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Comment by Andrew_nenakhov | Hacker News Reader

All i want is a laptop with similar build quality, battery life, and Ubuntu.

A major factor in achieving excellent battery life coupled with relatively good performance & responsiveness, on Apple products, is the OS. That holds for both Macs and iDevices.

Yes, although I think a lot of the issue is generic hardware drivers that don’t necessarily configure things correctly, and it looks like the Asiago linux people are paying a lot of attention to power management, so it may end up having decent battery life too.

So you're saying that BSD has better power management than Linux? Would love to see some real research and analysis on this.

My claim is that macOS and iOS have far better power management than Linux or Windows, or Android, respectively. Possibly that's directly due to their BSD heritage, but I doubt it.

Apple's kernel isn't merely one of the BSD derivatives. And of course their userland is mostly proprietary.

It's not a BSD vs. Linux thing. It's the entire software stack including user space, e.g. how much is the CPU woken up by silly background tasks doing useless things. That thing can be fixed regardless of the underlying kernel if people care enough. The total investment in desktop Linux is tiny compared to what Apple puts into macOS.

The vast majority of power management is less background services while active.

It's mostly about reducing idle power consumption sleep mode, and closed lid hibernation.

Most battery loss in mobile devices can be attributed to two things.

The screen, and how much is lost when the device is idle in your pocket/backpack.

No, macOS does its own power management - the base kernel may be BSD, but macOS has vastly more work in it than simply shipping a basic BSD system.

The base kernel is not really BSD.

https://wiki.freebsd.org/Myths#FreeBSD_is_Just_macOS_Without...

>Darwin - which consists of the XNU kernel, IOkit (a driver model), and POSIX compatibility via a BSD compatibility layer - makes up part of macOS (as well as iOS, tvOS, and others) includes a few subsystems (such as the VFS, process model, and network implementation) from (older versions of) FreeBSD, but is mostly an independent implementation. The similarities in the userland, however, make it much easier to port macOS code to FreeBSD than any other system - partially because a lot of command-line utilities were imported along with the BSD bits from FreeBSD. For example, both libdispatch (Grand Central Dispatch in Apple's marketing) and libc++ were written for macOS and worked on FreeBSD before any other OS.

It’s pretty BSD. Sure Mach is under there, but that doesn’t mean it “is” Mach. There’s a lot more original work that doesn’t belong to either ancestor.

There are several android phones that compete with the iphone 13 pro performance wise, while running a much less optimized os.

Likewise in the desktop world, the single core performance of the M1 is on par with top of the line chips, and M2 will be the same, and intel and amd work fine on linux.

Apples decision to keep a locked box has nothing to do with performance, solely to do with keeping people in the ecosystem for revenue.

The "coupled with" was important. They hit a spot on the performance/responsiveness/power-use graph that others don't, and a lot of that's due to software, not just hardware. It's easy to get incredible battery life if you accept poor performance, or to have great performance by sacrificing battery life, but Apple does the extra work to achieve both. Kinda like how BeOS used to feel way smoother than Windows or (GUI) Linux even when running on far worse hardware.

I'm aware benchmarks don't tell the whole story, but Geekbench shows the iPhone 13 Pro[0] significantly outperforming the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra[1] - about 60% faster multicore (presumably thermally limited?) and ~80% faster singlecore.

[0]: https://browser.geekbench.com/ios_devices/iphone-13-pro [1]: https://browser.geekbench.com/android_devices/samsung-sm-s90...

I like the XPS 13 line myself. The 93xx line lasted all night when I forgot to shut the lid one evening (9+ hours) with Fedora (after running `powertop` and doing its tweaks).

But I'm also a "weirdo" who doesn't like Apple-made hardware (the trackpad, touchbar, keyboard, mouse, etc. are all inferior IMO), so maybe you're looking for something different there.

I'm currently on my first and last XPS, a 9570. I really wanted to love it, but there's just too much about it that is a complete disaster, particularly around power management, wake behaviour, and thermals.

I know I haven't exactly babied it, what with it having been plugged in in my home office for basically two straight years during the pandemic, but the battery is shot at this point— getting barely an hour of life. Often it'll be supposedly sleeping in lid-shut mode but be cooking itself for no reason. Then it'll wake up and immediately go into a power-panic shutdown, only to assert that the battery is full after all when it reboots connected to juice. And now the HDMI port is also toast (verified under multiple OSes to be a hardware issue).

Maybe I just got a bad year, but this is supposed to be Dell's premium machine and I don't think I can justify giving them another chance after this. It's just nowhere near reliable enough to be used on the road, and not performant enough to be a true desktop replacement. So I don't know who is using this machine and for what.

I had a 9520 for about 5 years. I had two issues, which was a broken left hinge (4k touch screen was two heavy for that part, I believe in the XPS 15 actually didn't suffer from the same issue), and swelling batteries, which caused various knock on issues. I also experienced the same issue with batteries from the dell latitude I got from work. Seemed to be a dell thing for laptops left plugged in constantly. I never had to deal with overheating issues despite having a Xeon (although it did get quite hot).

Its a shame because otherwise I really liked the laptop. Gorgeous screen, good trackpad and keyboard, and a perfect size imo.

I think the real garbage part of buying an XPS from Dell for professional developer work on Linux is that they will not provide any support for the device. Particularly when you report driver, sleep, or other software level issues that they ostensibly provide with OEM installed Linux.

> with it having been plugged in in my home office for basically two straight years during the pandemic

Yeah, my second seems to have succumbed to that as well. There's a setting in the BIOS that says "I plan on keeping this plugged in all the time" and it'll do better battery management that way.

My mbp automatically enables that after being plugged in for awhile, by setting the max threshold to 80% or something. The mbp warned me in the battery monitor I think. Nice, because I wasn't even thinking of such things.

That's the kind of thing that Linux tends to miss out on. But I don't feel that selling my computing experience to Cupertino is worth such things either.

I've had the same experience with my XPS 9560. Past few years I've had "TPM device is not detected"[1] issues. Tried all the different solutions and nothings fixed it. Dell have never addressed it with a BIOS update.

I don't want to go back to OS X, but its hard to find good build quality and a high res screen.

Also, my battery was terrible after a couple of years. I had it plugged in as well. I bought a replacement this year and it was easy enough to switch out. Hopefully I can just keep this going and use it as an RDP machine.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Dell/comments/onvh42/xps_9560_tpm_d...

I had the same issue, for me updating the TPM firmware solved the issue (but it is convoluted)

https://superuser.com/questions/1668861/alert-tpm-device-is-...

My guess is that Dell didn't update the TPM firware, my guess is this breaks some keys so can't be done automatically and a BIOS update at some point then screws up the handshake with the older TPM firmware unless the laptop is fully powered off.

But I'm not a huge fan of dell hardware.

Yeah my 15” xps was pretty bad too. Coworker and I both had this issue where one key press would result in the same letter being typed twice. Coworker sent his machine back several times but never got that fixed. I just used an external keyboard most of the time. Besides that, my machine’s battery ultimately puffed up and made the trackpad impossible to click.

Same issue with power here on my 9570! In fact I just checked after one month of plugged-in non-use, turning it on resulted in dead battery in < 3 minutes. What's crazy is that if I let it charge now, I will get 3 solid hours of battery life. The battery health indicates 2/4, it's definitely not a fully spent battery.

The other thing that has driven me crazy is the wide-gamut 4K screen. The text is nice and crisp, but good luck with sRGB content. Basically all content for non Adobe professionals is fubar'd. I eventually made the situation tolerable by finding an old version of Dell PremierColor and using its sRGB profile (newer versions of the software on Microsoft Store quit working on the 9570 and the color profiles do nothing - imagine that). Still get terrible color banding and crushed blacks, and I'm not even sure investing in a colorimeter would fix it.

Overall I've come to the same conclusion as you. In 2018 this was a $2000 machine (Costco price below retail), and I also can't justify giving Dell another chance.

My XPS 15 was horrible under Windows, but it was fantastic running Linux. It would somehow get 2x the battery, and ran a lot faster... and once Proton hit, it wasn't half bad on gaming.

> supposedly sleeping in lid-shut mode but be cooking itself for no reason

Same. It fires up full fans and all in the middle of the night.

It’s a nice form factor, but much like me growing tired of stuff like “android slowdown syndrome” and me getting an iPhone last fall … I feel like I’m being pushed to try a Mac laptop for a cycle….

I just don’t want to deal with this stuff anymore.

> around power management, wake behaviour, and thermals.

Can't speak for wake behaviour cause I have never encountered issues on my 15" 9570 but you can actually make it much, much better with a bit of work.

You need to work around plundervolt flags and enable undervolting(there's a tutorial in some reddit threat on how to do this), then undervolt CPU a bit, this way it almost never throttles. As for thermals, just changing paste to Kryonaut and adding few stacked thermal pads so they connect to the chassis in few places according to some tutorials I found made insane improvements. I play Valorant on mine and I went from almost constant throttling, to no issues at all, even during longer sessions. It's also almost never running fans on higher speeds during normal work.

But I agree, my next machine will be a MBP with Mx chip, I don't want to put in so much work into something that costs a small fortune just so it works properly.

That's so funny, because I'm in the same boat with my XPS 9570. I bought it for personal use because I had an amazing experience with a 9370 developer edition at my last job. I figured it would be the same, but that was extremely naive. I got the i5-8300H SKU with an empty 2.5" SSD bay, 53Wh battery, and a 1TB drive for $800 and change with the intention of plugging it into my GTX 1070 eGPU at home. I figured that this would be like, a power-sipping config.

NOPE! It wakes itself from lid-shut sleep and cooks itself whenever I put it in a bag, it will crash and reboot if the Thunderbolt cable gets jostled, and I get maybe 90 minutes on battery life after weeks of optimization script fiddling. I wanted to like it so badly because at the time, the processor was a steal. Matching the old 7820-HQ's performance with a bottom-tier i5 8300H felt like magic, but nothing else lived up to the hype.

I’m thinking, that since your battery has passed its cycle limit, maybe the increased internal resistance of what odd causing all the heat issues. Maybe, change the battery?

What are you after in a trackpad? I think this is the best feature of the laptops.

I am rough with mine (my first uses were on some IBM tank from the late 80s/early 90s when I was young and a Lenovo T61 in college). Spurious clicks and taps happen all the time when I end up using the things. I have spent minutes trying to get an Apple trackpad to perform to drag and drop and instead having it do every other thing from extra clicks on the way to zooming to running out of space when I get to the edge trying to get where I'm going. The fact that you can SSH in and use a more exacting interface is the best feature of the things IMO, but sometimes the UI is just the only way to get something done.

I also liked the matte texture of the ThinkPad, but I think that era is over (the XPS isn't glassy like Apple's at least, but still lacks texture).

Have you tried 3 finger drag? So much nicer than needing to apply pressure.

Doesn't that swipe between desktops/workspaces/whatever? On that note, I have no idea how anyone is supposed to discover these gestures. I had the same problem when I had an iPhone for a few months (long story): I became afraid to swipe anything because I never knew what anything would do and the lag on the thing meant that some widget could show up under my finger without knowing (something I really dislike about reflowing and progressively loaded websites too). The floating dot thing was also way more invasive than a button too.

FWIW, I have animation time set to 0 on my Android phone to avoid these kinds of behaviors but given that the primary interaction was through them on Apple, it was unavoidable.

In system preferences there are videos demonstrating all trackpad gestures in the trackpad settings.

I think most issues people have with using the trackpad are due to the fact that the default is that you have to click the trackpad like a mouse button in order to perform a "click." Most people coming from Windows want to use tap to click and I think that is what leads to confusing results.

By default yeah, you need to disable that gesture (or set it to 4 fingers) and then enable 3 finger drag in accessibility settings under trackpad. Aside from 3 finger drag though these are all in the normal trackpad settings, it's pretty clear about what does what and all of it can be disabled.

This used to be a regular (non-accessibility) setting, not sure why they hid it away a few versions ago.

But all of that crap is optional. The first thing a macOS user should do on a new machine is go to system preferences > Trackpad and turn that stuff and "Force Touch" off.

That doesn't help when I'm using someone else's Macbook.

I was eyeing an XPS like of notebooks for many years, but comments like the ones in sibling threads are holding me back from acting upon it.

Just got an XPS 15 with i9-12900HK with Ubuntu 22.04 (5.18 kernel installed after the fact). Still working the kinks out, but the machine won’t reliably wake when the lid is opened. It’s about 10% faster than my M1 Pro, but with much worse battery life. If I didn’t still need an AMD64 machine for somethings, there’s no reason to put up with the quirks of a Linux laptop IMO.

My XPS 13 9360 randomly turns on when the lid is closed and burns through the battery. There was an official document at some point saying that if you put it in your backpack in sleep mode, it voids the warranty.

I really like the laptop otherwise, but battery/power management is utter crap on it, both on Windows and on Linux.

I've noticed this too, but it seems Bluetooth related. There's a report with the Linux kernel, but no progress as yet.

See this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31521995

> But I'm also a "weirdo" who doesn't like Apple-made hardware

Please, it’s not that weird of an opinion.

> (the trackpad […] are all inferior IMO)

Oh.

But I think I agree when it comes to anything like drag-and-drop.

Not weird, or at least if you are I'm with you. OS; eh, ok, I'm used to it. Hardware, nope. I run my work Mac in clamshell and use none of it. Screen is fine I guess, but I'm old and most of it's lost on my shitty eyesight anyway.

Fwiw, I have a nearly-maxed-out brand new mbpro m1 and can't stand OSx so it's collecting dust as my similar specs 1 year old XPS i9 with PopOS sees 12h of daily use.

Of course an m1's battery life is better. Everything else sucks in comparison imo but I admit this is very subjective.

I really think that's what the Framework will be in a couple of years. I use one now and it's pretty great, but does have a few (totally acceptable to me) rough edges that they're working on.

I don’t mean to discredit Framework in the slightest but they are still leagues away from Apple when it comes to build quality.

The entire industry struggles to match Apple’s fit and finish, it will be an uphill battle for a hardware based startup. I do hope they succeed.

Apple runs an entire supply chain, for a small company it’s fantastic to be half as good

bonus: it’s a niche I can’t imagine Apple going after any time soon!

Yes true, I was probably too optimistic with "a couple of years."

Yep, I have a Framework laptop. I really hope Sand Hill Road doesn't kill it. They will almost definitely need another round or two at to hit profitability.

As a framework owner, there's maybe two orders of magnitude difference in build quality between a mac and a framework.

The track pad and display suck for a laptop in 2022. The display has issues with calibration and resolution (understandable from where they're at right now, but still it's trash compared to an XPS or MB). The trackpad has mechanical issues that cause it to wiggle, its been reported on the forum (and personally to staff a few times) but they don't seem to have a decent way to fix it.

Its been a nightmare calibrating the touchpad to my liking, on my XPS and Macbook it has always "just worked" (even on Linux!)

This depends on what one thinks of as build quality. If it is a certain way things look and feels that evoke emotions of quality and power, then yes, Apple's build quality is better.

But if you appreciate that things are engineered in a way to make repair-ability and upgrade-ability easy to make your life better and have less hassle, perhaps the Framework has better build quality.

Exactly how do you quantify "two orders of magnitude of build quality"? What units are you using for this analysis?

I think "maybe" is an important part of the text you quoted, and the rest of the comment goes into decent detail regarding the specific areas where the experience fell short of their expectations.

Did you stop reading after the first paragraph?

How does one distinguish a build quality that is 100x better from a build quality that is only 10x better?

I think the point is that it seems silly to say “two orders or magnitude” when there’s no quantitative metric. Is it more informative than “way better”

It's a figure of speech

Framework is the closest I believe. Personally I buy used thinkpads. Huge bang for the buck and they are pretty much bullet proof. That being said my daily driver is a 2013 MacBook Air running arch now.

Yes, I think so too now. But they don't ship to where I live, and their battery life is reportedly 3-4 times shorter than Air's. I understand that processors are a biggest cause of it. (No AMD option for Framework is also a very big minus in my eyes)

For hardware specs and upgradeability yes. I have one. I love how I paid market price for third-party 4TB SSD and 64GB of RAM and not Apple's 4X market price.

For build quality I think they're still behind Asus, Lenovo, and Samsung.

I am on a 2015 Macbook Pro also running Arch/KDE and it is a pretty solid daily driver.

My X1 Yoga from 5 years ago still answers all the above, IMHO. I replaced the battery (myself) about a year ago. Build quality is great, and I think you can even get it preinstalled with Ubuntu. If you're not into the touchscreen-yoga thing, the X1 Carbon is pretty similar.

I have the new X1 Yoga, and I like it better than any other Windows laptop I've ever owned, but battery life is just trash. I'd be lucky to get 3 hours out of the thing.

What about the very same laptop running native Debian?

How to install: https://git.zerfleddert.de/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi/m1-debian/

I think you should be hopeful for Aeshi Linux.

Do you mean Asahi?

Yes, fixed it.

FYI- If you meant to edit your post it's not showing up as fixed for me at least.

Asahi Linux. And it is awesome, the future is here. Just waiting for the GPU driver and ... suspend... and brightness and sound.

Yeah. As soon as it’s got feature parity I am getting an m1 Mac to run Linux with i3. And no don’t mention magnet it’s not the same.

You could try Yabai [1], but it's a bspwm clone not an i3 clone. Still not as zippy as the TWMs on linux, but a pretty decent experience overall. There's also Amethyst [2] which kind of replicates xmonad. In most ways they're worse than using the linux ones, though at least you retain the full features of Aqua and Quartz, while trying to integrate i3 or other TWMs with a proper DE in linux remains to be a hassle.

[1] https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai

[2] https://ianyh.com/amethyst/

I am familiar with both projects. And both are doing amazing work working around the limitations of MacOS to being some sensibility to the OS’s window manager. But yabai from what I remember requires you to disable SIP or to get it to fully work and on top of that I have cooled on my zealotry for MacOS over the years. I used to be a huge fanboy. But now I am a bit creeped out by all the ways Apple is trying to make it hard to leave the ecosystem. By how interconnected everything is. Also I love and support the brew project but … it’s not as fast or as robust as a proper package manager. (Maybe nix could come into play here.) But ultimately I am most keen on using proper Linux for the container tech, the customizability, the freedom, that containers run without the need for a VM —- that being said I hear arm64 VMs run super well on the M1s and … I dunno maybe I will revisit the Apple side of things. I just wish I could get the amazing Apple hardware and M1 or M2 performance and just run my own OS on it. The asahi folks are helping with that.

The really interesting question: how much would you be willing to pay for it?

I'm pretty price insensitive, but nothing on the market comes close to what I'd like:

- One week suspend, resume under linux (reliable).

- Keyboard and trackpad centered under display, and as good as best of class from 10 years ago.

- 4K / hidpi display

- no/minimal fan, cool running

- 12+ hour "typical" battery life; at least 4 when running slack and zoom (and maybe compilation jobs)

- as fast as a 10 year old midrange desktop e.g. i7: 2700)

- don't care about video acceleration, but video out must reliably work.

- No dual GPU switchover garbage.

- not intel brand (the last N Intel machines I have used have had severe chipset/cpu issues)

- ability to not run systemd in a supported config.

All the laptops I have found fail on multiple of these points. My pine book pro meets as many of them as most high end laptops do (so, not all that many), but at least it was cheap and worked out of the box.

Still waiting for a "real" laptop to replace it, but everything I've seen has glaring fatal flaws.

How about replacing with a "real" computer? I stopped accepting these compromises around 2004, and since then have built my own computers from discrete components.

As semiconductor technology advances, increasing miniaturization and integration become normal and expected. I imagine that in the 70s and early 80s, some people thought that the only "real" computers were minicomputers such as those made by DEC, or even mainframes. Highly integrated computers such as the Apple Silicon Macs are the logical continuation of the trend that began with the first microcomputers.

Having said that, the desktop form factor has its place. My next PC will be a desktop. But it will also be a Windows PC. I wish there was a Windows PC that had the same level of integration, and performance per watt, as the M1 Mac mini.

"integration" and "performance per watt" are way overrated IMHO. My desktop is on 24/7 with multiple VMs running. I walk up to it and begin working - no startup or setup. Electricity cost is probably $20/month.

The same as what it currently costs, personally.

honestly happy to pay through the nose for thinkpad build quality. it's a tax deduction and going to last me 5+ years.

hopefully get some ryzen 6000 series laptop options this year. the thinkpad z13 looks promising, but will have to wait for reviews to start rolling in.

I find this most interesting. I feel Apple went to Intel chips originally to be able to offer users the best of both worlds: both Windows and OS X. Naturally Bootcamp came along to bring that functionality. Now that Apple is back to a RISC chip, what is stopping them from offering a RISC version of Bootcamp? Windows runs on ARM chips, as do many distributions of Linux, so why not officially offer the ability to run alternate OSes?

Apple originally went to Intel because IBM was unable to deliver a Power chip with any semblance of power efficiency. IIRC Windows compatibility took some time before it was available.

Apple has said that Windows availability on the M series processors is up to Microsoft. Bootcamp is no longer needed, you can now install alternative OSes on the same drive and boot into whichever you want. At least that's the way Asahi works.

Apple's hypervisor API is the way to go in any case. If companies use that Apple will take care of all necessary drivers. Doing things on bare metal will require a lot of work and Apple won't help with that.

I think Apple was motivated to switch to Intel because of the stagnated development of PowerPC. You may be thinking further back, like in the 90s, regarding Macs that could dual boot into PC

Would a Ubuntu arm64 VM running under macOS be worthwhile?

I work on an Ubuntu VM running in Parallels on a Mac M1 to target a Raspberry Pi.

It’s the very best such setup possible.

I am waiting for HP Dev One. https://hpdevone.com/

I wish I could get something like this from System76.

My honest advice: Don't get HP. Except for the highest end ZBooks, maybe.

They all have severe drawbacks in some way. They even used the Elitebook brand to make cheap shit and now no one likes it. Gamers wanted the Omen, turned out to be shit.

I bet the thermals are horrible, the keyboard sucks and/or will break in a year or two, the battery life will be bad, the BIOS updates will cause problems with no way to revert, the drives may suddenly fail and Linux still won't work properly on them :D

Maybe consider a ThinkPad P1 Gen 4.

$$$ but can be had for 40% off.

A good spec with the nice screen and discrete graphics is < $3k.

Upsides: Great for Ubuntu, everything just works. Screen is beautiful. Keyboard is brilliant.

Downsides: Can get hot. Battery life sucks. Still 11th gen - Tiger Lake.

meh monitor

previous gen cpu

only 16gig

pretty underwhelming to be honest

1000 nits not glossy laptop monitor. Which company makes better? 2 SODIMM, so 64 GB RAM.

1000nits is great, but 1920x1080 is underwhelming. most of the thinkpad range is advertised as available with higher res (but other then the x1 carbon seems unavailable).

> 2 SODIMM, so 64 GB RAM

sweet :D

this looks more interesting https://wccftech.com/hp-unleashes-zhan-x-a-14-inch-laptop-up...

Choose two features between: 'Similar build quality', 'battery life', 'Ubuntu'.

I’ve found that Ubuntu is the problem variable when it comes to battery life. I’ve never gotten it to behave comparably to MacOS or Windows on any hardware.

This. I hate MacOS with a passion.

Everything about it or the developer experience? I use a VM for my dev work and then run the rest (which pretty much means "a browser", these days) in MacOS. Which works perfectly.

Not the original poster, but for me, everything. I'm the sort of user who likes to customize everything, and Mac (and other apple products) makes it hard to customize anything.

And I'm the kind of developer who will make pull requests to fix bugs that bother me, so everything being proprietary rather than open source is also a big pain point.

Nothing wrong with that, and I have no point other than I’m facinated by your approach to computing. I customize my iTerm2 theme, tweak Vim a bit, increase the cursor size and I’m done. What I want is to be able to get a new laptop, login to my password manager and be working within 15 minutes.

I’m a long time linux user who recently got a Mac, and I found it much more customizable than I ever thought. At least compared to ios it is seriously just a very old “linux” kernel with a better integrated user space.

Almost everything about it. It's pretty unusable for me all-around and just gets in the way of almost all my engineering.

I use Ubuntu for everything, and customize almost everything.

Ubuntu VM in a Mac isn't what I want. I want full access to all capabilities of the system, and no hassles with using all my GPU, RAM, and direct access to all disks and hardware interfaces. If I'm just going to sit in Ubuntu all day with VM resources maxed out, I might as well it be the host OS not the guest OS.

Surely it would be better to save one's passionate hatred for things that actually rise to that level, such as things that hurt people who can't just choose an alternative. I prefer to think of mere differences between operating systems as neither good nor bad, just different, and use whatever is most practical in any given circumstance, while trying not to get emotionally worked up about its downsides.

Hoping for Asahi Linux soon!

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