Orion Ubuntu Laptop Review: The Powerful MacBook Pro Alternative | Hacker News Reader

Orion Ubuntu Laptop Review: The Powerful MacBook Pro Alternative

forbes.com

26 pointsewanspence43 comments

I wish people wouldn't slap 'Macbook Pro/Air alternative' onto a laptop unless its form-factor actually resembles an MBA/MBP. If it doesn't have any of the following:

- < 3lb weight

- Aluminum unibody

- High-quality trackpad

It's not a Macbook alternative. It might be a perfectly good workhorse computer and adequate laptop, but it's not an alternative to the light-and-sleek design that people want in a Macbook. Case in point, the Thinkpad series are excellent laptops, but they're not Macbook alternatives: they are rugged and functional, with easily replaceable parts and not super concerned about weight. That's fine--but I would never recommend one to someone who wants something like-Apple-but-not.

Agree, the article even mentions the touchpad as a weak point... the touchpad is the single biggest reason I stuck with a rMBP for my last laptop purchase... it is overpriced on every component aspect save two. The aluminum unibody are nice imho and the touchpad is absolutely wonderful compared to every other laptop I've ever tried. The chromebooks have similar interaction, but much lower quality in feel... Most others fail on some usability, even if the feel is nearly as nice.

It's like talking about how it's such a great car, the engine's fantastic, but the interior is all tacky plastic and the power steering is all squirrely.

The only way we'll see an actual "MacBook Pro" alternative is if manufacturers actually understand what makes that product great in the first place. It's not specs!

I'm all for laptops that come with Linux as an option, but calling this a MacBook Pro alternative is a big stretch. People either buy the MBP for the build quality and materials, or for macOS, neither of which this seems to have - I'd give that title to Dell's XPS range at the moment.

Having said that - this Orion does seem like a decent laptop for the money, and I'm sure there are plenty of people who want a decent Linux machine without the price premium of Dell's XPS range who will happily go for something like this.

Actually, I'd have to recommend avoiding the current 2-in-1 XPS's for a while if anyone is considering them as an option. We've got about 200 of them in the wild and about 70 of them either won't sleep or won't come out of sleep and have had to either go back to Dell or get their motherboards replaced. No idea what happened, normally they're up to a pretty high standard.

This seems like a "MacBook Pro Alternative" in that it is a "Laptop computer".

>Design wise there’s nothing spectacular on show here. It’s almost but not quite ‘generic laptop’ but that’s fine.

>There was a point where I was considering digging out a mouse to help drive the OS.

They lost me at plastic and the plethora of ports I would never use.

What's wrong with plastic? People seem to hate it in laptops and phones, but it has several advantages and only few disadvantages compared to glass and metal. It's lighter, cheaper, and usually protects innards better. I used to have Lumia phones with plastic cases for years, and they survived many drops - usually landed on an edge, which ended up with a dent, but not much more. The only advantages I see in other materials are aesthetics, heat conductivity (metal only) and scratch resistance (glass only).

How is having extra ports a bad thing?

ports put a limit on how thin the laptop can be. a VGA connection can't get smaller, an RJ-45 jack can't get smaller. the dimensions of the laptop define how realistically "portable" it may be, which is ostensibly the main argument for laptops in the first place.

I'm happy to see the RJ-45, I don't care if it's thinner, my ~2011 mbp had one and thought it was a fine size (miss being able to reasonably upgrade the ram and hdd myself too). I'd much rather see another hdmi or dp/mini-dp over the vga though. Though the lack of a quality touchpad is the biggest omission for me... I hate all laptop keyboards, but the mbp touchpad is super nice.

My Panasonic CF-RZ5 weighs 1.6lbs, and sports VGA, HDMI, Ethernet, 3xUSB3, a headphone jack, a power socket, a 1920x1200 IPS display, and a removable battery. It is from 2016, and makes the idea of all of these features compromising portability questionable.

Because Apple doesn't have them. So they must be bad.

> The screen is also crisp and sharp. Running at 1080p resolution…

This looks like an absolute turd of a laptop and I can't believe we fell for the clickbait.

Is this an advertisement?! Let's look at the features of the model they linked: 14" non-retina display (I calculate 157 DPI), lackluster trackpad, "Intel HD graphics", "plastic construction" and Linux. Okay, you can get 32 GB of memory and upgradable SSD.

There is no 14" MacBook Pro, but anything less than 15" is not "pro" IMO :) so I will use that one. So, MBP: bigger screen (15"), better resolution (220 DPI), better video (Radeon 450 with 2 GB VRAM + Intel HD Graphics 530), better CPU (up to i7 2.9GHz), better trackpad, better build quality, better OS†.

How, exactly, is this an MBP alternative? It has exactly nothing of the things I buy a MBP for. How did this advertisement make it onto the front page?

† I like Linux, but I've found OS X to be a Unix that just works. Every time I use Linux I'm always fiddling with stuff. Additionally, there is commercial software available for macOS, so for non-tech people, it is much more usable.

I stopped reading at: "The trackpad is probably the weakest link of the package."

For me the number one criteria for a laptop to be considered a "MacBook Pro Alternative" is an Apple-class trackpad. Without one, it's just another laptop.

No laptop these days should have a terrible trackpad. There's just no excuse for it anymore. It's like people producing Windows laptops without including a Precision Touchpad. Why would you do that to your customers?

My work laptop is a Dell Latitude E5470. It has both a trackpad and an imitation TrackPoint, and they're both utterly terrible. I have no idea how anybody at Dell thought it was a good idea to send it out in this state. I use an external wireless trackball to avoid RSI issues, but even if I didn't I would need something for this machine just because its internal pointing devices are so utterly frightful.

This is so true. The touch pad on my Dell Latitude is a let down too, if anything it's too responsive and nothing I've tried seems to make any difference. I've got cheap chromebooks with better touch pads.

Yes that's a good characteristic - it's sometimes too responsive. But not consistently, so you can't actually get used to it.

The imitation TrackPoint is even worse, which is quite a feat if it was done deliberately.

'A Powerful MacBo...' would be a more accurate title - there are actually a few more options out there such as the Dell XPS Developer Edition or System76 offerings.

I used a Dell XPS 13 (2013 model) Developer Edition at my last job and use a 2015 MacBook Pro 15" at my current job. The Dell was superb and served me well for 2 and a half years of work with no significant issues. However, my colleague had issues with overheating and resulting unintended shutdowns. If Dell continue their 'Project Sputnik' work I think they will be able to really challenge Apple's dominance as the go to developer machine. I'm definitely not the only person who thinks it's mad that in 2017 the developer community, which relies so heavily upon open source software, is effectively held hostage by the whims and machinations of Apple when it comes to their development OS (and thus, currently hardware too).

My current experience with the MacBook Pro is very good (once I installed several add-ons like TotalSpaces 2 to emulate Ubuntu workflow) but I feel the real reason dev teams are going for this option is the safety in numbers you get from everyone using the same machine which is also used by millions of other developers. It's a bit of a tired expression but the MacBooks do just work.

Agreed, the entropy is pretty big wrt mbp. I love the aluminum body and touchpad... screen is also nice, but not my biggest bit. Having a more consistent cli environment is pretty nice if you're using tools that lean in that direction... I find node dev and similar are cleaner on macOS, where windows is much better today than in the 0.6/0.8 days, it's still less than great. My two must haves in mac are iterm2 and moom, all else I get via homebrew (except chrome and vs code).

At least VS Code is great (can run it everywhere I work, linux, mac and windows).

This laptop is getting a fair amount of coverage, but as far as I can tell it isn't anything new. It's a rebranded Clevo laptop shipped with Ubuntu, just like the System 76 Lemur.

Disclosure: I'm registered as a Sager reseller (another company selling Clevo laptops), but I'm not actively selling their products.

First I'd heard of Entroware. They seem to sell several more https://www.entroware.com/store/laptops and only ship to UK, IE, DE, FR, IT, ES (according to their site footer). How long have they been shipping Linux-preinstall laptops and how's their record for service/support and minimizing need for proprietary blobs?

I'm not sure. I hadn't heard of Entroware before. If the laptop has an Intel WiFi chip it should work out-of-the-box with distros running a recent Linux kernel. I ordered my laptop without an OS and have been running Arch on it for over a year.

The blank lid is actually pretty cool. That being said, this doesn't look like the killer machine that will finally make 2017 the year of Linux on the desktop. It's a little too bland and unsexy.

It seems as though the average user would be better off with the Ubuntu-pre-installed version of the XPS 13.

This is nowhere close to a Macbook, covered in plastic and fat ports sticking out, not to mention the trackpad is by the author's own admission subpar, which is a huge feature on the Macbooks, the trackpad is so beautiful to use.

> If we put "MacBook Pro" into our title, we'll get virality in views and ad revenue!

If this is a MacBook Pro alternative these guys probably haven't seen the Librems from Purism.

Has killer looks thanks to its aluminium chassis and as added bonus contains hardware kill switches for radio (wifi/bluetooth) and audio/video (microphone/webcam) aswell.

https://puri.sm/products/

These look great, but I wish they would bump that CPU up to a 6700HQ. Otherwise, for the price, I think I would rather pay for a XPS 15, since the specs are better.

> Where you would normally find the Windows key is an Ubuntu key or Entroware’s own logo (you can customise this at purchase).

It'd be nice if they'd also offer a properly labelled 'Super' key, as this seems to be the default mapping for the key in this position.

It's interesting that Linux laptops still have VGA output; is there really a monitor in 2017 that does not support HDMI? Is for old (and usually terrible) KVM switches?

As for the hardware I wouldn't say it's particularly "powerful". The screen is not on par, and coupled with a still lackluster DPI independence support in Linux, and it means a full 1080 resolution on a 14" screen. No dedicated GPU can be problematic for some. Also, the small touch pad does not look very inviting. Nothing is mentioned of what HDMI port there is, so likely HDMI 1.4. 1.8+KG for a 14" laptop.

Also, from the review:

> The desktop environment is subtly different to Windows or macOS, but the basic UI elements are all in the same place. It doesn’t work in exactly the same way as the more popular OS choices but it is 95 recent similar so the learning curve for the UI is very shallow. Given the vast majority of Windows users have had to transition to Windows 10 in the last few years with no major upsets, moving to Ubuntu should not be a problem.

This seems a little disingenuous. The learning curve for Linux is a lot higher than macOS or Windows, even for most basic of tasks. Then add the missing software that macOS and Windows users are used to, and that curve grows exponentially. Sure, if you dwell in the terminal all day, or just use cloud services, such as Gmail and Google Docs, that is not that much of a problem, but if you use other software on your machine, the chances of not having a direct alternative and having to learn a new paradigm is very high. Add to that the usually bad UI & UX that Linux software tends to have, and it's plain wrong and deceitful to say "subtly different" and "moving [...] should not be a problem".

It's a pattern I've noticed over the last few years in these types of articles, where the author just brushes away the inherent difficulty of changing an entire ecosystem to just "oh I just install Gimp instead of Photoshop and Terminator instead of iTerm, and all is good in the world. No, it really isn't unless that's all you don on that laptop, which isn't the case with most people.

You might be surprised the number of people who still have old screens with DVI/VGA as the input options. Or old projectors. Or old projector management systems that only do VGA. There is a lot of legacy equipment out there.

My work just went through a massive and expensive program to replace all of the projectors and room management systems because the new laptops we were getting were ditching the VGA ports and leaving users stranded.

It was funny seeing this again when we went to my kid's school library for a presentation and the guy came in with his Macbook and saw the VGA cable sticking out of the table and went "crap".

These machines are nice, but they don't target the same customer group as a MBP. If you are searching for something similar you are bound to Dell at the moment.[1] The rest are only ODM machines with suitable hardware for Linux - which is fine, but not the same as a MBP.

[1] http://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/555/campaigns/xps-linux-lapt...

Does Ubuntu pack more info on a 1920x1080 screen than Windows 10? I found dead exactly the opposite and would be interested to know how to set ubuntu up to do this, Windows 10 without any scaling seems so much more crisp to me.

VGA in 2017..?

It works for Lenovo. My 2016-era W540 doesn't have an HDMI port, only VGA.

That's just plain sad.

Does it have a digital port (dp/mini-dp)?

Plenty of places still only have VGA connections for projectors - I have to use a TB3 to VGA dongle at least once a week.

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Is there a powerful laptop which can be 'hackintoshed' to run macOS? Apple's current machines are unappealing. It feels like the mid-90s just before Apple started allowing Mac clones. Apple had given up producing appealing machines then too.

> It feels like the mid-90s just before Apple started allowing Mac clones.

There's parallels there, where at the time Apple was being pinched by infighting within the the PowerPC consortium. Motorola and IBM were squabbling over who would get to do what, and the 604 vs. 603e battle was well under-way.

Apple eventually bailed on the PowerPC and moved to the more industry standard Intel CPU. It wasn't cloning that solved Apple's problems, it was eliminating their PowerPC handicap.

The real obstacle right now is Intel. They're up against the wall on process, they're flailing a little, and the year over year CPU gains are pretty marginal.

Now that AMD is back in the game maybe that'll help clear up this logjam. The alternative is, strangely enough, that Apple steers towards ARM for their laptops where they have more control over their destiny.

Note that Apple's not the only one feeling the crunch here. Every single laptop vendor is stuck using whatever Intel gives them excepting the few that have gone with AMD.

I'm using a Hackintoshed Lenovo Y50-70 (FHD model) running MacOS Sierra and i can only recommend it so far, all of the configurations that are being sold are very compatible with macOS. It even comes with a dedicated GPU which is great for GPU-intensive tasks on different OSes - it's disabled whilst running macOS because of missing drivers for nVidia optimus though.

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