Any developers out there that truly love their Linux-based, non-Apple laptop? If so, what's your make & model? What do you love about it?
It's maxed out, I bought it back in 2013 used from ebay base was 500, with dock and extra parts ~900 total. The specs outside of GPU for gaming are still more than adequate. I5 dual w. hyperthreading. 16GB Ram, 2 SSD (2.5 128GB, M2 256GB). Spare battery in optical slot, or 1TB sata. About 10 hours battery life. That's one of the biggest things to me, is the flexibility and expansion.
It's the best Linux laptop I've used. Everything on Arch works flawlessly. I haven't done a full reboot in months, opting to suspend. The dock with a custom script, is a breeze. The keyboard, almost as good as my Unicomp.
Lastly ease of maintenance. I replaced the screen after leaving earbuds on the keyboard and cracking it (60$). Dropped it down a flight of stairs, toasted I don't know what [wouldn't boot]. New motherboard, CPU, and stick of ram (80$). Dropped a box on it, broke one hinge (15$). There are also some HiDPI mods floating around replacing the screen with either 2560x1440 or 1920x1080.
I'm either waiting to build a gaming rig, or a laptop with external gpu at this point. There are pain points, the screen viewing angles are atrocious. Speakers are tinny and useless. I gutted them on a rebuild years ago. But I mean when I'm at work or on any other laptop I want my think pad.
I feel I'm an outlier in what I want. I want the old used car of a laptop. Something that has good bones, and I can maitnain myself. Rice it up, soup it up, and use it for several years. I don't mind heft, 6lb is max for me. Give me expansion and good battery life, with linux support. Also things happen, so durability is key.
Caveat: eventually I tired of the occasional wifi problems and I replaced the broadcom wifi module with an intel one (~$25). Flawless wifi since.
I think my only regret/disappointment would be the memory -- this one is limited to 4GB and I can't upgrade it.
What I'm actually saying is I don't know what is wrong with a touch screen.
a) I'd be paying more for a touch screen that I don't want. Whatever the cost, I'd rather have the money
b) Does whatever OS I'm running know I've got a touch screen? What's to stop it taking advantage of that? What's to stop it essentially requiring I use it?
c) Even if I don't use it, buying a laptop with a touchscreen suggests there's a market for such a device. I'd rather not add the weight of my support.
Touch is one of the most natural forms of interaction to people. A screen without touch, to a young child, is "broken". The more screens with touch in our lives (such as say the iPhones and iPads), the more that seems to apply to any age that a screen without touch starts to feel "broken".
This is what I find strangest about the arguments by people for the MBP Touch Bar: so many people that support agree how useful touch is. Wouldn't it be more useful just to make the whole screen touch capable than to stop part of the way there with just a tiny strip?
The boldness of the original iPhone at the time was relying entirely on touch. The MBP Touch Bar seems a strange hesitation relative to that.
The most classic forms of input (keyboard and mouse) are touch manipulations of plastic artifacts: their bandwidth is essentially a subset of touch rather than any other way around.
With modern touch screens we are only beginning to scratch the surface of touch sensory bandwidth. Certainly there remains plenty of interesting areas to expand haptic feedback. There's also plenty of ways left to blend and hybridize touch sensitivity and gestures and even context sensitive/context reliant physical objects (like digital pens/pencils or even how our keyboards might interact with touch).
«It's for consumption, not creation.»
Many of the earliest forms of human creativity were manipulating things through touch. Maybe we haven't yet arrived at something like a good approach to digital sculpting or pottery, but that doesn't mean that we won't.
Even then, I've seen amazingly creative touch apps. There are some really cool touch apps in music creation, just off the top of my head. The fact that you associate touch with consumption (and "less cognitive development") may say more about you than the world of touch apps that already exist.
«It leaves the screen dirty.»
Yeah. So? Things get dirty when you use them. You find ways to clean them. Are you keeping your screen pristine and untouched/undirtied because it needs to be sconced in a museum some day?
I get that it's a personal preference and it plainly drives the Monk-esque sorts of OCD wild, but at the end of the day, entropy wins anyway.
«It encourages wasteful use of screen real estate by UI.»
One person's waste of space is another person's accessibility. Touch invites larger click targets to better accommodate the fatness of people's fingers. That accommodation, however, also helps people with accuracy issues with a mouse (which has always been a big deal easily ignored). Even further, it helps those situations that shouldn't demand accuracy in the first place. When I'm working on a spreadsheet at work, why does every click need to be a "headshot" to get my work accomplished? Lining up those shots takes time and energy I could be spending on the actual work. Just because mice can be pixel accurate doesn't mean they should be. As monitor resolutions increase and DPI increases and pixels shrink this only becomes crazier when an application has a small pixel-accurate hitbox. (It amazes me how many mission critical Enterprise apps you see with old school 16x16 pixel icons on toolbars running on modern hardware as if those businesses have a need to be FPS sniper schools.)
Fitt's Law suggests we should do better than that. Targets that are bigger and/or closer to the mouse pointer are easier to hit. If it takes touch to force more developers to be more mindful of Fitt's Law, then that alone is reason enough to support touch.
Bandwidth is information transferred over time. Whether you are discussing input (push/gesture max) or output (can't see the screen because hand is in the way), current-era touch is inferior to traditional input systems.
You failed to provide even one example of a creative use of touchscreens, except a vague music reference. I've seen those apps too, they are frustrating to work with and any serious musician would use a (musical) keyboard with real velocity support in preference.
I agree UIs need to move forward, I simply disagree that current-era touch is creative or high enough bandwidth to get us anywhere useful.
From that perspective a touch screen, even with current technology, is still more bandwidth than no touch screen at all and more creative than no touch screen at all... I'd argue that does get us somewhere useful.
I don't think the onus here is on me to provide examples of how useful that may be, but on you to explain why perfect is not the enemy of the good, in this particular case.
The battery life is fantastic. The touchpad is the best I've ever used on a Windows laptop. The GPU is excellent (960m). The keyboard is great.
Overall, no complaints. I did also purchase an XPS 13, which I thought was great, but the screen was just a little too small.
FWIW I purchased my 'refurb', they pop up from time to time on Dell Outlet, but they go quick.
EDIT: Oh yeah, Linux works flawlessly. Currently running Antergos, but have also run Ubuntu.
Pros:
* matte screen
* aftermarket upgrade to 16 GB ram
* aftermarket upgrade to 2 SSDs, one in the normal SATA6 connection and another in the ultrabay with a caddy, so I can always remove it and put the cd/dvd driveback in if required.
* still have a spare PCIe slot so I could add another SSD there or use that instead of getting a caddy for ultrabay
The biggest draw for me: power, ethernet, VGA, 2x USB and mini display port are all on the back of the machine so the cables stay out of the way when it is on a desk connected to external monitors. If I am using the keyboard on the laptop then I can have my paper notebook on the right and it isn't in a tangle of wires, or a wireless mouse and mousepad.
CONS:
* 1600x900, but I use external monitors 95% of the time
* the first T420s had some battery firmware issue so it wouldn't hibernate when the battery got low, it would just turn off. Doesn't seem to happen any more and the problem was only with one of three suppliers of batteries so not everyone had that problem
I think the build quality is nice, it has a serious appeal to it and has a nice weight and feel to it when carried.
I'm a 100% Arch Linux based developer doing all kinds of work.
I think I would like X260 more though. I do not use touchscreen and pen very often and hot-swappable battery would be great.
It's been going for 10 years, and probably has at least another 10 years left.
Cons, does get a little hot on my lap from time to time. The little red joystick thing takes a little getting used to. I'm not much of a mouse user so it isn't too much of a problem, I run the i3 window manager. No space is wasted on a trackpad.
What I like is that I can replace almost anything, even the CPU and the GPU. I added RAM, 16 GB out of 32 now and swapped the DVD burner for a 1 TB Samsung 850 EVO SSD. I was using the 32 GB SSD cache of the HDD for the OS so it was already fast, but it's faster now. THD screen is good, the touchpad has 3 physical buttons. The battery lasts 3, maybe 4 hours with care, which is more than enough for me. It's 3 kg and the power brick is a brick but it's ok.
Ubuntu 16.04 works pretty well on it. Almost: it has two problems I can live with, shared by Ubuntu 12.04: 1) it doesn't shutdown, only suspend or restart. If I have to turn it off before going on vacation I press the power button when it restarts 2) plugging out the USB 3 HD I use for backups does something to the USB port and I have to reset the port or the PC won't suspend. Every other drive works. I have a script for that and it runs at the end of the backup script. I'm a developer so it's OK. If you're not, look at another hw.
Everything else is OK, support included. Next business day on site assistance was about 100 Euro for 3 years.
The second and third generation models look iteratively better. Maybe they work better with Linux too.
Edit: however any 15" model without the number pad will win me over.
Using AutoKey, I've got most of the Terminal control keys remapped to Alt keys when in the Terminal. Using AutoKey, my Alt-C does Control-Shift-C in Terminal, and Control-C works as I expect in the Terminal.
Lightweight, matte non-glare screen, and double battery. The latter means I can swap batteries if I'm out and about without shutting down. 100% Linux compatibility.
Also under $1K even considering an aftermarket SSD & RAM.
Downsides: The screens are pretty washed out and blah compared to the mac screens, but ok for coding. The trackpads also holdup very poorly against the macs.
The key problem for us though is they fail way more than the macs. Probably about half of them have had some issue or another after 2yrs. For the macs it's been closer to 1 in 10 or 1 in 15.
We decided to spend more and push people toward more expensive macs. It saves us so much IT time.
Got it preloaded with Linux, which isn't important but felt nice.
It's super light, powerful enough for everything I do (giant pile of chrome tabs + one of gimp, gaming, or webdev), has incredible battery life, and is well-built and generally sturdy. Also the tiny bezel is amazing - it makes the laptop smaller, makes the screen feel bigger, and lets you see more of the rest of the world behind the laptop.
My next laptop will probably be an XPS 15 to see what those are like.
Great battery life (it's a charge every couple of days laptop for me), love the watch-style hinge (which is really solid), and the keyboard has all the keys I want on it.
I greatly prefer the ThinkPad for the following reasons: much better battery (even after a brand new battery for the MBP), it is much lighter weight, non-glossy screen (better to counter train window glare), and the keys requires much less force to actuate.
I miss the smooth MBP track pad, but I rarely use the mouse anyway. I'd never buy a Mac for personal use, even without any price either way I prefer the Thinkpad.