Comment by noir_lord | Hacker News Reader

Comment by noir_lord | Hacker News Reader

I went through this last year.

I looked at Macbook Pro, Dell XPS15 and Thinkpad T470P.

In the end I went for the T470P (i7-7700HQ (4 core/8 thread) w/ 2560x1440 screen, 16GB of RAM (upgraded myself to 32GB)) and the bigger battery (pretty much no optional with a 35W TDP processor).

I tried the XPS15 but the keyboard was bad and the fit and finish wasn't awesome.

I've had zero issues with linux support or the machine generally, build quality is excellent, I personally like the styling but many don't.

It's so fast that I held off building a new desktop (and packed the old one away) and battery life is very good if you aren't maxing out the CPU, I've had over 8 hours of actual work time, screen is good, sharp and decently bright.

In the UK it came with a three year warranty as standard vs 1yr for the Dell.

It was also 300 quid cheaper than the Dell.

I ruled out the Macbook Pro on price and the fact I couldn't put 32GB of RAM into it.

At work I have a Ryzen 1700 with 32GB RAM and a SATA SSD, Intellij with a bunch of plugins loads faster on my thinkpad than that machine (NVMe SSD vs SATA SSD basically, the Ryzen should demolish any laptop processor with threaded code).

It's a solid little machine.

The new higher core count lower TDP intel processors look interesting, I suspect the T480P (if they do one) will have those, 35W TDP is a lot compared to 15W, I suspect that the 7700HQ will still beat them handily and extreme battery life wasn't an issue for me, anything over 5 hours is fine I'm never away from AC for longer than that.

What version of Linux are you running where you have had zero issues, Thank you...

I'd also be interested in this. I've never once run linux on a laptop flawlessly - and I've been trying for a decade.

This depends more on the hardware these days. Most drives, CPUs, etc work just fine without configuration. Wifi drivers are pretty good these days. Maybe you'll hit a snag with those if you're really unlucky.

The bad part is still GPUs. Even then, they're usually much better than 10 years ago. AMD GPUs have better drivers than Nvidia, in general. Older GPUs are better supported in general.

Personally, I'm happily using Intel integrated for everything I do. But even then, even as much as I think Linux is the best choice of my available options, there are flaws as with any other OS. Regarding the Iris Pro, the mesa driver stack had a bug (related to srgb) introduced in August of last year which was only fixed this month and caused several OpenGL applications to fail to run.

I think the Linux experience is still the best for development, and I've used the other two major OSs both extensively.

As for practical advice, Manjaro is a great match between rolling release and well-tested packages.

Fedora 27.

I also run fedora on a X230 and have full time since 19. Never an issue.

> I ruled out the Macbook Pro on price and the fact I couldn't put 32GB of RAM into it.

Just curious, how has 32 GB ram on it affected battery life?

No appreciable different at all, with a 35W processor RAM power consumption just isn't an issue.

I think power consumption by RAM is more affected by the number of sticks rather than their capacity. As long as they're only 2 slots (most laptops are except ultra-high-end machines), the power difference between 16GB and 32GB should be negligible.

I think a couple of replies are missing one aspect to your question. If you have more RAM and you use it, you'll probably have more processes to drain the battery. I noticed this when my desktop went from 8GB to 16GB under Unity and extra Google Chrome/Vivaldi/Firefox tabs.

On the other hand, it encouraged me to buy a faster and more energy efficient graphics card, run i3wm, and buy an SSD. That fixed the problem.

So a laptop with 32GB RAM might mean you'll push it harder, but I guess it also opens up the opportunity to run VMs, etc. Regardless, highly-specced device is cheap, Apple or otherwise.

At the moment, I think my favoured approach is an ultrabook + desktop system. Laptops will never be desktop replacements so long as you can pack more punch per dollar into a desktop. As usual, it's horses for courses. I think ultrabooks are best used as devices of focus and for mobility. Putting the kitchen sink into them doesn't make a whole lot of sense, usually.

This!!

I couldn't agree enough. I went with the T470p, i7700HQ, 32GB RAM, and 1TB SSD. This this is amazing.

I unfortunately must dual boot just in case I need to use software or services that require Windows. I just wiped their default installation with Windows 10 Education edition, gave it 256GB of space, then installed Arch on the other partition.

I mainly use Arch and have only used Windows for the first day or two of having the laptop. I get around 8-10 hours of usage, similar to you, and everything is just awesome. Even while running a VM or two the battery like is still good!

my 2c on T470p I had a change to compare T470P and P50 with same config. Benchmarks are very similar, so no diff. there. I own a P50 and colleague has the T470p and the biggest diff is the size of notebook of course,but what I hate on P50 is the keyboard offset b/c of the numpad keys. It's hard to type with arms straight and screen at center, so there is always a slight angle to that .. 8h+ daily work on that and you start to feel the strain on that. So wouldn't go with p50 if i could choose now. On other hand 470p is 14" and keyboard is symmetric (no numpad) so much better ergonomics, but the fan noise and heat that this notebook creates is more than usual. I guessing because of the smaller form factor they were not able to cram a better colling system. So on idle this thing just blast hot air like crazy. When we do team work and sit next to each other, it blows so much hot air that i need to move further away,b/c it burn my hand from the fan duct. So can't imagine what will it do in full load and in summer...

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