Why isn't there a Linux laptop to directly compete with OS X/Apple? | Hacker News Reader

Why isn't there a Linux laptop to directly compete with OS X/Apple?

4 pointsone2three45 comments

There does not seem to be a top-of-line laptop with full linux support.

Imagine a Thinkpad series with full support for Debian for example.

Full support meaning that all HW works without any user required effort and keeps working during updates.

So, in essence very good HW, running linux (or any POSIX OS), coupled with company support.

All that adding up to a good, reliable professional laptop at a reasonable price.

It saddens me that as a professional I seem to have only three options for a good laptop:

1. apple mac ~3000 Euros

2. top-of-the-line Win ~1500 Euros but I'll have to work on Windows

3. top-of-the-line HW ~1500 Euros with linux where I'll have to babysit and troubleshoot every time OS upgrades

I just can't understand why this market gap has not been filled yet...

View on HN

The problem isn't that there is "one desktop" for Linux but there there "one thousand desktops" and none of them are any good.

If there was one they'd have to fix the bugs, but because there are thousands people move to the one that fixes problem A, but problem B is broken, etc.

A pet peeve I've had for a long time is that most Linux desktops have a 'devil may care' attitude about font metrics, so that labels are often bigger than the space allocated for them, overlap with each other, etc.

Lately I was digging into some old Word documents and that got me looking into the internals of how Win95 graphics worked (this is enshrined an a "windows metafile" format) and found the font selection, metrics, etc. from Win95 are pretty advanced compared to what people use today, and that's got something to do with why you could make applications with Visual Basic and have the controls and text render properly and why off-brand knockoffs of Visual Basic for Linux and other OS have never been a thing.

Personally I really like the option of a "big Windows machine running a Linux VM with NO X Windows" that way you get a GUI that works (like you can find the scroll bars for your IDE) but just ssh into an environment of 100% POSIX Goodness.

3. top-of-the-line HW ~1500 Euros with linux where I'll have to babysit and troubleshoot every time OS upgrades

What criteria determine "top of the line"? "Top of the line" for what, exactly? To reduce that question to the absolute absurd, "What laptop is 'top of the line' for deep sea fishing?"

My criteria for the best Linux laptop is "What peripheral chips and components are best suited to current Linux driver code?". Incidentally, have you ever tried to install vanilla Windows on a HP laptop? It'll take you days to track down all of the various drivers needed for all of those wierd and wonderful and quirky peripheral chips, that HP buys cheaply in bulk, just to get it working with any reasonable usefulness. (Which is just one of the reasons why HP laptops are on my "Never, ever buy one of these" list.)

In my own case, I buy Lenovo laptops with Intel peripheral chips. I have a ten-year-old T410 which still works well with Linux, although I replaced it about six months back with a Lenovo P53.

With both of these laptops, I can install a flawless Linux distro within about 30 minutes. Recovering Windows on these same machines takes literally hours.

As a starting point, Windows applications developers often use Windows laptops; macOS and iOS application developers typically use Apple laptops.

For generalized development tasks, Intel-based Apple laptops are quite typical; to date, there hasn't been a compelling necessity (i.e., signing infrastructure requirements) to run Linux on anything but a re-purposed Intel-/AMD-based device.

The Dell Developer Edition devices arrive with batteries included (for Canonical Ubuntu, anyway), though the biggest driver is demand. There are plenty of folks internal to most of the major laptop manufacturers that unofficially support flavored Linux on their own time, as their sales and marketing staff don't prioritize Linux offerings as a product.

Lastly, there are a lot of folks within the greater Linux ecosystem that want true "librem" laptops; problem is, the resources do not YET exist at ODM (not OEM) scale to fully support backports to librem device firmware (commercial device firmware is complicated enough, thanks to Intel / AMD).

This looks pretty nice to me:

https://puri.sm/products/librem-14/

https://system76.com/ search no more!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com