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Comment by patte | Hacker News Reader

I turned away from the mac, first because the HW, second because prop. software is creaping me out more and more. I bought a lenovo T480 (big battery, higres screen, good keyboard, only the trackpad is shitty) and I installed the shiny ubuntu 18.04 and I have to say, it's the best setup I ever used. It's super stable, with some tweeking(https://github.com/erpalma/lenovo-throttling-fix) it's crazy fast, 7h+ battery life when doing web development. Even the LG UltraFine works great under linux. I never regretted it.

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> I bought a lenovo T480 (big battery, higres screen, good keyboard, only the trackpad is shitty) and I installed the shiny ubuntu 18.04 and I have to say, it's the best setup I ever used.

If by hires screen you mean WQHD, I am wondering what you do with absence of proper fractional scaling support by desktop environments (and how workarounds interact with external monitors).

KDE supports fractional scaling

I've been thinking about doing this too for some time now. Just not convinced which Lenovo to go for..

Former macbook pro user here. I currently use a T480 with the 72wHr battery. Web Development and programming I pull about 20+ hours of battery life. Using i3wm under Fedora.

Absolutely gorgeous machine.

Can you use the switchable graphics or did you get the model without a gpu?

I got the one with the MX150 dGPU, because there was no other option from the students program I bought it from. But I personally would go for the one without a dGPU. Even-tough the dGPU version uses 2 heatpipes, there are thermal issues. As soon as the GPU hits 70°C, the cpu-package gets power throtteled to 5W... so it's not usable for graphic intense workloads. I would choose the one without the dGPU, manually buy and install the 2heatpipe cooler for better CPU temperatures and use a eGPU if I really needed the power. For the time being I just disabled the dGPU under linux with bbswitch. I'm still able to watch 4K movies with 60fps, no problem.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/8flj0i/t480_power...

Wow, what a shame. How is this even possible? A Macbook Pro 15" has a 45 Watt TDP CPU and is half as thick but throttles less? The new Macbook Pro has two extra cores and I could use the graphic cards as well. Switching graphic also works where in Linux it does not. Taking into account that resale value of Macbook Pros the price difference is not so big.

20+ hours is impressive. Do you also use lenovo-throttling-fix, and if so, what are your settings for the turbo-boost max power?

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