branched off Fedora at some point and starts undergoing additional QA and engineering work. I'm not really sure why you're making a distinction between people working on RHEL and Fedora, Red Hat doesn't pay (many, 35 full time employees according to the 2016 conference) people to tinker around with Fedora all day, there is a lot of community involvement but Red Hat has a lot of people on payroll who maintain core systems that are used by both projects (they just land in Fedora first because that's the incubator) - see systemd, GNOME, LVM, md, glusterfs, the list goes on and on and on. These people aren't necessarily "Fedora" or "Red Hat" developers, they are GNOME developers, etc., but they frequently are involved with Fedora since that is the incubator for future RHEL releases.

The difference between Fedora and Redhat is like between consumer Windows and LTSB Windows.

One has faster development cycle, the other is regularly branched off and has longer support.

> Fedora i don't trust so much.

Why?

You don't have to get old laptops, most higher-end lenovo and asus laptops, like the ultrabooks, work quite well, you can even run on any of the recent macbooks with no issues. The fact that most laptops are sold with windows pre-installed is not a linux issue, but a product of miscrosoft's imperialism.

> most [...] asus laptops, like the ultrabooks

Watch out though. Some of the Baytrail netbooks are unfun for a variety of reasons with Linux. (Also with Windows). One of the longest threads on the Ubuntu forums is people trying to get Linux to run on an Asus X205TA.

Yeah I had a similar experience with a dell convertable with a baytrail low end quad core. An expensive coaster expect for the most basic kinds of tasks but if linux were running stable it would be a usable machine.

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