Linux Developer Laptops: Dell's Precision 5500 series reigns supreme (2019) | Hacker News Reader

Linux Developer Laptops: Dell's Precision 5500 series reigns supreme (2019)

wesmckinney.com

129 pointsskadamat181 comments

No.

I have a 5550 which is I assume what the author is referring to. It’s garbage. Overheats constantly, the touchpad is dire, the screen has bad vignette around the edges, it’s noisy, the thing hard freezes when you plug it into a dock, the webcam only works 50% of the time you power it up and if you pick it up by the base it flexes so badly the touchpad clicks. The keyboard is also soggy as hell and the battery lasts 3 hours if you’re really lucky.

It’s the worst laptop I’ve ever had the displeasure of using. I am just glad I didn’t pay for the thing.

But a Thinkpad or a MacBook and just give this a hard pass.

I’m using a 14” MacBook Pro which was much cheaper and it’s a far more productive machine without all of the above problems!

I was going to write exactly this.

I don’t know about Linux support since I have to use Windows on it but oh boy it is crap. The fans are always on whatever you do, the left part of the keyboard is frequently burning hot. Touchpad is mostly really good … when it works, because as soon as I wash my hands, it stops detecting anything. The audio part, at least on Windows, is pure random. USB docks randomly works and once a USB-C device is plugged in you are good for overheating near the connector.

For me it’s total garbage and I’m just waiting for it to die and my employer to change it for something better.

Our newest Dell laptops looks good but I’m never trusting this company again.

> I was going to write exactly this.

Same. I made the mistake of getting a Dell 2-in-1 without trying it first.

Whether on Windows or on Linux, it's a pain to use.

I found serious ACPI bugs (not just the kind that can be easily fixed with iasl) which made me conclude power management could not work reliably, whether on Windows or on Linux.

It's was usable at all on Windows 10 only thanks to Microsoft extremely careful approach: waking from suspend every now and then, checking the % of battery consumed, giving up on suspend and powering off should the hardware be caught lying about the power envelope while having been "sleeping".

No wonder why Dells risk catching fire if put in a backpack...

> No wonder why Dells risk catching fire if put in a backpack...

omg I also had this and forgot to add it to my rant ! One night I was going down to the kitchen to drink a glass of water and I heard a loud fan noise coming from somewhere. Sure enough it came from my backpack. I opened it and it was extremely hot inside. I wonder what could have happened if I had a good sleep that night.

I've been running Linux on a 5550 for about six months now, and the hardware is rock solid.

Everything works fine. I've experienced no overheating, network is stable, all the USB bits work, it docks and undocks without issue, the web cam works, audio works, it sleeps, hibernates and wakes up fine. Fans aren't very loud and I've only ever heard them spin up when compiling (I would say the full speed fans on the 5550 are about as loud as full speed fans on a 2016 Macbook Pro). The large touchpad works well enough. The 4k screen is OK, and matte, which I consider a bonus. The keyboard is average, certainly not the worst laptop keyboard I've ever used, but far from the best.

However, I wouldn't buy one for myself. Simply because of how flexible it is. It is nearly unusable when sat on anything but a hard flat surface. It's like the designers never even tested it as a LAPtop. Tiny, imperceptible flexes, or even just more pressure on one side than the other and the touchpad generates clicks.

Also, a USB-A port would have been way more useful than an SD-card slot.

This has been my experience with this hardware too. Agree 100% about the USB-A port, but Ethernet would have been nice too!

I use it as a portable workstation, so it is always on a desk with a keyboard and mouse. Definitely not suitable for lap use, but that's no problem for me.

Way nicer than the XPS13, that's for sure!

Dell universal docking is hot garbage, and they don’t really support it unless to pay for a higher tier.

I understand why people would rather not use Apple, but to me going through the drama of dealing with Linux laptops and shitty OEMs, I’d rather go with a pleasant MacOS experience and use separate Linux VMs if needed for builds.

I have a Precision 7510 running Linux and don't have any of these issues so I wonder how different those two series actually are.

We used to buy Precision 5500 series laptops (latest model: 5560), but they have issues with thermal management. Over time, the battery expands due to temperature to the point of moving the trackpad up. Now we are giving Dell a new chance using the 7500 series (now 7760).

The 5560 is between 7.7mm (0.30") (front) and 11.64mm (0.56") (rear) thick. The thickness of the 7560 is between 25 mm (0.98") and 27.36 mm (1.08"). The increased thickness should solve (or help solve) the overheating.

Hmmm, I have a 5540 currently and don't have the problems you had (and I actually replaced the factory Ubuntu with PopOS after a year or two).

Although battery life is not great, but I am not sure that is as much a hardware issue as it is a software one. Although I am waiting on baited breath for AMD based hardware.

I have 5560 and I don't have such issues also.

I don't like the touchpad because it is too big and lacks separate physical buttons.

And I don't like that TB ports don't work with WD19TB docking station (from Dell!).

The wifi range is poor and it is heavy when comparing to ThinkPad.

But besides those issue. I like it.

> If you pick it up by the base it flexes so badly the touchpad clicks.

The XPS15 does the same. What's your USB vendor id / device id? I am working on a libinput patch that mitigates that [0].

[0] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/libinput/libinput/-/merge_req...

Same. I bought an XPS 15 last year and the thing didn't work that well with _windows_, let alone linux. All the same thigns, the touchpad clicked (I even had them come try to repair), it got so hot I couldn't put it in my lap, and even with light usage, battery life was well less than 4h. Just garbage. It's too bad, the screen is lovely and I actually liked the keyboard, but I saw that I had a made a mistake and sold it while I could. Never again.

In comparison, I have a 2018 era XPS 13 9370 and it runs Linux pretty well. I think Dell is trying hard to come up with nice hardware but they don't have the chops to make it all come together including heat management, assembly, power usage, etc.

I'm sticking with my XPS 13 and interested to see what a MS Surface Laptop 5 looks like when they come out later this year.

I think Dell

For what it's worth, I bought a Precision 7200 Developer Edition and it's been great. I came from using Mac's for 10 years before the switch.

I can't speak for the 5500 and I haven't used it with a dock at all, but then I've never used docks in general. At this point I think a USB-C plugged into a monitor with several ports would be close enough.

A lot of it just has to do with you making a choice that you're happy with. I loved using Macs for a decade and I know plenty of people who HATE them because they have to use them at work and they simply didn't have a choice. Because they didn't have a choice, they focus on the things they don't like.

When I picked my Dell I looked a lot of options and eventually came down to Dell or System76. Ended up going with Dell mostly because of past good experiences with their support and that made me more comfortable. It took a little getting used to and there were things I had to figure out along the way but it was my choice so I saw it through.

My next laptop will probably be a System76 or a Framework, but this beast from Dell is doing great right now. It's a portable desktop for me.

If you're OK with MacOS, you don't need Linux laptop. Linux laptop users (like me) have reasons to go into this constrained space :-(

That's said, I roughly agree with you. I have 5530. It's throttled quickly. The battery goes out in a few hours, and yeah, the fan noise.

I'm thinking about giving up Linux and switching to Windows/WSL. It's a bit too much to live with Linux over this mediocre laptop. I guess Dell laptops will work fine with Windows.

I tried that and after few months I'm going back to Linux or I'm bying mac. I'm using Win 11 with WSL. Sometimes WSL can't start and I need to restart. Sometimes it start taking too much of procesor and memmory and I need to restart... One day it will be probably alright but not yet unfortunatly.

> No.

Completely OT. Is the rhetoric of authority on the internet being fined tuned for superficial social media interaction? Vaguely reminds me by analogy the thumbnail engineering on youtube.

I rather prefer comments that telegraph agree or disagree. You can tell me all about how long you've had your laptop and what you do with it later, but start with the point.

I don't understand why Apple is the only company anywhere near their quality of laptop. I don't even care if it's MacBook expensive, I just want a laptop near as physically good as a MacBook, but with Linux and Windows support. Thinkpad doesn't really come close. Why is there no competition here?

I think everyone capable of pulling this off works at Apple.

Indeed. At $currentJob with 1k employees we use Dell laptops (currently Latitude 74xx series, Precision 75xx and 55xx). The 55 series has been the most problematic by far. The earlier generations broke down so frequently that we had to have ~50% of mainboards replaced, being completely bricked or with having the CPU frequency locked to 800Mhz being the most common causes. This has improved, now we "only" have overheating and ballooned batteries as frequent problems. Other than that they have the downside of having few ports and no 4G/5G modem. Despite we (IT) warning our employees, many still pick the model because it looks sleeker and is lighter than the 75 series (which has been excellent).

I really think articles like this can help drive Lenovo to go back to their old superior keyboards.

However, apart from the missing [2019], should there not also be a [Sponsored] tag? The author's review can't reliably be seen to be unbiased (emphasis mine below).

    I just spent the better part of this past year year struggling with the Thinkpad P1, Lenovo's latest effort to compete with Dell's XPS 15 and Precision 5500 line. I had had a Precision 5510 in the past, which had been my favorite laptop of all time, except for some small issues that led me to explore Lenovo's latest.

    I was talking with the Dell folks recently about my experiences with (and general fussiness regarding) Linux laptops and **they offered to send me a new Precision 5540 to give them constructive feedback.** After a few days with the new machine, it was obvious that it was the machine for me and I shut down my Thinkpad P1 for good.

The article reminds me a bit of Jerry Pournelle's _Chaos Manor_ columns. The author writes glowing reviews of the free hardware thrown at them, while the actual experience they describe seems somewhat dubious for users who can't expect free hardware and personal phone support.

If I understand the article correctly, their recommended "Linux Developer Laptop" is permanently stuck on a fairly old version of Linux, and you better not compile much if you want to get decent battery life. Neither of this strikes me as ideal for Linux developers, but what do I know…

I'm guessing that even on M1s that a multi cpu compile drastically lowers battery life. I've never seen a battery that c++ didn't laugh at while torturing it

FYI, Wes McKinney is the guy behind Pandas, the Python data analysis package. Just in case that changes your perception of the author's bias.

Maybe if you're considering the "major laptop manufacturers", but I prefer my System76 laptop any day, since it comes with Linux and they support it from the get-go. Also, they write a lot of nice software that makes the Linux ecosystem better; I love Pop_OS! and how I basically don't have to futz around with getting things to work but have the power of a Debian/Ubuntu variant so I can install other things easily. I don't know off the top of my head any other companies that support Linux like this, but there are a dozen or more out there that I've seen and forgotten over the last few years. I do have to say that a Dell is a good choice for Linux as far as hardware goes, but I prefer now to support those companies that give back to the Linux ecosystem in some way.

I also think it's funny to call something a "developer laptop" as if you can't code on nearly any old piece of junk. If you do something very specialized like graphics or neural net ML perhaps, but then you're probably looking to get a workstation rather than a laptop.

Regarding your last paragraph, I generally agree, but there is at least one exception: If you need lots of RAM and nothing else, then many consumer laptops won't do the job.

Oh yea, that is so true. I wish I could get a cheapo processor with like 32GB or 64GB of RAM. The only choices you have are to get a cheap laptop with a minuscule amount of RAM and the exact amount of processing and hard drive space you need, or to buy some $4000 beast with the amount of RAM you need, but too much of everything else.

I wish that Pop!_OS installed with some sort of hibernation setup by default.

I think the point is that most modern laptops don't offer good linux support (which are without a doubt have the best developer experience, aside from ~debatable~ macOS'es). Either they lack good driver support or need you to hack config files/kernel params. So yeah, I still type for "developer laptops" or "laptops with good linux support" when I'm searching new computers, and no, a basic off-the-shelf Dell Inspiron (or any other "piece of junk") doesn't cut it

Depends which kind of developer, there is a big world out there beyond UNIX CLI and daemons with Web UI.

There are basically two requirements I have for Linux hardware: an Intel wireless card, and a non-Nvidia GPU. I haven't really been let down so far by sticking with only those two requirements, aside from some teething pains with Lenovo's AMD ThinkPads.

System76 actually _does_ have good Linux kit. They work hard to make sure it actually works (usually in the firmware), they don't just slap Linux on some white box odm and ship it.

I think ergonomics / general slickness goes a long way for a dev laptop, not just pure horsepower. Form factor, keyboard etc. Everyone has their preferences with these things :)

I am one of those people that don't care what something looks like, as long as I can plug it into my docking station and occasionally use it stand-alone. However, I can see your ergonomics and "general slickness" point as I've had some work laptops in the past that had the worst keyboard layouts or the touch-pad was placed weirdly or I had to do the Contra cheat code on the keyboard to incant the proper spell to get it to startup properly. I work on a personal laptop that is ~3 years old and I don't think I'll need to replace it ever, since I can replace parts and it's faster than I will ever need for my use cases.

If I could replace my System76's keyboard with a layout that I like, then I would have zero complaints.

I <3 System76

What happens when such a niche manufacturer's hardware breaks down as a warranty case? I strongly prefer vendors or OEMs who have strong support. I am not terribly impressed by the overall quality of my current laptop by German reseller Schenker/XMG but they, as an alternative to the big enterprise suppliers like Dell or HP or Lenovo have a stepped up support game as well (it reflects in their relatively higher prices vs quality they sell).

This is also the reason why I'm sceptical ordering things like the "Framework Laptop". If it's a hobby expense it's an alright expense and risk, but for productivity, I need assurances, and part of that assurance comes from a track record, which not all niche vendors have (with me).

> What happens when such a niche manufacturer's hardware breaks down as a warranty case?

My System76 laptop came with a year of warranty I think, and I never used it. I think there were 2 and 3 year extensions available when purchasing, but I never buy the warranty for anything. However, 3 years after I purchased it I emailed support for a software question and got a great response from them and they spent a good amount of back-and-forth (emails) time helping me diagnose the issue and resolving it, even outside of the service window. That's just my experience, YMMV.

I've had fantastic existence with System76 support, with caveats:

0. They are Colorado business hours

1. They don't send someone to your location to fix stuff.

I like System76, and my two previous work laptops came from them (both served me for over four years each; I only had to replace the last one due to a hard to diagnose RAM issue), but I can't recommend them to anyone outside of the US. By now they really should have gotten into bed with an EU distributor to handle warrantee, customs, and shipping, because it's just too costly and too much of a hassle to deal with System76 with an ocean in between.

I'm using a Dell XPS 13 pre-loaded with Ubuntu now. I had to order it by telephone because the option to configure it with 32GB of RAM and Ubuntu wasn't available on their website (in this respect Dell really sucks with their localized web shop, but at least you can contact them within the EU), but no hassle with customs and shipping, and warrantee isn't limited to the US standard of one year by default, but the EU mandated standard of two years. If it breaks down, I can get a replacement within a week; that's just impossible with overseas commerce.

Wow, thanks for posting this - a System76 is on my shortlist, but it's coming straight off now; I had no idea I'd have to ship it across the Atlantic if there was a problem!!!

Curious - is your XPS13 touch screen or 4k? I called and they insisted the XPS13 only had 32GB RAM options for touch or 4k screens. I don't want either of those things, so im SOL i guess.

Nope; just a normal 1920×1200 non-touch anti-glare screen.

I got this one in July 2021 though, so Dell probably changed everything again. This is an XPS 13 9310 (BN93209C) with 32 GB RAM onboard and Ubuntu Linux 20.04 (current LTS) pre-installed.

Having that code — BN93209C — to give to the telephone operator helped, although I don't know if it is still useful now. Dell seems to be really into limiting their offerings depending on the country you are in.

I got a System76 Serval WS laptop running Ubuntu 2 1/2 years ago and have been happy with it. I used it a lot pre-Covid when I was traveling more. It also updated well, although I always wait two months post-release before upgrading Ubuntu.

I bought a System76 Thelio desktop running Ubuntu in July, and I am typing on it now. I am very happy with it. One nice thing about it is I know the various parts of the system will have decent drivers for Linux. I did get an Nvidia 12 GB GeForce RTX 3060 graphics card with it - that is one area (Nvidia) where support could potentially be problematic, but I have had no problems thus far. The upgrade to Ubuntu 21.10 went smoothly. I also bought a 27" inch monitor with it, and working from home, it beats my old 19" inch monitor by a long shot, especially if I am doing git merges or something.

The first System76 laptop I bought was in 2014, and I have helped other people buy them, and I feel they have gotten better over time - the machines are better.

I like how much of the system is open, if I want to change something I can just drop down and do it - to the desktop layer, to the userspace level, to the kernel level. People have caveats, and I have run into them, but workplaces have had me run Windows or MacOS, and those systems have caveats as well. The ability to be able to look at the code and change it is something I like.

Prior to buying my Thinkpad X1 Nano I considered a System76 laptop, but decided against it mainly for a few reasons:

- Many reports of spotty QC in their machines

- Display panel being 16:9 instead of 16:10 or something taller

- Uninspiring design

- Mediocre specs for price

- Barrel power connector instead of USB-PD

I'm tired of the 'thinner is better' progress of laptops. As a developer I want ports, I want more cooling so the fans don't run all the time. I want a laptop I can actually place on my lap without getting burned LOL. I love my old T420. Currently have P15 from work. Horrible layout because they crammed in a numpad so now the trackpad is offset to the left. If I had to buy a laptop myself I'd lean either to System76 or the Framework laptop.

Perhaps look at HP zBooks; I have one that is almost 6 years old and still kicking; plenty of ports definitely not thin.

I just looked at the current offering and the only negative compared to mine is that it seems to no longer have any USB-A ports on the left; just on the Left.

Now they can come with Ubuntu pre-installed; at the time I had to install it myself.

Only downside is the price; they start around $2k; the one I purchased was $3k, and I justified it by hoping it would last me a while. Given that this was in 2016, I think I made out alright.

Only thing I would change is I'd like a 1440p display. At 15" I think a 4k is wated, but 1080p is a bit confining.

Also, if you do get one, do spend the extra $60 for the better IPS screen; all the reviews I checked said the base screen is garbage.

Well thankfully, Apple seems to have gone in that direction with the last MBP releases. And with them being the trendsetters they are, I wouldn't be surprised if other OEMs saw that as a green light to start putting out thicker laptops with decent ports again.

Judging by the new Mac Studio with those massive wind turbines, maybe Apple's next gen laptops will meet your expectations.

Take a look at T14. It's the progression of the T4xx line. Lot's of ports. Good performance. Good Linux support. Still fairly upgradable.

I was assigned a Macbook Pro at work and I asked for a non-Mac laptop, reason being I'm a Linux developer and Macbook did not work well for me(keyboard,etc).

I ended up with a XPS 15 that has 64GB DDR and 2TB PCIe NVMe SSD around $2750, comparing to 32GB+1TB of MacBook Pro it is about $800 less expensive.

I did not realize Precision 55xx series is even better built than XPS15 otherwise I will probably go that route. Time will tell how this goes(still waiting for XPS15, it's shipped).

Side note: My family had an xps13 and the hinge broke after 3 years, after opening it I found it's made with plastic, I was disappointed that XPS did not even use a metal hinge, which is probably just 25 cents more. so yes XPS does not use the best quality parts from my experience. Next time I will try Precision series.

I'm pretty confident the Precision 55xx series are exactly the same, they just have different chipset features.

> I was disappointed that XPS did not even use a metal hinge, which is probably just 25 cents more. so yes XPS does not use the best quality parts from my experience.

This is why it's $800 cheaper than a MacBook Pro.

I normally hate laptops but I had to buy one due to Covid and went with a Precision 7750. I didn't bother with a dedicated graphics card, and chose the minimum spec RAM and NVMe, but I did opt for the 4K display with WWAN for the 4G modem. I purchased 128GB RAM and a 2TB NVMe elsewhere and just put them in. Final cost was under £4k

It's actually quite decent. I'm not sure I can upgrade the modem to 5G though.

That's what I'm going to do: replace DDR and NVMe myself to save a bit.

I am also keen on something between a NUC and mini-tower, that is small enough to carry, powerful enough to build heavy code bases. You do need find a display with keyboard etc to use them, which works for home and office and lab settings well. Or, just use it as a build machine connected to the network, headlessly(no need keyboard,mouse and display)

Only the XPS 13 from te XPS range is "Linux compatible". The rest are a crapshoot.

I had a little look at the Precision 7760. With Ubuntu there's only 1 version available in the UK and it's a beast with 64GB RAM and 4TB SSD. It cost £6,091.39[1].

Looking at Apple for a rough equivalent[2] I spec'd a 16" up with 64GB and 4TB and it's £4,599.00

I'm an XPS 13 Dev Ed owner myself. It's OK for the most part, I don't have many problems with it.

I'm not in the market for a 16"/17" laptop right now but when it's time to replace this it's going to be hard to look past what Apple are offering.

1. https://www.dell.com/en-uk/work/shop/laptop-computers-2-in-1...

2. https://www.apple.com/uk/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/16-inch-sp...

Change the RAM and SSD to the minimum and buy upgrades elsewhere.

> I did not realize Precision 55xx series is even better built than XPS15

Bought an XPS15 for an intern. I pulled the screen to open, and it remained stuck with the base, because they didn’t even tune the hinge. How can someone work with such a device, you can hear the fans and feel the heat through the keyboard: If XPS15 is in the top 3 money can buy after System76 and Precision 55xx, then Apple can double the prices and they would still have customers.

5560 is one of my least favorite laptops ever.

The trackpad is unnecessarily big that my hand routinely clicks it when typing. Also, it has driver issues:

- on windows if you move the trackpad quickly and then click, it resets your cursor position -- I've lost work because of this bug: https://imgur.com/a/ibNObJ8

- on linux (tried in fedora) there's an unresolved issue with the kernel driver where randomly the acceleration of the cursor will drop and the cursor movement will have a large amount of lag: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/libinput/libinput/-/issues/61...

Physically, out of the box it looks nice but over the course of 2-3 months becomes quite disgusting: it attracts smudges, the speaker grill fill up with dust. It's also heavy.

The plastic housing on the edge of the display is so sharp that when I went to wipe dust off the screen I sliced my finger and started bleeding.

Performance wise, it's okay, but I only get 5 hours in windows (VSCode, Slack, Firefox).

The keyboard is okay, but I prefer the thinkpad keyboards because the delete key isn't offset from a touch power button like the dell.

3/10 would not buy again

> Also, it has driver issues: > - on windows if you move the trackpad quickly and then click, it resets your cursor position -- I've lost work because of this bug: https://imgur.com/a/ibNObJ8

This is actually part of the Windows Precision Touchpad functionality. I think “it’s a feature, not a bug.” I hate it too, but it’s definitely not exclusive to Dell.

This is from 2019, does not appear useful at all.

Shallow dismissal. Don’t assume everyone lives in the same year as you.

Huh? Are others time travellers?

Absolutely! For instance, Jacob Rees-Mogg lives in roughly 1840 CE.

Technologically, it can be cheaper to live a couple years back. Look at all these first gen iPhone SE's for about $100.

https://buy.gazelle.com/collections/iphone-se

That’s what I do with everything possible. Tech becomes quite cheap, and if something breaks (which it does less often than with new stuff), there is no getting upset when the company refuses to honor the warranty, because there is no warranty. Just buy another one.

Well, nobody currently lives or will live in an earlier year, and it only gets less relevant as time goes on.

Have you seen any major changes between now and then? I looked for a linux developer laptop last year and ended up with a lenovo P1 after a previous bad experience (with power management) on an XPS13 (which I used while traveling - I don't travel now).

I didn't see any other alternatives last year vs what he's discussing. I would love to hear if there are new competitive linux-friendly laptops out there now

Well, the Framework did come out since then. That's no small news in the linux laptop world

The article states they want discrete graphics. Framework don't yet have this capability.

Anecdotal, a colleague of mine absolutely hated his to the point where he didn’t even sell it, it just ended up in a drawer until he’s calmed down enough to sort it out for sale >_<

No offense to your colleague, but if you get angry against a piece of tech to a point where you can't even stand to sell it, I think you have more issues than a bad laptop...

Because everyone loves CCP sponsored back doors in their hardware. I am a solid pass on lenovo for life.

I don't think this is remotely credible. Without some evidence it's just scare mongering (although I find it hard to take anyone who automatically jumps to saying CCP when talking about China seriously)

Anyway, as someone without even the remotest business or personal connections to China, if someone is spying on me I hope it's them, rather than someone who can actually impact my life

I think GP was referring to SuperFish,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfish

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9072424 ("Lenovo Caught Installing Adware on New Computers")

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9074110 ("Extracting the SuperFish certificate")

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9524536 ("Class action lawsuit filed against Lenovo over Superfish")

etc.

This seems to be a windows spyware, the OP refers specifically to hardware, and this discussion is about linux so I don't think he was referring to Superfish.

Incidentally, the OP is troll account with -3 Karma so I think he was just trolling anyway, I didn't notice that when I first replied.

Yeah CCP shills do say that to those who oppose them ;)

Laptops from the same series are still offered, and (for good or ill) still pretty similar to 2019 - https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/workstations-isv-certif...

I have a 2020 model, and would concur with this post - good screen, build, thermals, lots of ram, no having to fight with drivers. Even firmware updates "just work" (apply as snaps).

I did find this review more helpful when making the purchase decision - https://www.engineering.com/story/dell-precision-5550-review...

I largely agree--the post definitely seems to show its age, and explicitly doesn't really cover any laptops besides the Dell Precision 5540 vs. the Thinkpad P1. Not the author's fault--this is a great reason why post's dates are useful, but I think that any current review of the Linux development laptop landscape has to include options like the Framework or System76 offerings and exclude models like the x230 (no shade at the x230; I ran it as a Linux dev machine for several years, but it's now significantly handicapped for modern software development).

If I read dmidecode correctly, I'm writing this on a laptop from 2013, which remains not only fully functional but which has high enough specs that I don't even see it struggling for quite some time. When I someday get another laptop, it's likely to be from eBay, and I would very much like to know what the best laptops were 3-5 years ago. Being from 2019 is important context, but it's not disqualifying.

I used to be the same, rocking a late 2013 MacBook Pro. I then bought a Radeon 5000 series and put it in and old PC I had lying around (Xeon E5-2667 v2, Q3'13 according to ark.intel.com).

I was amazed at how well they kept up, and even how they were faster than my 2018-2019 work laptop (an 8th gen i5u-something) when comparing Rust build times.

Then I got a new one with a Zen 3 (5650u) in December. Man, it feels sooo smooth and snappy when compared to the older computers. And I'm running Linux/i3, so nothing that requires fancy graphics or anything. What's shocking, is that the other computers never felt slow, laggy or struggling.

However, this laptop is an absolute steaming PoS on multiple other aspects (chief amongst which a broken BIOS and absurdly bad screen), so I would absolutely not recommend it.

> Then I got a new one with a Zen 3 (5650u) in December. Man, it feels sooo smooth and snappy when compared to the older computers.

> However, this laptop is an absolute steaming PoS on multiple other aspects (chief amongst which a broken BIOS and absurdly bad screen), so I would absolutely not recommend it.

I think you meant to argue that new hardware can be good, but that's really not the conclusion I walked away with.

My point was that there have been noticeable improvements in computing power. I wouldn't recommend this particular model, but it's likely that an equivalent ThinkPad would be an all round much better experience and have the same performance, or maybe even better.

This particular new laptop is a "business" series, so it tries to look fancy, but it's just cheap crap sold at a high markup. I have older models at work, and they have all failed in various ways. They're barely moved outside the office, too, so it's not like I beat on them all day every day. It's a line I would never recommend to anyone under any circumstance, be it new or old. But it is fast.

My general opinion, though, is that instead of buying cheap models often, it's usually much better to buy nicer, "higher-end" models less often, at least as far as perception is concerned, especially if you don't have anything (new) to compare it to. This can afford better "peripherals", such as a screen, keyboard, silence, etc., which cheaper models tend to never have.

It will probably more useful, because with the passed time since introduction, the drivers had a chance to mature. In opposition to the newest gadget, which lacks support of feautures to varying degrees.

Chromebooks and Mac Airs are still better for actual travel use just due to size and power draw (airplane sockets are typically only good for about 180W before they trip. Varies by plane a bit, only one I've seen meaningfully higher was an A380 for Emirates that seemed good to about 250W).

Outside of the big names, I've had a lot of luck with FreeBSD and recent Linux on the MSI G-70x "gamer" laptops, getting the nvidia cards to work in the GPU-switching mode with the lower power Intel ones is finicky but if you don't need to run games or CAD or whatever on it that's not a concern most of the time. Typically 50-75% of a similar Mac and available with NVME ssds and 32GB or more of memory. Atheros/Killer network adapters are not amazing but works and most have a RJ45 gig or 2.5g ethernet port if you need it.

Personally I'm waiting for the new ARM ThinkPad X13s. I rarely buy things on day one but that will be one for sure. Not sure which distro will run on it but I like tinkering with it.

Do you know that the ARM one will run linux on day one?

Not by Lenovo. Officially it comes with Windows 11

Same here - I'm ready to move on from my 2015 XPS13, but having recently got an M1 Mac for work I'm now not prepared to compromise on battery life. If a major Linux distro (Ubuntu or Fedora) is shown to work well on the new ThinkPad, I'll be getting one pretty quickly.

The performance will be the real question, like it won't be nowhere near the M1 for sure

Why wouldn't you just get an AMD X13? At least you know there's already sorted GPU drivers in mainline, it's no slouch AIUI.

What I read about the ARM ThinkPad is it's basically a smartphone in an X13 chassis... Yay? Seems like a strange Linux hardware support nuisance to be looking forward to.

Missing [2019] in the title.

I’m in the market for buying a laptop this year. What is the currently reigning developer laptop?

The Dell Precision 5560 is still a great Linux machine. Most things worked out of the box for me (the one I got has an nvidia card if that bothers you)

Battery life does not beat my 2019 MacBook Pro but it’s still pretty good (don’t have hard numbers)

Edit: also, nothing so far competes with the MacBook trackpads imo. YMMV

Depends on what you're developing.

I'm a mostly[1] happy owner of a Framework laptop.

[1] - I have two complaints. One is screen size. I think one more inch would be ideal. I bought the laptop in spite of this. I can live with it. My second complaint is the battery drain when I suspend the laptop. When suspended, the laptop is dead within a day or two. (Yes, I have 'deep' sleep enabled. No, I'm not using hibernation.)

I've been having very good experiences with my Lenovo P15v dual booting Fedora/Windows. Intel graphics aren't speedy but are reliable. Absolutely gorgeous 4k screen. The usual nice Thinkpad keyboard.

I think it depends on your needs, really. When I bought a laptop in December of last year, I narrowed my options down to a Dell XPS 15 and a Thinkpad T15 (both with the Intel CPUs, although AMD seemed to perform better on benchmarks, Dell doesn't even ship with them and the Thinkpad with AMD wasn't available in my region). I didn't consider System76 much because I need Windows support, and sadly couldn't go for a framework because they didn't ship to where I needed.

I ended up going for the Thinkpad even though it has a worse screen, because I read many negative things about defects in XPS laptops, the CPU was of a lower tier but apparently more energy efficient (also I learned that laptop CPUs are a mess), the Thinkpad has more varied ports, and it has the trackpoint.

I was pleasantly surprised to learn that many top of the line laptops (not counting Apple of course) now have user upgreadable components -- both of my options had upgradeable hard drives and ram.

Back to my original point, for my workload I didn't need more than 16gb of ram, or a dedicated GPU, or good Linux support (although I heard it's pretty good for Thinkpads at least), so my option made sense to me -- and still it set me back almost 2 grand, so not an easy choice. I expect this device to last at least 5 years, which puts the cost into perspective to me.

> still it set me back almost 2 grand, so not an easy choice.

You can't just buy a laptop from Lenovo when you want it. You have to wait for the right time.

I'm still trying to figure out Lenovo pricing in the US. Without any discount their laptops are way to expensive compared to the competition. But then, they do these massive random 50%+ discounts and make their laptops priced less than anything else on the market. The question is why would they do that? It's as if they want to dump some old stock. But the laptops they discount are not old, they are top of the line.

When it's time for me to upgrade I'll go with one of the framework machines. [0] It's fully customizable, with room for future upgrades. I've been looking into a Dell machine for a while, but they just seem to have too many issues.

For what it's worth, I'm currently using an m1 macbook, and the battery life is absolutely incredible.

[0] https://frame.work/

I have an M1 mac for work and I am seriously impressed with the battery life. I prefer my asus laptop that I loaded ubuntu on for my daily driver (gaming, coding, fun), but man, I can leave my work machine unplugged all day while running the work VPN, firefox & chrome, remote desktop, vscode, slack and mattermost, and finish out the day with above 70% battery. I wasn't planning to like this laptop but I do.

I'm in the same boat. Unfortunately, I have run into odd compatibility issues when trying to compile and run a handful of Rust projects that are generally meant for x86 platforms. That issue and macOS prevents me from adopting the m1 as my daily driver.

ThinkPad graphics workstations with Windows 10 Pro like P80.

If you are okay with 16Gb RAM the Huawei Matebook Pro will not disappoint. The quality is top notch and the price is true value for money. For me the light weight, 3000*2000 display and how nice the keyboard and touchpad is makes it nice to use. Ubuntu works perfectly.

I also have a small armada of XPS efforts and very nice Lenovo laptops but the Huawei just feels better engineered.

You also get goodies with it, like fancy speakers and other accessories, depending on the promotions available at the time.

Huawei are a tech leader, not a race to the bottom clone. But after the Trump ban on Huawei you would never know.

If you want hardware that actually works with Linux, System76 all the way.

Which one you chose is a matter of taste, preferences, and finances.

I'll throw my experience with Linux on Dell's in the ring. I have a 13" Dell Inspiron 7000 (i7 8GB ram). I've had it for 4 years or so. In terms of drivers and overall compatibility with Linux, it's been perfect. I install Xubuntu (have also used Mate), it downloads whatever it needs, and everything works. I can't recall a single instance of something crashing, or WIFI problems, or whatever.

There are two downsides. One, battery life sucks. Relative to a Macbook, it's very bad. But, this isn't a surprise to most people. Second, the touchpad driver is shit. Oh man, does it suck. Palm rejection doesn't work, and I had to enable a setting which disables the trackpad for a few seconds after a key press. Otherwise, it's unusable. That part, is irritating.

Those downsides don't really matter to me, because I'm plugged in and docked the majority of the time. I've considered looking into the touchpad issue more, but it's just not worth my effort atm. Otherwise, it's a great machine!

I think a great deal of success with this laptop and Linux is owed to the stewardship provided by Mario Limonciello while he was with Dell [https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Dell-Mar...]. Hopefully Dell can continue to carry the torch. Being able to use fwupd to keep platform firmware (including the docking station) up-to-date has been a treat. "It just works", even.

But for this Precision line specifically, there are only a handful of laptops that can run linux with (nearly) full platform functionality _and_ be outfitted with ECC memory.

Coincidentally also a great doorstop. 2 kilos puts this laptop way out in niche territory. Pretty much nobody wants that. The perfect Linux developer laptop is anything with an xterm and a radio that can reach the Linux box where you are actually working.

Edit: oh it’s an old post. I got the 5560.

Got one from my company (with Windows 10 though) and it’s an amazing device. Really fast, but still not too loud, too hot or too heavy. Good 16:10 screen and battery lifetime is also good.

I have a Dell Precision 5560 with Ubuntu installed from the factory. While the article says that they find power management is where the laptop shines, I have had the opposite experience. I've found that often my 5560 is dead because the battery quickly drains when its off. Does anyone have a fix for this? It seems this thread has attracted some fellow users. Do you have this problem as well? It's really surprising to me that this was an issue out of the box from a vendor who has been selling Linux systems for a while now.

Need to have a thorough comparative analysis to claim something reigns supreme. My laptop is Lenovo Carbon X1 7th Gen - with custom Debian 10 install.

I chose it over Dell offerings due to better keyboard and substantially lower weight. I don't really care about operating system that comes pre-installed; As, i always do a fresh 'bloatware free' install of Debian anyways. The only thing that doesn't work is fingerprint reader. I absolutely love this laptop; But wouldn't go as far as to claim it reigns supreme.

For the past two years i have been doing more and more coding on my home workstation that runs Windows (if you can believe it). With WSL2 all the linux apps (including GUI based ones) run smooth like butter; And the fact that i can back-up and switch between different distros seamlessly really makes my life easier.

So, i would even consider running Windows on my laptop for Linux development purposes in the future (sorry if it offends anyone). The only thing that is stopping me, is the fact that my X1 runs much faster under Debian and battery life is substantially better.

I've been using a Lenovo Carbon X1 4th Gen with Ubuntu installed for the last 5+ years and love it. My next laptop will almost certainly be another X1 Carbon.

My maximum spec Lenovo P1 Gen 1 that I have been using for the last 3 years has been really underwhelming. It feels just very average. No premium feel whatsoever. XPS13 by comparison feels a bit more premium.

Most damning, out of the two M2 SSD drives in Lenovo P1, the main one was some no name Chinese make that failed without a warning after a year. For a premium model that is just unacceptable. Secondary drive is a WD that is still alive.

By comparision 10 year old Dell Precision M6700 and M4700 are built like tanks have ports and upgradability to the max. Same goes for Lenovo T440p that I bought for 200 Euros for my kid's schoolwork. Same goes for older HP ProBooks. Another kid has a Macbook Air M1 and that is just alright.

The laptops from early 2010s just feel sturdier and better built.

The question is which will be the well built professional Alder Lake laptop to get? Will it be Lenovo, Dell, HP, Asus maybe MSI or maybe even Framework?

Intel 12th gen offers some impressive gains over AMD and 11th gen Intel so it makes sense to wait.

To be fair, shouldn't the Intel 12th gen laptop processors be compared to these upcoming AMD models?:

AMD Ryzen 5 6600U

AMD Ryzen 7 6800U

Both are Zen 3+ with RDNA 2.

For laptops, add upcoming HP Elitebook 8xx G9 series (has Intel and AMD) to your list to check out. No idea whether it's good.

I recently bought an LG Gram 17" for use as a Linux developer laptop. So far, I'm absolutely delighted with it: huge 2560x1600 screen, fast, silent, hardly weighs a thing, decent battery life, Thunderbolt 4 and everything works in Ubuntu 22.04, without special drivers. Definitely worth a look.

I can’t do an off-center keyboard. I wish there was a Linux laptop with really good build quality and a centered keyboard. For now, my crummy old XPS will do.

Unrelated.

Why do people hyperlink the title text? It is annoying. I wanted to mark and search the "Dell's Precision 5500" bit to see what the machine looked like. Then I tapped the link. Hyperlinking makes mouse highlighting difficult.

Hyperlink title is all over the internet and it is annoying and it serves no purpose.

Somewhat unrelated.

Why do browsers make it so difficult to copy text within hyperlinks. The Presto layout engine handled this perfectly 15 years ago - how have other browsers not managed to fix this in the intervening period?

I think mobile-friendliness has to be blamed for this. Most browsers these days have "copy link text".

See my sibling comment.

tl;dr hold alt

If you hold alt while highlighting, it bypasses the click events letting you highlight to your hearts content.

Sometimes this doesn’t work when the site is using JS to do some kindof click handler, but it should work fine for an a tag

TIL. Thanks.

I got one of the new 14" Macbook Pros recently and am extremely impressed by the build quality and no the whole no-more-touchbar. I don't feel as productive on it as I do my 3 year old Thinkpad X1 gen7 running Fedora, though. It's like a comfy sofa where as the Macbook is a desk chair.

And you can use multipass in the M1 to generate, for example, ARM64 docker images that you can run in a Graviton CPU. Win Win :)

Didn't know that, awesome!

I've not had a Precision laptop, but I did use multiple generations of the XPS 13 with linux, and I was fairly disappointed with that experience. My XPS 13s had keyboards that would occasionally miss inputs, they had annoying coil whine, and the port selection got worse and worse over each generation.

I've been much happier running linux on the Lenovo T series recently. It is less flashy but seems to be made better. The only real complaint I have with Lenovo is the mediocre speakers.

I am excited about asahi linux opening up the possibility to have my next machine be an M1 macbook.

This is the year of 16:10 screen ratio laptops. Also 16 inch laptop screens. Because of Apple's latest macbooks maybe.

Excited about upcoming HP Elitebook 805 G9 series with AMD chips. Not sure about Linux support - maybe fedora and it's spins work fine.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/CES-2022-HP-announces-the-Elit...

It does seem like in the last several years, the quality of ThinkPads has declined as other business lines like Dell Latitude/Precision and HP EliteBook/ZBook have improved.

I have latitude 5500 (idk if it's different laptop). I am generally happy with it, except for a few minor issues:

- It came with a broken charger, the service replaced it.

- Sometimes when I plug in the charger when the lid is closed, it doesn't start charging (the front light turns on and off after a second), so I have to open the lid and re-plug the charger. Only happens on Linux.

- My touchpad is recognized as "PS/2 Generic Mouse" by libinput, so I can't have touchpad scrolling.

- It only has UEFI boot.

> - My touchpad is recognized as "PS/2 Generic Mouse" by libinput, so I can't have touchpad scrolling.

I have the same issue. Different Dell laptop though. It's been an issue for a looong time. Scrolling reliably fails at least once a week forcing a reboot.

Around 15 years ago I made Linux work well on various laptops. This included X and KDE. More recently I've tried the "great Linux laptops": Thinkpad and Dell. I had so many issues that I had to stop using these laptops altogether.

Some issues I remember off the top of my head are driver support (sometimes bluetooth, sometimes wifi, sometimes other), and video. Getting the video on high dpi displays to look reasonable with Linux on these laptops seemed impossible.

I recently checked and only 3 models of the entire Dell line-up offer Linux OS (1 model is XPS Developer edition).

Basically it seems that Dell abandoned Linux compatibility with new models.

https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/overview/cp/linuxsystem...

This link shows their Linux lineup. Seems they cover all 3 laptop sizes 13/15/17 both in an ultra book form factor and a bulkier port rich model. What more were you hoping for? I personally think it's a good thing they limit the pre-installed Linux models to their professional/business line of laptops. Supporting Linux on every model is probably a waste of time.

I filtered business laptops by using Linux checkbox and got only 3 results. https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/dell-laptops-and-notebo...

Feel free to use my link to see more business laptops with Linux. There's 7 on my link and they are all configurable.

My Dell Precision 5520 was a big disappointment. In spite of having a Xeon CPU, Dell decided that this specific model would not get ECC RAM support. Other Dell laptops from that era using the same CPU do support ECC RAM, but then you have to give up portability. It's my most regretted laptop purchase.

Yeah, had a friend who always complained about this machine.

I personally finally found Thinkpad T14 to work properly with no issues with 4 hours of battery life on Ubuntu(Regolith) out ot the box.

Only issues with this model for me is that the speakers are very weak, you can barely hear anythint most of the time.

For heaven's sake. Is there a laptop which works OK with docking on Linux? I have an XPS 13 now, used Thinkpad t460p before. Both of them has roughly 1/3 chance I didn't see anything on the screen after docking/undocking.

I've got a 5520 with Ubuntu, and my advice is to use the HDMI port on the side of the laptop instead of running video through the dock.

I am still running Debian stable on a T460p and all I can tell you is that there is hope.

I used to have major issues with suspend and dock on this machine, with Ubuntu and then Debian. I lost many work mornings to getting the machine to show anything on the screen after docking. I tried various drivers, tweaks, everything -- sometimes it would work for a while and then trouble would be back with the next reboot or kernel upgrade.

Then one day I hit the right tweak -- or Debian flipped the right bit -- and at least for the last ~year I've had zero problems with it. Dock, undock, suspend, resume, it's 100% there and I don't even think about it anymore.

I believe it's because I finally managed to turn off the Nvidia card and use the Intel one instead, but I can't be sure. To be honest, I'm afraid to touch the video setup or reinstall Linux because I might land right back in driver hell.

What’s a good high perf laptop in 2022 that manages high load for hours (with power cable) without being noisy or overheating/throttling

The Dell precisions I have had have been crappy with swelling batteries after a year or so of hard use. The current one has had two battery replacements with touchpad and keyboard replacement, within the warranty period. I just recently swapped the CPU fan. The last precision before that had to get a screen and motherboard replaced.

Anything that has proper cooling and latest gen CPU seems to be plasticky gaming models (Alienware, Legion, ..). No one makes a good developer workstation for 99% stationary use it seems. Yet almost all developers I know use external power, keyboards and screens almost all the time and just occasionally move between e.g home and office. The niche of “movable workstation” seems underserviced despite a huge market, right?

Did you miss all the M1 MacBook Pro hoopla? https://hn.algolia.com/?q=macbook+pro+14%22

Sorry, I should have added I have to be able to run Windows on it natively too. Otherwise I'd be on an Apple chip. I need something quiet, high power, AND x86 (But doesn't have to be light, cheap, small, have any battery life...)

I have been running Linux on Thinkpad X1 Carbon laptops for several generations now: Gentoo on Gen 1, Debian on Gen 5, and now Arch on Gen 9. I can’t recommend them enough for a Linux daily driver and development workstation!

I like the Lenovos (not affiliated with them).

Had various of their laptops: T42, T500, T440p, X1 Extreme gen2 (dumb name, but nice laptop).

They usually run Linux without any problems, are solidly built (even after being taking over from IBM).

I think this should say (2019) in the title, I was somewhat surpried to read "Dell ships a pre-installed a customized Ubuntu LTS release (currently 18.04) "

Is it an unpopular opinion to hate working on any laptop?

Unless you have an external display, keyboard, and mouse. I have my laptop always connected to a screen (34'') unless I need mobility (a meeting room, a plane). A desktop cannot be turned into a mobile solution ;)

You'd think. But I'm with you. I never saw the appeal and avoided them until Covid hit.

Doing more and more in the browser these days I'm thinking of just getting a Chromebook. If only there was one with a good quality large screen.

Connect it to a monitor?

Got a Dell latitude 7420, wiped Windows 11 off it, installed Ubuntu, and I was happily surprised that everything just worked.

I have a Precision 3561 running Ubuntu and it's pretty great if you ask me.

Dell/Ubuntu, never again. Running Pop! on my Lenovo X1 Extreme 2nd gen.

Pfft MacBook? This 12 year old ThinkPad is great, you gotta believe me!

He doesn't pfft anything, that much is clear from the very first 2 paragraphs. Also this is from 2019, before M1. Next time, at least read a bit of the article.

No.

i find it very hard to suggest an intel/amd laptop nowadays now that M1 macbooks exist..

M1 is a league on its own, everything else is just tech junk at this point

M1 is overrated. I own MacBook Pro with M1 Max. It’s fast, but it’s not something that helps in day to day use. And ARM compatibility issues not really helping. Battery is not that amazing either. I spent 30 minutes in discord and battery was at 91%, 5 hours is not something unique. It’s good, fast and expensive laptop. But not something that I could call mind breaking.

Hmm, I have the air with m1, and my battery life is insane. Like 20 hours, even with a parallels vm running some of the time.

I do however have no idea what discord is. Isn’t it some kinda forum?

Also using safari when on battery doubles your life, fwiw.

Discord is like Slack, with video calls. I’m using Safari.

Slack has video calls… they’re Shite though ;)

> I do however have no idea what discord is. Isn’t it some kinda forum?

Budding Slack competitor that started with a focus on gaming. If you couldn't guess from the context of its eating battery like crazy, it's a webtech "application".

Discord in particular is a horrible battery hog—we used it a lot over the worst stretches of the pandemic in my social group, and it was constantly killing laptop batteries that could reasonably last 8+ hours, in like 3 hours flat. I've always had to avoid Electron (and leaving enormous web-apps open all the time, like Gmail) and use Safari to achieve (or sometimes exceed—they're relatively conservative about it) Apple's battery life claims. Unfortunately, a handful of common programs seem to be the equivalent of having your computer to find more digits of Pi constantly, on all cores, while what they're actually doing justifies maybe 10% of their actual power use. Mostly, it's webshit doing it.

My regular M1 MBP is comfortably managing 18 hours of normal use (non-video browser and terminal) or 12ish hours of more intensive use (video and Slack). Sounds like putting the M1 Max in a laptop form factor is a bit of a waste, as I've never even strained the base level processor.

Try the Discord PTB which is native to M1. https://discord.com/api/download/ptb?platform=osx

> And ARM compatibility issues not really helping

There were two things I wanted to try on my MBP w/ M1 - compiling an Android app that has some C code, and also to run Fidelity's Active Trader Pro program (not that I would use it that actively). I also installed the Rosetta stuff it prompted for.

The Active Trader Pro program would not run.

In Android Studio, the production version can not compile with CMake as it can on Intel-based Macs yet ( https://github.com/android/ndk/issues/1299 ). They say there is stuff in the beta/alpha/canary branches where it is working, but I am not in a rush and will wait for that to make its way into production.

> It’s good, fast

Yes, I did see the speed, especially with a normal Kotlin/Java Android Studio compile, on 16GB RAM.

Now using a Macbook Pro with the M1 Pro chip with 16gigs of RAM for fullstack development. Best laptop I've ever used (that coming from a linux aficionado). Battery life is about 10 hours with Chrome, qutebrowser, Slack, Apple Music, Ruby and node processes for coding, and Neovim. Laptop basically never stutters or freezes. Screen, keyboard, speaker, mic, camera are all on-point.

My only complaint is that the window manager I use (Yabai) is acting buggy, and I miss i3wm.

There are still zero Apple laptops with touch/pen displays. M1 gives good performance per watt, but at the same time my computer's longevity has been more than enough for probably a decade now; as long as I get a good solid 10 hours on a single charge, that might as well be 20 hours because it'll be hooked up to my home monitors before too long. And yes, M1 performance is very good, but so are a lot of other machines out there, and most laptops today, even the slowest worst ones, are more than sufficient for the everyday computing needs of most people.

So the value of a amd/intel laptop is all the performance you need, all the battery life you need, and also you get extra features you'll never see on a Mac like pen and touch screen, plus compatibility with all of your games, programs, and hardware. That's not tech junk, imo.

I'm very curious about counterpoint to this from a causal unix user perspective

The counterpoint would be that huge swathes of the public (myself included) despise using Mac OS for anything more serious than browsing, so that entire line of laptops would be dead to us.

The counter-point is it may be "unix" but it is not Linux and if you think it is, it will bite you in ways you don't expect (why does the sed command that works completely fine on Linux fails weirdly... oh because even though it is mostly the same sed except it is not really... it's the BSD sed from whenever Apple forked it).

The "package manager" brew is it's own thing because it is not first party, will never be and will conflict with your OS in unexpected ways when you least expect it.

And then, it's not even amd64. So, if you use docker for example, you have to remember to cross build for linux/amd64 if you are deploying to an amd64 server, which is much more likely than you deploying to arm64... and then, you have to run an emulated VM in the background for this purpose.

Do you rely on specific software/libraries? Well, you may read that it is supported now for M1, but you don't really know what bits aren't supported... and you may find that the hard way.

Does it run Linux?

First of all, Desktop linux barely works on the hardware it is designed to work on.

Let's say that because of some miracle, Linux becomes usable on M1 macs... and people start buying M1 macs to run Linux, Apple will have incentive to lock the bootloader (which they don't currently do) so that people are forced to run macOS only... because their profits does not come from the hardware itself but the "ecosystem" (a.k.a. vendor-lock-in) they have built around it.

> First of all, Desktop linux barely works on the hardware it is designed to work on.

Huh. I have been running linux on laptops for years and I don't even pick my laptops to run linux spefically. My last laptop was a surface pro and Linux ran with 0 issues and that is pretty esotoric hardware in the laptop space.

> Let's say that because of some miracle, Linux becomes usable on M1 macs...

The release of the first version of Linux on M1 mac is weeks away. With the only major things not working beeing the GPU and bluetooth.

> and people start buying M1 macs to run Linux, Apple will have incentive to lock the bootloader (which they don't currently do) so that people are forced to run macOS only... because their profits does not come from the hardware itself but the "ecosystem" (a.k.a. vendor-lock-in) they have built around it.

I don't follow this logic. Why would Apple first create more work for them to unlock the bootloader and build ways to load other Operating Systems to then take it back? Like do you think Apple likes to pay their engineers to play a prank on the Linux community? Or how do you envision this happened.

> I have been running linux on laptops for years and I don't even pick my laptops to run linux spefically.

That is very surprising to me because I have owned 8 computers in the last 18 years; I have tried to run desktop Linux on all of them and I have yet to have an experience where I haven't had wide variety of issues with all of them. I have also yet to meet anyone who is happy with running Linux on their computers, even those whose preferred desktop operating system is Linux (as is mine). The people I know were the happiest are those who ran it under Virtualbox as their main OS for work (while running the Virtualbox itself on macOS or Windows obviously) because then they only have to worry about it working on Virtualbox and even then they encounter issues all the time.

> My last laptop was a surface pro and Linux ran with 0 issues and that is pretty esotoric hardware in the laptop space.

Then, you are probably the luckiest desktop linux user to ever exist. Cherish it while it lasts.

>The release of the first version of Linux on M1 mac is weeks away.

I assume it is just like how the year of the linux desktop has been every year forever.

>With the only major things not working beeing the GPU and bluetooth.

These have been issues on desktop Linux forever throughout all these years. If you think it will be suddenly fixed on a completely new platform that came out last year, I can only tell you that you will need to be prepared for disappointment. I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't work without major problems in any platform in 2042.

>Why would Apple first create more work for them to unlock the bootloader

It doesn't take more work to unlock the bootloader. They don't lock it because they don't expect anyone to be able to make anything else work... so having it locked would make them look bad without the benefits. If people do manage to make other operating systems work, their cost/benefit equation will change significantly and they will take steps to block it.

>play a prank on the Linux community?

Why do you think people working at Apple would even consider that Linux community is somehow remotely relevant to their business?

> I have also yet to meet anyone who is happy with running Linux on their computers, even those whose preferred desktop operating system is Linux (as is mine). The people I know were the happiest are those who ran it under Virtualbox as their main OS for work (while running the Virtualbox itself on macOS or Windows obviously) because then they only have to worry about it working on Virtualbox and even then they encounter issues all the time.

And yet there are millions of people that do run linux and like it (using virtual box to run linux is like licking lolipos covered with plastic). Sure there are sometimes issues, but in 90% of time it is for new hardware (and that is reduced nowadays - e.g. intel sends patches to kernel ahead of time) and my play with compiling new kernel versions :)

It is not a system for grannies (unless it was setup by someone else at the beginning - then it can be, I saw it used like one) - it is mostly system for powerusers, those that don't need to push alt/opt to show a hidden menu option.

it doesn't matter, it has a native unix environment

i live in the terminal most of the time for my dev tasks, i even have a tilling window manager

for everything else, i am glad macOS exists, applications are great, i get to use iOS apps too and everything is consistent and snappy, it stays cool, quiet, it never throttle on battery, things compiler super quick, and battery lasts super long

laptop? apple won, i wouldn't put anything else on the podium

macos is specifically dumbed down for normal users, that don't want to be forced to see something complicated.

Can it run xmonad?

Are you that guy who gives free M1s to those who can't afford it to reduce humanity's junk?

The macbook pro M1 is actually cheaper, at $1999, the precision 5500 is $2300

Obviously I was referring to 'everything else is just tech junk at this point'.

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