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Comment by robocat | Hacker News Reader

Please build me a Linux laptop for software engineering, Google.

For engineers only. No software support beyond ensuring the BIOS and the drivers work and are updated.

I hate Dell, but I got a Dell XPS 15 because it was the only laptop I knew would: boot Linux reliably; last two Ubuntu LTS upgrades (4 years); have a high spec (i9 etc); and was reasonably priced (Apple tax was 50% higher for worse hardware).

Is it impossible to make a laptop better than Dell or Apple? Google: how much goodwill would you receive through developer love? Why do I have to pay for Windows when the OS division seems to be actively working against making my work easier? Google, you have the skills and size to make a secure laptop.

Google, maybe it is because most of your engineers internally just need a good terminal, instead of a fast laptop?

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I'm not sure I understand what your issue with the Dell is. I mean I have a Dell XPS 15. It's... fine, I guess.

As for the so-called "Apple tax", I just don't buy into this. I mean I miss the glory days of the 2011-2012 Macbook Airs. These were so cheaply priced they destroyed the competition because no one could produce a similar spec laptop at that price point. But then the numbers men decided dropping the average ASP for Macbooks was "bad" so they had to invent new features nobody needed or wanted to drive up the cost (Touchbar being the poster child) but for the hardware you get, it's actually pretty good. Or it was.

> Is it impossible to make a laptop better than Dell or Apple?

It's clearly not trivial.

> Google: how much goodwill would you receive through developer love?

Based on the bubble that is HN the answer is clearly "absolutely none". Just look at Chrome adding DDG as a search engine option. Where in that thread do you see people saying "this is great"? No, the top comments are littered with theories about how this is just an effort to avoid antitrust or other such ulterior motives.

I guarantee you that if Google produced the laptop that you and 22 other people would buy you'd hear nothing but complaints about it.

> I guarantee you that if Google produced the laptop that you and 22 other people would buy you'd hear nothing but complaints about it.

Counterpoint: I know plenty of happy developers that own multiple Nexus and Pixel products, without bagging them. Engineers want good hardware and many are willing to pay for quality.

> As for the so-called "Apple tax"

For as close to equivalent as I could get (specification, reliability, etc) the equivalent Apple cost 50% more than the XPS 15. Paying 50% extra for an OS I don't need makes no sense for my situation. Paying for an unused Windows license for the XPS was unavoidable (I have our own licenses for the Windows VMs we need for testing).

> It's clearly not trivial [to make a laptop better than Dell or Apple]

The Google hardware I have experienced has mostly impressed me (even if third party, they have mostly enforced quality constraints). Although I have owned a Nexus with a design flaw, I would consider buying a Pixel (although at present I find the Nokia gives me better bang for my hard earned buck).

> Paying for an unused Windows license for the XPS was unavoidable

The website gives you the option to save $90 if you have them install linux on the XPS 13. I suspect you may be able to call and get the same deal on the XPS 15. At least when I was buying from them 20 years ago you could do that...

AFAIK XPS 15 doesn't come with a Linux option (and for me, I bought it through a reseller who had a black Friday deal, so I wouldn't have had the option).

That's correct, you may in fact order an XPS 13 pre-installed with Ubuntu from Dell. But you won't find an XPS 15 model with that option. I couldn't find it in January when I went to buy mine.

I agree, I really loved my Nexus 5 and original Pixel. I'm a huge fan of Google's industrial design.

It'd be really nice to have a well-made laptop where Linux is a first-class citizen. It's not even about the $whatever it costs to ship it with a Windows license, though that's significant for some/most - it's more the principle of it for me. I don't want Windows to be the default OS and I just couldn't live with myself supporting that. I also don't want a Windows logo key to have to see every day.

Have you kept up with the Pixelbook development? Chrome OS is pretty great for general "cloud" work (AWS management for example). It runs containerized Android apps (which I use to run the native Gmail app to fly through my inbox).

But that's nothing compared to the new stuff. It runs containerized linux with a great abstraction layer that connects GUI calls from linux into the beautiful hi-dpi Chrome OS desktop environment (I think it's still called "Aurora"?)

It's still in beta, but they're almost ready to add: - USB support (obviously important here, but they want you to be able to develop android apps on it) - Sound from linux container -> hardware speakers (I believe this is in beta channel now though?) - graphic acceleration (also is in early testing, canary branch maybe?) - backup/restore functionality (lose your laptop? get a new one and restore your container)

All of this in one of the sexiest laptops with the best keyboard of any of the ~5 machines I own for $999

I've been using it as my main development machine (a complicated electronJS app that windows substate on linux choked on) and all the backend/database work for over a year and I love it. You could get it on sale for $699, too.

Main complaint? If you need to do a lot of work in VM's. You currently can't spin up a Windows VM or anything very easily, but rumor has it they're working on letting you dualboot in the future.

I freaking love this machine. They should pay me to evangelize but I promise they don't :)

The main downsides are the wimpy processors, soldered ram, storage and wifi cards, poor repairability, non upstreamed code.

Mostly it's the keyboard that pisses me off on the pixel books

The keyboard on the pixelbook has been regarded as one of the best keyboards on a laptop nearly everywhere I've read! It's the only non-mechanical keyboard I like!

As the article says "A report from Business Insider claims that Google has axed 'dozens' of employees from its laptop and tablet division."

I would love a Pixelbook, but I need a laptop if I want to work while travelling - I often end up with poor cellular data (or none at all!).

Does having both a laptop and a pixelbook make sense?

Work also bought a device to get satellite data - so that we can do operational support while in "remote" areas in New Zealand (plenty of areas we go to that lack mobile coverage) or when travelling overseas.

> I would love a Pixelbook, but I need a laptop if I want to work while travelling

I don't follow. Pixelbook is a laptop! It's actually the only one I travel with

I bought the low spec Pixelbook and gave it to my daughter. I replaced it with the high spec Pixelbook for myself. She since replace her Pixelbook with a 32gb 15 inch Dell XPS i9 for VM work specifically.

Prior to this, I gave my mom Chromebooks after she kept calling me for tech support for virus infestations, and it worked well.

Working with the Pixelbook, I totally agree with the VM bit. I would love to run Vagrant, MiniKube, KubeFlow, etc. The Linux emulation is good, but It's Google. 'We' can do it better. They probably did, but missed the adoption / backwards compatibility curve.

I hung out with a ChromeOS dude last weekend and he told me about how the Linux emulation is controlled by 'vsh' using their own replacement for QEMU, and inside that is an LXC container. Great for security, and I believe him. I entered one of the system vm's and saw LXC/LXD. The security seems great, but again, I can't do what I want to do. I felt dumb asking him about my 'emacs' in the ChromeOS Linux emulation. It always had a huge title bar on the top that took a bunch of the little screen real estate available. His answer was 'hit the full screen' button. I felt dumb. Usability for us dumb engineers will sell your product. Apple has abandoned the engineer market. The XPS flexible, but the Pixelbook is still sexy. I can't get my son to take my daughter's Pixelbook though, so maybe I am just old.

What is it about Dell that you hate? Anyways, Thinkpads are also held in high esteem for running Linux. I'm currently using a Dell XPS (2016 model) at home and a Thinkpad at my current customer project, both running Ubuntu 16.04, and I can recommend both. I chose the Thinkpad over a MacBook Pro, and would do again, but the display and touchpad is no match to Dell's, much less Apple's; that's however no problem because the thing is hooked on a docking station/two monitors/external keyboard.

And once you learn to love the TrackPoint, the touchpad won’t matter any longer.

That’s not true. My work laptop has been a ThinkPad for the last five years, and while I like the TrackPoint for some things, I use the precision touchpad on my X1C6 more. Modern touch pads have good heuristics for fine motions versus large sweeping motions. And the touchpad is way better for scrolling through documents or web pages.

Three gripes with my Dell XPS13.

1) The docking station is horribly buggy. If I unplug it to take my laptop somewhere and then plug it back in, I have to do a full reboot or none of the USB peripherals on the docking station get power. Monitors, power, ethernet all still work through the docking station after being plugged back in. Dell support took 4hrs of my time installing/uninstalling drivers and firmware updates before finally giving up and sending me a new one. Which suffers the exact same issue. So I can buy a different brand of docking station, not take my laptop anywhere, or constantly reboot my machine.

2) Rebooting takes forever then fails. Every single time. After 8-10 minutes of sitting on the blue "Rebooting" screen it finally crashes and tells me something went wrong while rebooting. Every single time.

3) Sleep still doesn't work about a third of the time. If I put my machine to sleep through the Windows start menu and wait for all the various indicators to power off before closing the lid, there's a good chance that when I boot up tomorrow, the battery has fully drained and the machine has to boot back with all my applications closed down and context lost.

It makes me miss my Thinkpad.

All 3 of these issues appear to be related to one common variable.. Windows. I have a Dell XPS 13 9360 8th Gen i5-8250u running Fedora 29 and I've never experienced any of these issues. Why don't you try another OS instead of blaming the hardware. If it continues with Ubuntu 18.04/18.10/Fedora 29 then contact Dell for support..

It's almost certainly a driver issue. Drivers that are provided by Dell. I'm not at all blaming the hardware for the issues. I'm blaming Dell.

To answer your question, I don't switch OS because the machine belongs to my employer and they set the rules. They say everyone runs Windows so I run Windows. It's actually a very usable OS.

You also seem to have missed the part where I spent 4 hours on the phone with Dell support already. Why would you expect that will be more successful with a different OS?

In the thunderbolt docks the issue is firmware updates.

not always. they actually removed a dock already because it was too faulty. it was the tb15. my colleague needed a motherboard upgrade and they replaced the tb15 with the new tb16 because it just couldn't handle what it should have. 2x 4k monitors, ethernet, usb and power over a single thunderbold cable. btw. the tb16 is mostly fine

FWIW, my aforementioned Dell and the Thinkpad both are running Ubuntu flawlessly and without any reboots for months on end, as true workhorses should. In fact, out-of-the-box experience for Linux desktops with first-party support by manufacturers has never been better IMO.

agree 100%. every dell and thinkpad (and now thinkstation) I've installed ubuntu linux on for the past 3-4 years has worked flawlessly (wifi, sound, and gfx being the big three). What really impressed me was the Dell 5520 I had when working at Google- it had a nice nvidia card that was dedicated to running tensorflow training while the rest of the machine was perfectly usable for software development. All of this on battery.

Not sure how far up the thread you've read, but this thread began because a person wanted a Laptop for running Linux. Hence the discussion of whether your complaints are Windows-only.

I suggested Linux because all of your issues are specific to the OS that you are running. As previously mentioned, I have an XPS 13 9360 with 8th gen and none the issues you are complaining about. As for it being employer provided notebook, it may not be the drivers but some crap employer installed security software like Tanium that is causing the issue.

The 9360 hardware sucks, too. Search "9360 coil whine". The CPU (i7) throttles all the time. The fan noise is intolerable. (I run Fedora 29 too)

The Dell thunderbolt docks apparently simply don't work. I have a friend who's gone through a ton of Latitude hardware. Dell just can't make it work, period.

Works mostly fine on XPS 15 + Linux + KDE. Quirks are on KDE end mostly.

Depends on what model. The IT department gave me a dock and I couldn't get it to work with my Dell laptop. It was insufficient to charge the laptop, and I got tired of trying. Later a BIOS update plus driver changes will get it working on windows, and there are people successfully here using their dell thunderbolt dock with Ubuntu 16.04 and 18.

Ultimately, I gave up and bought an intel nuc with an M2 SSD and plenty of ram. It just works.

Believe it or not, I was actually talking about on Windows. :)

This is all the stuff that puts me off trying (again) to get a Linux Laptop. I just don't want to bother with it!

I've (sadly) heard similar reports for Linux on Thinkpads (eg https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/9fos6i/x1_extreme... - and plenty of other reports on other models).

Did you intend to answer someone that is having troubles with Windows on their XPS?

Ubuntu 18.04 has been rock solid for me on the XPS, and it has been getting BIOS updates (and Linux has been getting device driver updates if I want to reinstall).

Linux worked perfectly on the Toshiba I had for the previous 4 years (I didn't buy it with Linux in mind, it just worked).

In my experience, Windows laptops often get "driver rot" over time (amongst other issues). As a developer I can usually fix the Windows issues, but it certainly is not a painless task.

Dell's XPS Windows drivers were particularly bad considering the sticker price - Windows blue-screened two clicks into the install after opening the box - and I had some other blue-screen problems that took me a while to resolve when I first got the laptop. I haven't booted into Windows after installing Ubuntu, and Ubuntu has given me far less trouble than Windows (on this machine).

How so? The only operating system mentioned in that post is Windows.

^+1 for Thinkpads running Linux. Switched from MBPs to these a year ago, never going back.

Do you actually use your computer unplugged?

yeah, but not for extended periods -- so I dunno how the battery'd do for daily working-at-a-cafe or similar. I do always carry a spare battery tho

Also use a thinkpad, X1 carbon from 2015.

Run Manjaro with gnome-shell (actually gnome-shell-performance until 3.32 is released). Its lightening quick, reasonably stable, good battery life.

I also tried KDE, which works quite well, but the battery life was quite poor and I find the general KDE experience abrupt.

Now my 2017 mbp just gathers dust, never going back.

Have you looked at Thinkpad? You could run linux on Carbon X1 and have ultra-mobile package with i7. $1500 but you have one of the best laptops in the market in my view - keyboard, screen, size, weight, feel, specs, battery life, etc. I own the latest Macbook Pro 15 and Carbon X1 6th gen. I want to pick up my thinkpad more than the MacBook. I find Aluminum not a good material for laptops - it is uninviting, heavy and cold to touch. Thinkpad Carbons use magnesium and carbon fiber body thats light and coated with soft touch paint. It is just fantastic.

Mac comments aside, ThinkPads are fantastic for Linux. I'm running Arch on my T460. You can find a used ThinkPad in pretty much every price range on eBay.

How do you compare the battery life against the two?

I can run all day using Arch + vim, running tests, etc. Roughly 10-12 hours on my X1 Carbon Gen 5

All day. 10-12 hour battery life easily.

I also opened the chassis and added Liquid Metal (Grizzly) TIM. The little i7 stays pegged at 4 GHz without throttling and presumably also improves battery life.

If you're willing to afford some depth to your laptop, a dual battery T400 series will get you 12+ hours of video.

You are overstating the price differential.

I'm seeing $2182 Thinkpad vs $2599 MacBook Pro--choices driven by WQHD display, 16GB of RAM and 1TB SSD. Processor on the Pro is significantly faster, the display on the Mac has slightly higher resolution. Maybe not $400 worth of difference, but certainly almost $200 or so.

And I still can't buy an i5 laptop with 32GB of RAM.

> And I still can't buy an i5 laptop with 32GB of RAM.

Sure you can. Just buy a slightly older gen that's on par with an i5 on benchmarks, and max out the RAM on it. It's silly to limit yourself to new devices, when the best deals by far are found on the market for used/refurb ones.

I have no intention of comparing MacBook Pro specs to Thinkpad specs. I was merely pointing out the build quality of Thinkpad vs MacBook Pro.

That was the extent of the reason why I talked about MacBook Pro.

Also I bought my Thinkpad refurbed almost fully specced our for $1499 on eBay. i7, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD, HDR 2.5k display, etc.

Lenovo, like Apple, charges a ridiculous markup on SSDs. However, unlike with a Macbook Pro their laptops are user serviceable.

If you want a 1TB SSD and know how to use a screwdriver, you can save $250 by buying the SSD yourself. If you're willing to start with a 256GB SSD and hold off on upgrading until you actually outgrow your storage space, you could save even more.

The question is for how long will the serviceability stay this way. Lenovo is switching to one soldered RAM slot and o in the new ThinkPad generation. [1]

I own a ThinkPad X1 Yoga (2016) and except the battery life I'm extremely happy with it. Maybe I will switch to a MacBook in the future but the keyboard is a turn off (No F-keys and no Home, End, Insert and Delete keys). On the other hand I like that Apple has only Thunderbolt 3 connectors and I like macOS.

[1] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-ThinkPad-2019-leak-Data...

The new X1 Carbon is not a good Linux machine. Some hardware just doesn’t work (built in LTE). Then there is a bunch of manual configuration required to fix various things, e.g. throttling. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Lenovo_ThinkPad_X1_Carb...

Do you need a fast laptop? No one I know actually does (although I’m sure some people do). Text editing and web browsing don’t require much horsepower. In my opinion, compiling shouldn’t happen on a laptop in the first place: this is why one of my friends has a mega-sized server than he just runs builds and trains ML models on.

An old laptop will run any Linux distro flawlessly and be equally snappy (as in, low-latency disk reads, fast boot times, many applications open) as a current-gen one if you put in a fast SSD and max out the RAM.

I know that this topic is controversial, but it strikes me as odd how many people seem to equate software engineering with a monster laptop, when many of us get lots of work done on smaller, less beefy client devices, offloading the real heavy lifting to a machine that can handle it.

> one of my friends has a mega-sized server than he just runs builds and trains ML models on

I built my first desktop computer to do this recently. I can definitely recommend it, even for local server development. It's nice to be able to have a version of a codebase running on the remote machine so my local laptop stays cool while I'm testing.

It is simply that my time is expensive.

For the $1000 it costs for a faster laptop, work gets many thousands of dollars back due to more efficient development.

I could waste time optimising disk space, waiting for compiles (the developer tools we use need single-core CPU performance), enchancing the performance of development tools, waiting for VMs to boot, waiting for Windows VM to update, waste time shutting down that VM I am not currently using. Yes, I could waste time switching to other tasks while I am waiting for whatever it is I am waiting for.

I travel, and while travelling work gets some development time out of me because it is a laptop and not a workstation. A terminal is no use when I am in an area with poor cellular data connectivity (e.g. most planes).

Work definitely wins on this whole equation.

> For the $1000 it costs for a faster laptop, work gets many thousands of dollars back due to more efficient development.

In that case, why are you looking for a “reasonably priced” laptop? The Apple tax is indeed 50% or more, but it should be a straightforward decision if it fits your other requirements.

Sure, there are diminishing returns; but I don’t see why you wouldn’t spring up $3000 for a maxed out Macbook, considering the cost is still orders of magnitude less than what your business brings in. Unless you really hate the touch bar?

Not OP, but: This is actually why I’m looking at used/refurb MBP for my next purchase probably within the next few months.

At home I’m still on an i5 13” 2013. It’s still running great for everyday uses. Probably aiming for a 2015-ish era 15” i7 or so with double the RAM.

They run in the neighbourhood of $1400 or $1900 CAD. I imagine there are even more resources for that kind of purchase in the US.

I might bite the bullet yet for a newer machine but the Touch Bar is honestly a big turn off for me. Or rather the Touch Bar is fine but the lack of dedicated function keys is a turn off. Have considered adapting by remapping some keys but the price is also a factor.

Sorry, I shouldn't have been inflammatory with "Apple tax". We spent more than $3000, and we are not particularly price sensitive (I was buying the maxed-out configuration, not mid-range). At the time I bought it, the XPS 15 has a better specification than what I could choose from Apple (in New Zealand).

I spent a few hours looking, and I did seriously consider buying the top-spec Apple available. I do use MacOS at work sometimes, although I prefer Linux, and I came from a Windows background.

The Dell appeared to have better drivers for Linux than the Macbook Pro, and the XPS has been a good purchase (rock solid so far, no issues).

Macbook is a very poor choice for developer because of the keyboard without Escape key. I tried to use keyboard without Esc and it's simply too painful to use.

I don't care about the tax. But I can't buy a tool built for aliens by aliens. I could adapt to all the crazy keyboard changes all manufacturers tried over the years. But removing Esc key makes it completely unusable.

For vim? I'm not a vim user but most of them just rebind it to something better, right?

I use emacs/intellij and almost never have had the need to use the Esc key for anything at all.

I use vim. I do map Esc to caps lock, but it’s muscle memory to reach for Esc at this point, so it’s still difficult to justify the touch bar. Thankfully I use a Macbook (not Air, not Pro), which I (affectionately) call the SSH machine.

Mostly for vim, yes. I can't remap it to CapsLock, because I'm Russian and I already use CapsLock for switching keyboard layouts for 20+ years.

"Apple Tax?" When I purchased my last beefy workstation, I looked at Dell, HP, IBM, and clones. When I purchased my 2008 8-core workstation, Apple was hands down the cheapest option. It lasted 10 years until I finally decommissioned it (no more OS updates and slow 3GBps disk I/O). With the last upgrade of PCI SSDs, it still performs just as well if not better than any new laptops I've used.

I recommend Dell's Alienware (AW) laptop if you need a machine with good specs that can reliably run Linux. I have been a happy Ubuntu user on AW for a while. Great options for hardware, built like a tank, and can run simulations/experiments for days without heat warping problems* (this was my primary requirement). Downsides are it is clunkier than the competition (personally I am now used to it) and the battery backup isn't great.

* I once started a set of experiments, drove off for a short 3 day vacation, and returned to see everything was still running smoothly. Which frankly I hadn't expected.

I have used a few different system76 laptops with Ubuntu LTS pre-installed (you can opt-out of Pop!OS, whatever that is!). They've been just fine for my purposes.

https://system76.com/laptops

I am in New Zealand (we are far away from everything!) and I wanted something that at least had the potential to be supported locally.

Hey most Intel Chromebooks now support Crostini i.e. you can run native Linux programs . It runs in a VM under the hood and it's well integrated with the outside OS. Give it a shot.

I would love to, but how many Chromebooks have an i9, 32GB of RAM and 1TB SSD?!

(I wrote another comment for why I use a high-spec laptop: basically multiple VM's and greedy development tools).

Maybe a dumb question. But why run those VM's (or the development tools) strictly locally? I have a small server at home for that. Or alternatively there are free tiers on GCP/AWS/Azure. The advent and maturity of WebAssembly/PWA, could help there as well. But we're not there yet obviously.

As a developer who has repeatedly tried and given up on linux on laptops, a Pixelbook with crostoni has been the first that I have been extremely happy with. Everything I use just works pretty much as it should.

> Is it impossible to make a laptop better than Dell or Apple?

I don't know about impossible, but they've both been building laptops for a long time and they have large market shares, so if it was easy to build better laptops than theirs someone probably would have done it by now so it's probably really hard.

IMO the best (or one of the best) for Linux :

Thinkpad Carbon X1 6th gen (or 7th now?)

I only wish it was sold without Windows so I can save $30-40 on the win license.

Other than that, freaking perfect laptop that rivals a macbook (I will admit that the mac trackpad is slightly better... but this one is pretty damn good)

I will definitely look at getting a Thinkpad next time.

I needed a laptop (I try to refresh every 4 years in time with Ubuntu LTS releases), and the Dell met my requirements at the time, so that was what I got.

I looked at getting an Macbook Pro, but I was worried about the keyboard issues (I do use the laptop keyboard), and I had read about Linux driver issues.

The keyboard is one of the best things about Thinkpads :)

My dream is Thinkpad keyboard + macbook trackpad... I can dream...

Mine is thinkpad 7 row keyboard and trackpoint on a Macbook pro.

I don't think either of us are getting one for Xmas. If I had become founder of a unicorn I'd have had one custom made by now...

Dell literally makes that laptop in the form of the developer editions. I had one and it was great. I have a Lenovo now and it sucks (work).

They make the XPS 13" in a developer edition, but literally Dell do not make an XPS 15" developer edition model. I prefer a slightly bigger screen when working while travelling (in fact I would probably go for a 17" if it only cost an extra 0.5kg).

You can get the Precision 15" with Linux. However I was quoted a price 2 times as much as the XPS 15 with a lower spec, less community support, and I was quoted it with 16.04 installed in Jan 2019 (presumably only 16.04 officially supported? Hard to get information when we are only a small business).

https://liliputing.com/2018/05/dell-introduces-2018-precisio...

Not to start the flame war, but whats the appeal of Linux for software engineering, if you want the "it just works" approach of designed from the ground up experience?

Don't Chrome books provide you what you need for software engineering?

What's the appeal of laptops for software engineering? Tiny screens and attached keyboards are a recipe for hand and spine problems.

I'm not following. OP asked for a linux based software engineering laptop.

The ones available are not hitting the mark.

Why?

You want a couple things for an engineering laptop: Linux support, good hardware (screen, keyboard, build, trackpad, etc), and enterprise guarantees.

XPS sort of does that, but you're still dealing with Dell which has it's own hiccups (variable build quality, archaic sales methods, etc.), also the XPS line isn't quite commercial grade. Thinkpads typically have good Linux support, but sometimes as with these last 6th gen X1's it takes some work to get it right.

The hard part is ultimately enterprise reliability. I want to confidence I can buy 2000 of these for my army of engineers and not overload IT with issues. This kind of support is common enough, but not necessarily for Linux laptops. Hell it'd probably be easier with Linux, the issue is more if the market is big enough to support the operational costs of enterprise support.

I had assumed people who wanted to run linux were okay with dealing with driver hardware jank, and were more or less comfortable with the tuning and customization required to get the hardware to work as they desired.

For those who just wanted a machine that "just worked" Windows based and Apple laptops would suffice, the latter having the power of a unix based OS underneath.

There are a lot of people that would like to run Linux but don't want to deal with hardware problems. That and software compatibility are the biggest pushbacks by far.

This is absolutely not the case. I can't emphasize it enough.

I don't mind Macs and OSX, but I would like some different options. I like Ubuntu (run it on my desktop) but I refuse to play the driver/customization game.

I want everything to just work.

I work remotely and travel a lot for work. At home and at my office (coworking) I have a keyboard and monitor.

> whats the appeal of Linux for software engineering, if you want the "it just works" approach

For one thing, Linux-based OS's like Debian GNU/Linux absolutely follow the "it just works" mantra - if the OS installs properly in the first place and does what you need it to, you can expect it to be rock solid with few or no future issues. Plus, they tend to work for a lot more time than the 5 years max that Chrome OS does (or Mac OS, for that matter). That's simply invaluable in this day and age.

Not really when one's work is related to graphics programming.

I bought a System76 laptop with a 1070 GPU last fall and so far I love it. Hard to explain but I just feel happy using it and having a GPU for machine learning is a big win.

I have two still serviceable MacOS laptops but I don’t think I will buy any more. But, I love Apple Watch and iPhone - probably be a customer of those products for a long time.

Alas whilst there are many who crave such a device, as a market, it is still niche for a sole target. Dell, offer you the option of Linux, more so, drivers. Yet, they still offer the laptop for the windows end user at the other end of the spectrum. That end also has larger market.

For me, wouldn't it be great if laptop shells had a universal connector you could plug the mainboard of choice via an edge connector, be that ARM, X86, MIPS,????. Certainly make laptops more upgradable and save upon production costs with a standard laptop mainboard form factor.

> Google, maybe it is because most of your engineers internally just need a good terminal, instead of a fast laptop?

Admittedly it's about 6 years since I interviewed there, but when I did, there were a number of engineers in my loops who were using chromebooks.

They found it more than sufficient for their needs.... I can see that, I guess. I'm assuming the bulk of the "heavy lifting" happened outside of the context of the chromebook.

Google has an internal cloud-based IDE which is quite popular, so it's possible to do all work in cloud. Otherwise you can ssh into your desktop. Either way Googlers are not allowed to store source code on a laptop.

There are some Engineers who use a Chromebook, but most have a Macbook. I think Linux is more common than Chromebooks.

But honestly, why would you choose a chromebook if you can also get a macbook?

FYI: Google employees can currently choose between a MacBook Pro, Pixelbook or Lenovo X1 Carbon with Linux as their laptop.

If you don't like Dell, three options are Lenovo, Purism, and System76. I'm personally quite happy with my thinkpad.

Do any of these options have a case that feels sturdy? It seems a little silly describing it this way, but one of the reasons I keep coming back to macbooks is the aluminum case. I want good specs, but my lizard brain also wants a laptop which doesn't feel like a flimsy plastic toy.

Ah, fair enough. I think Purism cases are all-metal. I have not touched one though -- going to once they release a 32GB model.

System76's Oryx Pro has an aluminum case.

Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition is a good laptop.

> last two Ubuntu LTS upgrades (4 years);

What does 'last' mean? Any laptop should 'last' 8+ years.

> have a high spec (i9 etc);

I really don't see the point of high-spec laptops for development use. Higher end, high power components just make the batter life worse - reducing the entire point of a mobile device. And you're paying a premium for the mobile version.

A much better option is to have a beefy linux desktop that you perform work on remotely. There is very little reason to locally compile code on a laptop. The economics work much better IMHE... If you have a $2000 budget for instance, you can build a $1300 desktop and buy a $700 laptop which gives you much more power and flexability than buying a single $2000 laptop. So yes, I do think many Google engineers just need a portable terminal to connect to beefy VM's remotely. If you are often working on a mobile internet connection, Mosh works very well for high latency connections.

The $2000 laptop makes sense if you want to game while traveling and/or are using Windows where offloading work to a remote machine is a bit more clunky than just using X11 forwarding and/or tmux over SSH.

Laptops with GPUs tend to be power-hungry and expensive. But the middle ground of a laptop and an external GPU has a good shot at getting even more power per dollar, having sufficient battery life, and still being quite portable.

I do some of my work where there is no internet (except satellite). I happen to be CPU/memory/SSD bound for some of my development work. A four year old 4k laptop with equivalent speed and battery life!? - this one will pay for itself fairly soon by improving my productivity.

The 8950HK processor is fast[1] and NVMe is way faster than SATA.

I just use the integrated Intel GPU (I don't play games on my work laptop. If I were to play games, I would use a dedicated gaming rig or console).

I am expecting that in 4 years time I can get equivalent improvements to productivity by getting a replacement laptop (or even better, retire to a pacific island!).

[1] Benchmarks are not the answer, but anyway: https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/2145#family-64-sing...

This doesn't fit with Google's product direction (charitably, the cloud; less charitably, a data vacuum), business direction (supporting the ad business), or the way they see the world (opinionated).

Is the world filled with that many 15" i9 laptops nowadays m that your problem is really Linux compatibility and the price? I had a hard enough time finding a reasonable quad core a year ago.

https://mntre.com/reform/ You may like the sound of this.

From what I hear most devs aren’t allowed to check out code locally (unless they do mobile development) and instead use a web ide.

FWIW, I just upgraded my Thinkpad for a newer one at work (Google, running GLinux/Debian). Seems great so far.

No goodwill. Only heap of comments on how that is another way to suck user information in to Google ecosystem.

With WSL in Windows 10, a lot of the reasons for booting Ubuntu go away. Check it out if you haven't.

The big problem with WSL is that I can't run a different window manager, which is probably one of the biggest benefits of Linux anyways.

Personally, I can't live without focus-follows-mouse. That way, I can type and click on a window that is under another one.

I've had good luck with the HP zbook studio line. The latest g5 version is quite polished and high end.

Would you be interested in open hardware doing exactly what you asked for ?

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