Comment by tlrobinson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tlrobinson | Hacker News Reader

Tangential rant ahead:

I've been pretty disappointed in the latest MacBooks as well (mostly just the keyboard and mediocre performance improvements over previous generations), so as a hedge I thought I should give Linux another try, hoping in the ~5 years since I last attempted it one of the more user-friendly distributions would have figured out how to make installation painless.

Nope. It's easy enough to get a basic installation of Ubuntu or elementary OS working, but you still have to muck around with things like wireless drivers, graphics drivers, multitouch support, etc to get everything working as well as macOS. After half a day of trying to tweak kernel parameters and other things I gave up. Sometimes I enjoy that sort of challenge, but not right now.

I understand it's difficult to support a wide variety of hardware without the support of a company like Apple/Microsoft/Google, and supporting proprietary drivers is controversial and not the community's top priority. It's just a bit disappointing desktop Linux still isn't ready for the mainstream, despite multiple commercial companies working on it.

I grew up messing with GNU/Linux, so I know what it means to tweak kernel parameters and not have working wifi. But in the past five years of using Ubuntu full-time I haven't had a single issue with out of the box stuff working on any of a number of Lenovo machines.

Hell, I even have 16.10 running on a Macbook Pro from 2013. Curiously, the baked on RAM chip has a bad patch on it somewhere and macOS chokes when doing a full re-install, yet Ubuntu seems more fault-tolerant about memory and runs mostly fine (there are display corruptions when first booting, but putting it to sleep and waking it up causes them to go away until the next reboot).

Meanwhile I would argue macOS has become much worse given the closed-nature of the software and the price premium to use it. It's hard to complain about having to tweak things when the OS is free/libre.

> But in the past five years of using Ubuntu full-time I haven't had a single issue with out of the box stuff working on any of a number of Lenovo machines.

Yeah, my only experience is with Apple hardware. Obviously Apple doesn't work with Ubuntu to certify their hardware like Lenovo does (https://certification.ubuntu.com/desktop/), nor would I expect them to, but MacBooks are one of the most popular laptops so I sort of expected it to just work.

> It's hard to complain about having to tweak things when the OS is free/libre.

I agree, and I'm definitely willing to tweak things here and there, but it's a non-starter for most people. I guess they can still buy Ubuntu certified hardware or whatever, though.

Thinkpads generally work out of the box without any tweaking. I'd suggest using a distro with a recent kernel and you shouldn't have any problems.

Why do you still recommend a Thinkpad? Thinkpad screen resolutions stink across the board. X-series RAM caps out at 16GB where my XPS15 gets 32. I understand TPs work well with Linux but it's 2018, a lot of things work pretty darn well with Linux.

Comparing the X1 carbon or other ultra-portables in the X series with an XPS15 isn't really fair - and the 16GB is a limitation of Intels mobile ('U' series) processors, hence the same issue with Apple.

A fairer comparison to the 15" machine would be either the T580 or P51 series which has a similar choice of up to 32GB RAM and up to even Xeon processors if that's your bag - perhaps not quite as sleek as the Dell, but then it is a Thinkpad.

T580 also uses a "U" processor though. At least until the T580p is out.

I don't actually like retina displays for tech work. I think it's purely cosmetic, and it generally slows things down. But worse than that are glossy screens. The 1080p x1 screen is perfect for me at 13", no scaling required, it's matte, and it's still in HiDPI territory so plenty of screen real estate. You can also get the 1440p screen if you want more pixels.

Ram-wise, 16Gi is plenty for me. The nvme ssd more than makes up for any issues. I regularly run multiple IntelliJ/Goland windows, docker containers, VMs, etc. without a problem. If I need more, I have a proper desktop. Laptops are meant to be portable.

The carbon is half a pound lighter than the comparable macbook pro, and better in all respects that matter to me - keyboard, weight, battery life, repairability, durability, linux compatibility.

I think there's definitely some blame on laptop manufacturers here for their ridiculous ever-changing collection of SKUs.

Even Lenovo Thinkpads are incredibly diverse in terms of the hardware you can find in them compared to any generation of MacBook Pro.

I'm constantly amazed by the lack of product leadership at some of these companies. I guess the fact that they all focus on pleasing enterprises instead of actually making a decent product line-up and selling it hard is to blame.

Isn't it about time someone stepped up to fight Apple at their own game? Instead of shitting out SKUs like they have diarrhoea, have some restraint and release only a single model per machine, with SKUs modifying only inconsequential things like CPU speed, RAM quantity, and storage. Get rid of the myriad of awful Wifi and WLAN cards (that often cause issues in Windows as well).

Do this for several generations so that the basic hardware and drivers are the same for every machine in the line-up. Focus on getting the basics right - no sleep/wake issues, no finicky nonstandard hardware, no coil whine, no excessive fan noise etc.

Microsoft are trying this with the Surface range, but they're only just starting to actually position products in competition with Apple's.

I can confirm your experiences. I've been a long time Linux user, yet I still struggle to change to "natural" mouse scrolling on the latest install of LUbuntu. I finally had to resort to "magic" incantations on the command line and restarting X. Even then it all reverted when I rebooted the machine.

Why not buy a machine with Ubuntu preinstalled from Dell or system 76.

I don't want to buy a new machine (yet), I just want to try it out.

Then you should compare the tinkering experience for linux with Hackintoshes?

Sounds like you used a random laptop instead of researching which one is well supported hardware.

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