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Comment by frant-hartm | Hacker News Reader

For developers, going with Intel only (no Nvidia discrete card) is the most sensible choice. I have P15 and it's riddled with issues - not that they are not solvable, but it needs workarounds, restarts of X (logout/login), or running discrete only (which eats battery).

The problem is they don't make the larger workstation laptops with Intel only.

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> For developers, going with Intel only (no Nvidia discrete card) is the most sensible choice.

Absolutely not. Even the latest gen Intel ThinkPads are power-hungry and wasteful. They either throttle to shit, run way too hot or run way too loud and you have increasingly terrible battery life in all three cases.

AMD resolves a few of those problems, you get more with the same power consumption, but still a good few steps behind a M1 Mac things combined.

As I don't think Linux on an m1 Mac is going to be viable in the near term - I don't think it's all that relevant as a Linux workstation?

It does seem fairly usable already. I'd say it's going to be viable as a primary workstation sooner than later, but things like polished GPU drivers will take more time.

There are other ARM machines as well, that run Linux more easily, but those aren't as high-performance yet.

I don't think something is usable without GPU acceleration.

Some acceleration for sure is necessary, though things like video acceleration (that belong in the set "polished GPU drivers") are quite secondary. Linux is a good example of that, accelerated video decode is still quite rare and finicky.

I imagine this is even more true for a device with a "retina" display.

I hope you're right, but I think you're wrong...

I came to exactly post this. I previously had a HP ZBook with Nvidia Quadro inside and although I managed to get it running nicely I recently bought an LG Gram with integrated graphics and I'm not looking back. Both came with a Windows which I immediatly changed to Linux.

If you are not into gaming you can save big bucks and weight buying a laptop with integrated graphics. If you need a GPU for work you most probably need one with >8GB anyway.

PD: Why do so many laptops come with crapware instead of vanilla Windows? Why??? Why do laptop manufacturers tarnish their product so much? It remembers me so much of Android phones.

I also own a ZBook and I looked at an LG Gram as a possible replacement in case something happens to my laptop. I use the 3 physical buttons (click, paste - a Linux thing, right click) and the LG doesn't have them. That made me immediately discard the idea. On the other side this Lenovo has the physical buttons. I wonder how terrible the touchpad actually is. I only need to move the pointer and scroll. No gestures, no clicks.

If you don't care about gestures as they've always been fine in my experience. I can't speak for gestures because the only one I use is right click (two finger tap). But for pointing the cursor and pulling the trigger the touchpad/trackpoint works fine I use both constantly since sometimes the trackpoint is easier to reach or the touchpad is easier to reach. I also use both sets of buttons as well as sometimes it's easier to have your left hand at home position and your right hand trackpaddin' but you use your thumb on space to left click.

all-amd systems are a solid alternative as well. if you only have an igpu, it's effectively the same experience as an all-intel system. if you additionally have an amd dgpu, offloading work to it is as simple as setting DRI_PRIME=1 in the target process environment

Yeah, AMD would be the way to go (I switched to AMD on my desktop when Ryzen came out) only if there were reasonable laptops available.

AFAIK there are no AMD laptops with 128 GB RAM. Quickly looking at Lenovo site, I couldn't even find one with 64, only 48.

Besides the lack of OLED display, the limited RAM on AMD laptops is another showstopper then. I want a minimum of 64GB ECC, which I can get on a Thinkpad with an Intel Xeon CPU.

The Alienware M15 r5 Ryzen édition (amongst others) does support 64GB of RAM, but not ECC.

It also isn't an all-amd system, so your external displays and prime offloading all become way more awkward.

I have one - prime offloading works exactly the same as on Intel. As far as external displays it's very simple, when I plug one in it is owned 100% by the NVidia GPU. Which is not an issue because I have access to AC.

Since they stopped wiring outputs to the dGPU, it's not really that bad. You just rmmod nvidia/nouveau, echo auto >/sys/bus/pci/devices/…/power/control and ignore the dGPU until you need it. And even then, it's absolutely fine to launch a second X server for the game you need to play without shutting down the first one, or just use bumblebee/primusrun.

> The problem is they don't make the larger workstation laptops with Intel only.

This might be a Lenovo-only problem. With Dell, you can customise-to-order a Precision 7760 with an 8-core Xeon, 128 GB unbuffered ECC memory, a lot of storage, and no discrete graphics card, if you so desire.

Many of these options aren't available on the site, but you can always call/chat in and from my experience, Dell will be happy to customise a machine to your requirements.

That is IMO a very shitty experience, why would they do this when they already have an online shop where you can configure stuff? You cant blame people people for not knowing this when such thing is gatekeeped. IMO fuck dell for that approach

That's another thing I don't understand, these configurators are not available in my country (Czech Republic) - neither for Lenovo nor Dell.

Fortunately I was able to find a local Lenovo partner, who has some internal access. But I don't understand why they don't have it public for whole EU.

> For developers, going with Intel only (no Nvidia discrete card) is the most sensible choice.

Seems a right shame it lock you out of the 4K display though.

Huh, I didn't know you could force to use discrete GPU only on the P15. I am considering switching to this laptop from T480, where this doesn't seem possible.

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