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Comment by khedoros1 | Hacker News Reader

> Linux distros are by far the best environment for a computer scientists - made by developers, for developers - but there's no major vendor that sells machines with Linux pre-installed and supported, and getting Linux installed on the newest Surface or Dell toy is often a challenge that gets many frustrated.

Is there any reason why something like the various Dell machines preloaded with Ubuntu or RHEL wouldn't count?

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for laptops, dell seems to love 16:9 aspect ratio, which makes them inappropriate for development. for workstations, every dell i've seen uses custom cases that prevent upgrading the motherboard with an OTS component

>>for laptops, dell seems to love 16:9 aspect ratio, which makes them inappropriate for development.

Inappropriate how, exactly?

They are too short for reading terminals or documents. Macs are 16:10 which is a little bit better

How about "suboptimal"? 16:9 is OK for games and great for movies, and 1080p is at least wide enough that it can be reasonable to stick 2 terminals side-by-side, but it would be even better if it was a little taller.

I hate the 16:9 ratio and everyone uses it. It's probably cheaper since that's the same ratio as full HD which is used in many TV panels. A 1920x1200 monitor is much better than a 1920:1080 for me for coding.

Those are certainly downsides, and that's fair enough. The last Dell tower that I used was from about 2008 (Precision T-something). I remember adding a hard drive and RAM to it without trouble, but I can't talk about their non-business line, or larger modifications like replacing an expansion card or power supply.

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