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Comment by StavrosK | Hacker News Reader

Speaking of laptops, what would you recommend to someone running Ubuntu? My 2013 MacBook Air is feeling it, with its non-upgradable 4 GB RAM. A discrete graphics card so I could play DotA2 once in a while would be nice, even if it's at medium graphics quality.

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I'm kinda in the same boat.

I want a laptop with Iris Pro 580/p580 and NO dedicated GPU. The 580 has a bit over a TFLOP of compute (plenty for games like DoTA) and more importantly, the drivers don't suck on Linux. The issue is that any laptop that ships with that processor also ships with a crappy dedicated GPU.

When I have a 45w processor, I want to pay a few hundred extra for a 55w Nvidia M2000m that has 10% more compute power (granted, more efficient at GPGPU) and horrible drivers.

What I want:

15.6", i7-6770HQ, 32gb DDR4, M.2 SSD, high-res IPS screen, Thinkpad-grade keyboard, good webcam, decent ports (At least 2x thunderbolt, 3x usb3, SD, 3.5mm, and ethernet), a little thicker for a battery that lasts a couple days, durable build quality, large trackpad with builtin wacom, NO dedicated graphics.

I guess that's too much to ask.

I think intel's pricing the iris graphics a bit too high, so it's pretty rare. Lenovo has some idea pads with iris, and the macbook pro.

Hopefully they drop the price enough to make it more popular. As you mention it's a particularly attractive option for linux.

Speaking of which, seems like the 580/P580 never really delivered on the promised performance compared to the much lower power Iris 540/550 (used in the macbook pro).

The next gen looks promising though. Intel's already mentioned the kaby lake + iris for the NUC in Feb/March. I'm hoping that intel tunes the performance, power use, and price so it makes it into more devices. Iris graphics on laptops is pretty rare so far.

I think there is a bit of a meme that Linux Intel graphics don't suck. They have broken desktops repeatedly and still have a lot of glitches on newer hardware, whereas everyone calls AMD bad but I haven't had a bad experience on their Mesa stack in over 5 years. Its generally that Intel is buggy / edge case broken and AMD is rock solid if not patching Windows drivers in performance.

Albeit, I am biased, in that I intentionally avoid bleeding edge GPU hardware in general anywhere I can, but its hard to avoid Intel's latest because each year all the NUCs / notebooks / desktop platform switch to their latest CPUs. With AMD, since they have basically no market presence anywhere, I can get away with buying a 290 a year after it comes out for $240 and then having a great out of the box experience with it, whereas my 740SU notebook 4 years ago was only 6 months new when I got one and had massive Haswell GPU bugs on latest Mesa for about 6 months after buying it.

But even then, Intel and AMD are pretty much par for support times and when you should expect good stability in my experiences, but everyone memes AMD as being trash while Intel is the savior of consumer Linux.

I bought a NUC with the Iris 540, ran ubuntu 16.04 on it and I'm quite pleased with it. Minecraft, full screen youtube, full screen netflix, random web games like slither.io, random "rich" websites, webGL particle/water demos, etc all "just work".

I've had way less problems with intel than I did with my radeons. Not sure I'd say better than nvidia (who has a pretty good binary blob driver), but similar.

Even weird edge cases like rotating a display into portrait mode while logged in worked fine.

It's not a GTX 1070 killer, but it's quite a nice upgrade from other Intel GPUs. It runs a fair variety of 2d/3d stuff at 1080P quite comfortably.

You won't find all the features in one machine, but the Dell XPS 9550 is also sold in a version without dedicated GPU.

Look at the Dell Precision 5510, you can get it without the GPU and with a larger battery instead of a SATA drive.

Has M.2 and all the other things you mentioned.

Thinkpads are generally a safe bet.

I've been using different models from the X-Series with Ubuntu since 08.04 and am currently looking at the T450s (14", but still an Ultrabook and light enough for me).

The X1 Carbon looks damn sweet as well.

The X1 Carbon (latest.. 4th? gen) is my daily laptop since release and I can't wait to get rid of it. In anything other than low light/perfect lighting the screen is unbearably dull, speakers are appalling (though in ubuntu you can override to > 100% volume). Keyboard is pretty unsatisfying to use also.

I got it because i wanted a 14" laptop and it was the only one on the market. Screen size is perfect (15" is a bit big for travelling & carry on luggage)

This looks like the laptop i've been waiting for

I was surprised how light the T-Series models have become, hadn't looked at them in years and only remembered the heavy clunky units that made me go for the X-Series.

The current model T460s is also interesting, quite a bit more performance than its predecessor, albeit in a different price bracket.

I'm mostly going for the 450 because there's tons of decent refurb available and I'm frugal that way ;-)

You need to understand the R series became the T4x0 and the T4x0s is the real continuation of the T series.

Just be sure that you're comfortable with the trackpoint on the 450... They swapped the buttons for a touch sensitive area at the top of the trackpad. The physical buttons have made a welcome return on the T460 range, but if that doesn't bother you, enjoy a great machine.

Same here, except I have a different experience. Maybe it's because I upgraded from a 2010 Macbook Air, but I like the screen a lot. The speakers suck, I agree, but I rarely use external speakers when I'm in laptop mode. I really like that it runs Ubuntu almost perfectly, and that it has 16GB or RAM. I do wish the video card was more powerful, but it drives a 4k monitor (as well as its own display) quite well. It's stupid lightweight, too. Makes my 2010 Air feel like cast iron.

i love my 4th gen carbon (work laptop), but i have to agree the speakers are appalling. way worse than the 1st gen carbon it replaced.

I ve switched from air running Ubuntu to XPS 13 dev edition with Ubuntu. Not everything beautiful but a decent switch, great power, autonomy and screen.

Thank you! What are some things you don't like about it?

Looking for a laptop is pretty frustrating, there are a ton of models and each has a ton of versions, it's really hard to know what to get :(

Not OP, but got the same laptop. "Jumpy trackpad" [1] and "stuck key" [2] problems are the ones I feel most.

They should have been fixed by the latest firmware (apparently still in 2015) but I can still experience them sometimes. I believe I have the latest fw (I'm surely >= 06A), but can't check ATM, so chances are I'm not on the latest. Then again, I admit I can work with it almost seamlessly (dev-work from CLI mainly).

[1] http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/os-applications/f/46... [2] en.community.dell.com/techcenter/os-applications/f/4613/t/19637021

One issue would be the webcam placement, it's below the screen. If you get the XPS 13 don't make the same mistake I've made, don't waste your money on this POS http://accessories.euro.dell.com/sna/productdetail.aspx?c=uk... Linux support is very bad, it uses a proprietary technology. Get a USB-C to HDMI adapter instead.

I just switched to the XPS 13 as well and picked up the WD15 which is the same price on Amazon. The WD15 officially supports linux and from what I read is better than the 3100 as long as you're on a more recent kernel. Hopefully I won't have to return it.

WD15 has 1 mDP, 1 HDMI, and 1 VGA. I'm hoping to get something that supports linux + 3 DP or HDMI based monitors.

Thanks for the information. Do you speak a European language? That's where I've seen "autonomy" used referring to battery life.

Can confirm, autonomy is how "battery life" translates to Greek too. Fun fact, autonomy means "ruled under its own law".

I always recommend the thinkpad T series. The 14s has almost the same profile as a macbook air. I've ran Linux on thinkpads for a while now, never disappointed.

I use two ThinkPads and one thing that I dislike about both of them is the Lenovo software. It's buggy and uses a lot of memory. I've gone through and uninstalled as much of it as I can and both machines have been much more stable. If I were buying a new machine today, I would probably reformat and reinstall Windows.

Doesn't matter if your just installing Linux on it

My Asus Zenbook UX305CA ran Fedora 25 out of the box with basically every peripheral including the touchscreen working perfectly. However it uses integrated (Intel i915) graphics.

Same with the XPS 13 2017, it doesn't have the power saving nvme mode yet which would I presume give it parity with Windows battery life, and Wayland was janky but X was fine.

Google IRIS 540 graphics and you should find:

Dota 2 Reborn 2015

low 1280x72059.8 85 ~ 72 fps + Compare med. 1366x76846.9 68.5 ~ 58 fps + Compare high 1920x108029.2 39.5 ~ 34 fps + Compare ultra 1920x108034.6 fps + Compare

Presumably Dota is easier on the GPU than Dota2. The kaby lake with iris graphics isn't out yet, should be Feb or March or so. The 2015 XPS 13 has the Iris 540. Sadly the 2016 XPS13 doesn't, yet.

Sorry, oops, I meant DotA2. I assume anything can run the original DotA (but I also don't know if anyone still plays that). Iris 540 is integrated and still has that performance? That's pretty nice, thanks.

For what it's worth: I've been doing gaming on my 2012 MBA using Steam's in-home streaming from my Desktop. It works really well for gaming casually on the couch, though it only works on my home LAN.

I have a Steam Link too, so I use streaming, but it's not great for twitch games like DotA and Rocket League :/

the XPS 13 runs linux perfectly.

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