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Comment by thirsteh | Hacker News Reader

Short version: Apple! Apple! Apple!

That's pretty much 95% of the posts on UsesThis. Which I wrote off at first as being elitist, but the more top tier developers you meet the more you realize that it is actually the norm. The interesting thing is that for those not using a Apple laptop are always on a Lenovo.

I'm working on a infographic, or something along those lines, that shows a breakdown of what it used on UsesThis, but the pie charts are going to mostly be Apple flavored.

I'd like to see a geographical and occupational breakdown, I'm sensing selection bias here.

certainly the vast majority of people interviewed on UsesThis are not developers

I meant an occupational breakdown among the developers. I'm sensing from browsing the site that it favors consumer-facing application programmers.

Nope, I'm trying to get anyone interesting from all sorts of fields. These are all the people who've said yes, for one thing. :)

Naturally. "Consumer facing" = "more widely known" = "interesting to a wider audience."

Naturally. "Consumer facing" = "more widely known" = "interesting to a bigger audience."

Cool! Lemme know if/when you do so's I can see.

I assume the reason they're on a ThinkPad/Lenovo is that there is a well-deserved reputation there for running Linux well.

I recently picked up one of the new Toshiba Portege models to run Linux, and stock Ubuntu is giving me flashbacks to the circa-1999 Linux experience -- it doesn't detect when a monitor appears over HDMI, randomly will run up to 100% and freeze (kernel patch coming soon!), power management settings seem basically ignored with the display dimming when that is both disabled and I'm typing... and the worst part? Mentioned it to the local department Linux people, and they just said, "oh, yeah, you should've bought Thinkpad."

I just got a Thinkpad T420s and almost everything worked right out of the box (Ubuntu 10.04) despite some people having trouble on the forums a few months ago.

Sometimes I have problems getting the display connected to the docking station to detect if I suspend while not connected, then connect, then resume. This is a pretty minor flaw that is fairly easily worked around.

Have you tried 11.04?

doh, yeah, that's what I meant to say I installed with no trouble. 11.04 was no trouble, and I haven't tried 10.04.

if you're looking for a mac book like experience with Ubuntu you should buy approved hardware, or from vendors that offer pre built machines like http://www.system76.com/ or http://www.dell.com/content/topics/segtopic.aspx/linux_3x

Thanks for the tip! I really wish I'd known about the approved hardware thing beforehand.

well its less approved and more known to work because hardware vendors provide proper drivers or support, etc.

I bought a dellbuntu once there was a bug with the x driver so x didn't work.

Before switching to Apple laptops, I had several Thinkpads - and would have to say their solidity, reliability and no-frills approach were major factors. I'd probably go Thinkpad again if I needed a non-mac machine.

Another factor represented here is they're popular in the corporate world - I know Adobe is standardized on them for the Windows side and I /think/ Google is too.

Remind me of a statistics I did months ago. http://codingai.appspot.com/demo/usesthis

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