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Comment by blrgeek | Hacker News Reader

1. What's the battery life like?

2. Are all devices supported with drivers - Bluetooth, 3D, graphics, sleep/wake, 802.11n, webcam, internal mike, ...

3. Does it do instant sleep/wake like a Mac - 100s of times without crashing/rebooting?

4. How does it handle external displays? Plug and play like a Mac? Does it handle display rotate? The internal display is only 1366x768 ?

5. Does it detect a headphone and switch from speaker to headphone automatically (speaker driver?)

6. How's the trackpad compare to a Macbook Pro?

7. How's the keyboard compare to a Macbook Pro?

Asking because I moved from Linux->OSX a long time ago, and I wouldn't mind switching back if the hardware is right and more importantly the Linux drivers work well.

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So, specifically:

1. 4 hours depending on workload(sort of an air form factor with a core-i7).

2. Yes, all supported, and still using my apple magic mouse. Used Skype, Vidyo, and Google Hangouts.

3. Can't say for sure, no reboots so far, wakes just fine.

4. Using an external monitor at work with my apple display port -> dvi adapter, so pretty much worked no problem. I was worried about the display being lower res than an air, but it hasn't been a real issue.

5. Yes, work fine.

6. The trackpad is ok. functional, but more temperamental than the mac pro.

7. I like the keyboard better, but I've never liked the mac keyboards.

Just to add another data point, Arch Linux on X220:

1. 4-6 hrs with 6 cell battery.

2. Yes, Intel everything (HD4000, wireless, etc).

3. Yes, 1 resume crash total this year.

4. Yes, attached to external monitor via DisplayPort -> DVI right now.

5. Never tested.

6. Small, crappy. I'm one of those guys who disables the touch pad in favor of TrackPoint though.

7. Much better IMO, not a fan of chiclet style and Apple's "mushy" keyboards.

The problem is that these are exactly the kinds of replies given by Linux advocates throughout the years. I've used unix varieties for more than 20 years and never experiences like this for anything, ever. Nothing is totally supported, or works right away. Ever. At least not in the way a Mac user would employ those descriptions.

I'm sorry you've had poor experience with Linux, I've had plenty of them myself.

I'm tired of dealing with ACPI / driver issues as well. That's why now I just buy ThinkPad and Intel-only chipsets. If you're going to use Linux, you have to research your hardware ahead of time (e.g. poor Atom support) or buy Linux laptops (Dell Ubuntu series, unofficially ThinkPad series).

I'm not trying to say everything's happy in Linux land. Printers are still a sore point, as are AMD / nvidia cards (Open or binary drivers? Multi-monitor support?).

> these are exactly the kinds of replies given by Linux advocates throughout the years

Sometimes a happy Linux user is just that - someone who's happy using Linux. I've had some hardware compatibility problems, but they were all minor and none for the past couple years. Of course, I know what I'm doing and I avoid hardware I know has poor Linux support (much like you should avoid a SPARCStation to run Windows NT in the 90's). Comments like yours are very much in line with other comments from people who have been called "Microsoft apologists" since ever. I will, however, avoid calling you one.

> I've used unix varieties for more than 20 years and never experiences like this for anything, ever

While it seems you have been trying a lot (20 years is a long time) you may have to consider the possibility you are just very unlucky. Of course, 10, 15 years ago, the supported hardware list was much smaller. Solaris and SCO Unix were never intended to be general purpose desktop OSs anyway and it makes little sense to support general purpose desktop hardware back then. I'm now on my fifth Linux-only laptop and I'm yet to have a single problem. In fact, this one is the first that came with Linux preinstalled. I had to remove the "Designed for Microsoft Windows" stickers from all the others, but I've left this one's "n series" as a proud reminder of its origins.

It may depend on whether you buy with Linux support in mind (having waited for someone else to do the spadework, and posted the results to Ubuntu Forums or wherever). There are machines where everything really does Just Work, with at most a few proprietary drivers that are in most distribution repos. (And I've had models from several manufacturers needing at most minor tweaks going back ten years or so --- FWIW, one machine that needed custom scripts to get the display-dimming function keys to work right.)

But if you buy on raw hardware specs, and then try to get Linux working after that, odds are that you'll run into something (sleep/wakeup issues, flaky Broadcom wireless drivers, or lately, problems with fussy trackpads) which will be real trouble.

So, you can get a pretty trouble-free Linux experience, if you do research --- but it might not be the exact machine you want, and it probably won't be anything bleeding-edge.

I use Linux on a VM, running under OSX.

OSX is ... finicky ... with dev tools. Apple does the compilers, and the bolt-on distributions (brew, Macports, fink) seem to have trouble keeping things compatible. Linux distributions don't end up falling behing their own compilers every time the compiler gets updated. I'd rather stay off the bleeding edge compilers, and have everything just work.

There is the "Apple tax", but it's hard to find a good lightweight laptop which is much cheaper than a MBA. A few hundred dollars cheaper, but you lose that on the resale value. For a desktop, there's no comparison (a $600 white-box will thrash an iMac, and if you pay for a nice monitor it's better to keep it than sell it bundled with an obsolete machine).

I can really recommend having an i7/64Gb desktop with native Linux OS as your primary development environment. It is like 20x faster than a Macbook Pro/8Gb with Linux VM.

And you could keep your Macbook Air for looks [and ssh to that box] ;)

this is what I do now at work. It has totally changed the way I do development. Instead of having a "build farm" or separate box to run continual tests on it's all in the same machine. SSHFS makes a world of difference too.

> OSX is ... finicky ... with dev tools. Apple does the compilers, and the bolt-on distributions (brew, Macports, fink) seem to have trouble keeping things compatible. Linux distributions don't end up falling behing their own compilers every time the compiler gets updated.

Seem to? From first hand experience, while MacPorts shows its age and cruft, homebrew just rocks. I just recently upgraded a SL+XCode 4.2 machine to ML+XCode 4.5. Zero issues. The only problem is old or broken software that assumes C == GCC in some way (e.g ruby 1.8). I've had more — although infrequent — problems with ArchLinux updating to latest GCC.

I've heard brew is great, but I haven't tried it (as my system is currently working OK).

But the reality is, no matter how good brew is, apt-get on a stable Linux distro is just going to be better. Unless you want OpenGL ;)

Linux can be fun when you want media. I told my brother to try Dwarf Fortress. He then proceeded to screw around for half an hour, installing OpenGL drivers (to display a text-based game, WTF?) and an audio library (to run the solo guitar track). It took something like the page-breaking apt-get here: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=113626.0)

Look at the new Lenovo Carbon X1 - from what I've heard it pretty much ticks all of those boxes.

Anything Lenovo usually does. I've got a T61 and an X220 tablet here which everything in Ubuntu 12.04 works fine.

The only problem I've had was connecting to an SSTP VPN but that was resolved easily with an ssh tunnel.

Anything Lenovo based in Intel preferable with internal graphics.

I have heard that Intel Atoms with internal graphics should be avoided since the graphics on those is not actually Intel's doing, though my eeepc with an Atom/internal graphics works fine.. maybe I got lucky.

I wouldn't recommend getting a Lenovo with an Atom anyway though, if they even sell anything with Atoms (mostly just from a "If you are going to spend money, spend some money" standpoint.

This could be true, I was referring to iCore chips.

Yeah, those are all a dream and that situation is only going to be improving with all the Valve/Intel stuff going on.

I'd just buy a second hand Intel core based lenovo rather than a new atom one. The market is saturated with Lenovo kit so it's very cheap.

Another happy linux user on Intel Atom Asus eeepc 1215N. It has done well with Arch and Ubuntu.

I'm thinking it depends on your graphics card. I have the nvs 8400m in me T61 and it's giving a heck of a lot of problems. For example, connecting an external screen means fudging with the xconf. Also screen brightness doesnt work.

Probably all the fault of the proprietary drivers, so it just goes to show that you'll have to pick your laptop wisely if you want Linux running on it.

Yeah I avoided the external graphics T61. Anything that isn't integrated is a PITA on a laptop. I have an Intel integrated one.

Avoid low end consumer. My G575 basically sucks.

On the other hand, my G530 works just about flawlessly, although a separate wireless keyboard was minor trouble to get set up.

Yes they are horrible machines. I don't think Lenovo actually manufacture those themselves.

I love my G570. Great value for money. My expectations aren't higher than the price I paid for it.

X230 is reported to have freeze issues with ubuntu 12.04 though

My wife's got a Lenovo laptop and upfortunately the trackpad is appalling. Not just worse than my MacBoook Pro, but worse than the bottom of the range Tesco/eMachines laptop that she had before it.

Which model. If it's a G-series, you're probably right.

1). Depends on ACPI support

2). Depends on the hardware, but surprisingly yes. Even the free Nouveau drivers do pretty decent 3d support.

3). Yep, configure it to suspend on closing the lid.

4). Depends on the wm you want.

5). Usually yes.

6). Pretty good, in fact you can enable the two finger scroll pretty easily.

7). More configurable.

If you are considering a switch, I'd recommend installing Fedora or Ubuntu, they usually have pretty amazing defaults. However, if you are considering this using a Macbook/Mac, be prepared for a lot more effort.

Actually - no offense - I'm looking for specific info on the drivers on this system than a generic response. I've heard far too often 'depends on driver/acpi support' to go down that road again :)

Which specific system are you basing your answers on? Can you be more specific on (6) - how many points does the multitouch support?

For Thinkpads what you list under 2) will usually work without hiccups.

Generally, Intel is very good with its driver support, so try to pick a laptop with Intel WiFi & GPU. Depending on your needs you may want an nVidia or ATI GPU though.

Can't say anything on multitouch with the Touchpad, since I don't use it.

Keywords: usually, generally, depending, can't say.

Obviously. How would you ever be able to say such a thing with absolute certainty given the number of possible hardware/software combinations?

I can tell you that my specific installation of Debian works flawlessly on my specific Thinkpad T420s, but what does that help you?

That's what prior research is for: http://www.ubuntu.com/certification/

If you like the hardware, try Linux on a Macbook. Ubuntu works perfect on the latest Macbook Air, even better than OSX in some ways.

It doesn't work so well on the retina MBP though, and it might take months to get the drivers to work with the weird things Apple did to the Thunderbolt firmware.

I don't use Thunderbolt so I never noticed. But everything other than that should work perfectly.

It won't even boot unless you add noapic to the kernel line in your boot loader. And that's just the beginning... http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=apple...

I have a cheap Acer 7741G. So I answer your questions for this generic hardware I bought from ebay.

1. Not good but not much worse than on windows.

2. It doesn't have builtin bluetooth but my $2 usb bluetooth dongle from ebay works. 3D with fglrx and the open source driver works. Wifi speed is not that great with 6 Megabyte/s but it's faster than 54 mbit wifi so I guess it works. The webcam used to work but not at the moment. I think I disabled it myself. I have to investigate that. I don't know what mike is but the microphone works of course.

3. Suspend doesn't work with amd's proprietary driver unless I boot with nopat. That's 100% amd's fault. With the open source driver it works out of the box as expected. Putting it to sleep and waking up is not instant but less than two seconds, so good enough for me.

4. xrandr --output LVDS --preferred --output DFP1 --preferred --left-of LVDS --primary --rotate normal Does what I expect it to do. Of course --rotate right etc. works too. Why shouldn't it? It was nvidia that refused to implement the freedesktop randr standard but recently they finally got it together and implemented it.

5. Yes.

6. I don't know. It's not great but ok. I have no problem with it.

7. See 6. You could just use linux on your macbook if you'd like the keyboard/touchpad...

You missed one, critical:

- does it handle GPU switching (Optimus&al) without piles of hacks?

I think everyone knows the answer to that question, and it is: not yet. Future support has been announced but it's not there yet.

Theoretically it is.

Practically it segfaults or hangs X (I tried on a notebook with optimus and a computer with sperate intel onboard and nvidia cards).

Give it some time, even nvidia announced to probably support optimus with the prime/dma-buf stuff in their proprietary driver.

Irrelevant. The XPS13 only has Intel graphics.

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