Comment by 013a | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 013a | Hacker News Reader

Haven't seen these two suggested:

The Razer Blade is a pretty excellent machine. Its gaming focused, which surfaces a little bit in their design language, but all that really means is more beefy specs. The Stealth model in particular might be a great choice, or you can up-market. I've heard nothing but great things about it.

The Surface devices are also an expensive but excellent choice. They do suffer in that I don't believe any of them are shipped with 8th gen Intel chips or Thunderbolt yet, but once they get that updated they'll be worth looking into. They are very pricey though; its basically $2000 minimum for any model with 16gb of memory.

Really, if you want MacBook-like quality, you need to realize that there's a reason why they're so expensive, and you can't really cheat the price by looking at Windows. There are a few manufacturers that are getting the prices down, like Dell's XPS line, but they make sacrifices in build quality, touchpad quality, etc. If you're fine with that, then yeah you can save $500.

I'm on a 2017 Razer Blade running Linux Mint. I would say it's functional if you're looking for a gaming/development machine, but less than ideal for 100% development. My work machine is a 2013 15" MacBook Pro for comparison purposes.

The screen size is 14", which compared to a 15" MBP is no where near enough screen real estate. That and the bezel is too damn big.

The touchpad is just awful. The buttons are way too slim to hit accurately (I think they're about 1/4") and I always inadvertently hit the touchpad with my thumbs moving the mouse to random locations. I could probably fix the later by toning down the sensitivity, but there's nothing I can do about the button sizes.

Finally, the unibody case as a very sharp edge and tends to cause discomfort when typing for an extended period of time.

As for the OS, Mint went on without any driver issues. This is my first experience with desktop Linux in a long time and I'm very impressed with how mature it's become. There's just no way I could go back to developing on Windows. In fact, I've become so accustomed to developing on Linux that it's a pain to go back to macOS.

I have a late-2016 Razer Blade and every time I compile something the fans spin up to aircraft-turbine levels of noise, it's ridiculous. I'm currently thinking of throwing the whole thing out and getting a Macbook Pro instead, because it's basically the loudest thing in our office.

Same here with the fan. I use Goland as my main IDE and man does it kick up a fuss whenever indexing occurs.

You can disable the indexing of the whole GOPATH as of 2018.1 and it will finish indexing a whole lot faster. See Settings | Go | GOPATH | Index entire GOPATH.

I have a late 2016 Razer Blade Stealth and I love. I was able to install Ubuntu without issue and the machine works flawlessly. At the time it was easily the best 13" machine on the market and I wouldn't doubt still is.

I use a Razer Blade, and like the other comments say, it's decent but imperfect. But I've yet to find a comparable model in it's class - a well-built slim laptop with a good GPU. All the other laptops with GPUs are so bulky and gamery. I need something a decent GPU to do game dev. I guess the Surface Book might be a contender? Seems quite expensive though.

I briefly had a Razer Blade for development and returned it for several reasons, the top two being:

1. Enormous screen bezel, which made it silly to lug around a laptop with the screen real estate of one much smaller.

2. Without careful, tedious manual power management in linux the cooling fans routinely spin up to dust buster sound levels under normal use, which is unacceptable if you exist around other human beings.

The Surface Book 2 is an interesting option, but the linux support, while improving through community effort, is still spotty [1]. At the moment it has many power draw, heat, and noise issues. Also, everyone I know who has had a surface device has had to have it serviced or RMA'd at least once, which is not acceptable for something so expensive from such a large vendor.

[1] https://github.com/jakeday/linux-surface

The Stealth has pretty small bezel sizes. It can also be configured with an 8th gen quad core i7. Its got Thunderbolt 3, and because its running Windows you get full external graphics card support whether your needs are professional or gaming. RGB keyboard backlighting :). With a 512gb SSD, that config comes out to $1700, which feels like a very fair price especially when compared to some of the Surface laptops (its impossible to configure any 16gb Surface laptop for less than $2000).

The rest of the Blade lineup is in dire need of a refresh, as you say. The bezels are ridiculous when compared to some of the recent high performance offerings from Dell, Gigabyte, MSI, etc.

As for linux, this is an intensely personal decision, but with W10 + the Windows Subsystem for Linux, its actually pretty darn usable. Its not like Cygwin or a virtual machine; its literally a bash app that almost emulates a linux distro of your choice, and works identically to if you're in that linux distro. These videos explain it pretty well [1] [2].

Of course, you're still working in Windows, so if the UI is the reason why you don't want to use Windows then you'll have to virtualize or dual-boot or whatever. But, in a lot of ways, this is more of an advantage than a con: it gives you access to all of the software that isn't available on Linux, like Office, Adobe, games, etc.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfRo63afjtM

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PP_T_m0UV9E

I have a surface pro 4 and I really love it; however, it doesn't support Linux well. Ubuntu will not recognize the type cover or (iirc) the touch screen.

Currently I develop in a VM or with vagrant.

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