Dell's XPS 13 Developer's Edition: My Missed Opportunity | Hacker News Reader

Dell's XPS 13 Developer's Edition: My Missed Opportunity

linuxterm.com

34 pointsautotravis50 comments

It is worth mentioning that Lenovo has a very significant "Certified for Linux" program. Virtually every laptop model has at least one "Certified" SKU.

http://lenovo.com/think/linux

This is the major reason I ended up with a PC instead of an MBA -- I was just going to install linux on it anyway.

Note that it is Ubuntu etc certifying the laptops. You can't buy the laptops with the certified version of Linux on them, and for the model I own (T430s) the only version they list (11.10) is end of lifed in ~3 weeks. However Linux is likely to just work on Lenovo Thinkpads, although binary drivers may be problem if you pick an Nvidia GPU.

I'm also a member of the Thinkpad faithful. Other than screen resolution (grrr) and bezel size, they are delightful machines. It is trivial to change/update much of the hardware - they don't solder memory down, nor SSD drives. And Linux works perfectly - the only thing it doesn't support is the fingerprint reader which ironically is made by a company Apple bought not too long ago.

Even 5 years back when on a Dell laptop which came with Vista the Dell support guys worked hard to fix my problems even though the ladies on phone used to warn me "sir, we don't support Linux on that laptop". I am on MBA now, don't know how to they treat Linux on a computer they will with Windows.

>>Thinkpad faithful. Other than screen resolution

The only option I had other than MBA and was ruled out for this very reason!

Just as a heads up to those thinking of buying an X1 Carbon, the RAM is soldered in on that model, and the SSD is a non-standard size making it difficult/impossible to upgrade.

very good point, you literally get what you pay for (and are stuck with it).

I am really liking my x1 carbon and it performs very well with linux.

I do wish I had stretched for the 8gb of ram but the 4gb has never been an issue (despite me sometimes running windows in a VM), however my general toolset is quite light (mostly command line based) so YMMV.

They're the standard laptop at Red Hat.

Thinkpads are amazing with Linux.

Yeah I don't understand Apple - why still put old and slow 500GB 5400rpm drives in brand new 15" Pros? Go to an Apple Store and try running anything on the 15" Pro and on an 11" Air - I guarantee that Air will load it faster. I've got the 2012 13" Air and it's a perfect tool for a developer, very quick, completely silent and very portable. I am pretty sure that guy would be very happy with his Mac,but he really needs to change that HDD for an SSD.

>>Yeah I don't understand Apple - why still put old and slow 500GB 5400rpm drives

I can think of one reason - people who buy Apple products buy it anyway.

>>2012 13" Air and it's a perfect tool for a developer

Having been a user for last 6 months(after switched from Dell+Ubuntu) I can't agree more.

I've neved worked on a 13'' laptop but I doubt I'd feel comfortable using it as my main machine, at least without an external big screen. That's the main reason I'm leaning more towards a T530 (or even Dell E6530) instead of an XPS.

For casual users, that's probably not as big a deal as you'd think. Besides, those folks definitely aren't comparing it to machines with Ubuntu.

I prefer the 5400 RPM machines, as I'm replacing machines, not buying new ones, and my old upgrades (SSD and RAM) always come with me (put "new" hard drive in old machine and eBay it)

They are Macbook Pros - intended for Professionals.

They are extremely pricey laptops - but the hardware can stand to be improved a lot.

Don't you think "Pro" is more of a marketing term at this point than an actual description of the intended use or target customer? Not to belittle Apple, either, every company does this sort of thing.

  > They are extremely pricey laptops - but the hardware can stand to be improved a lot.

You certainly can upgrade (at a cost of course) to a 7200rpm or SDD drive.

You certainly can do this - I would have liked the 7200rpm or even a SSD drive to be included on the base models though.

You and me both. ;)

I am hoping future hardware refreshes round out the baseline systems a bit more nicely, especially on the retina models.

I'm also not too satisfied with the 4GB default on the MBP - I needed to upgrade to 16GB to work properly. Getting a 16GB MBP from Apple, however, proved to be more exp then getting a 4GB and upgrading it manually to 16GB vengeance ddr3 ram. (best upgrade I ever did)

intended for Professionals

Professionals at what? Professional developers, professional photographers, professional writers... all would have pretty different needs.

Did you opt for 8GB ram upgrade? I think apple introduced that in 2012 models. Pity I live in third world country where no such option exists and I had to opt for 4GB ram. But still no regrets :)

Yes ;-) I got the 8GB, i5 version. Very,very happy with it. I use it mostly for Java/Ruby/C# development and it works perfectly for that.

I'm not sure why you'd want to trade, the biggest killer would be the 8 GB non upgradable ram. Ouch. You can upgrade the macbook pro to 16GB and throw in a SSD and your complaints will be gone. And yes, this will cost a bit more than the dell but you'll get a bigger screen out of it at least. My machine is upgraded to 16GB and a 500GB SSD and it's worth every penny. If you are ok with a 250GB SSD you can do it even cheaper (last year, I paid about $80 for the 16GB of ram and $500 for the 500GB SSD, 250GB SSD is significantly cheaper)

I have the 15" Retina MBP with 16GB RAM and an upgraded CPU... It's incredible and I love working on it. Ordering a machine with 4GB RAM now is asking for trouble, no matter the OS.

All my linux desktops do perfectly fine with 2 GB. Mac OS X is a slow memory hog, face it. That's one of the reasons I've bought the XPS 13 to replace my old macbook: with similar hardware my linux machines feel just much, much faster than my mac.

I have the exact same setup. While the rMBP is tempting, I think I could keep this for a while, as I don't know that I could get much better performance with anything else.

TL;DR: he compares a computer without an SSD to a computer with an SSD, the computer without an SSD is slower.

Why do stories like this get upvotes?

Real TL;DR: I compared a computer without an SSD, but with an Intel Core i7 clocked at 2 GHZ (quad-core, 8 threads) with a unix-like OS often cited as comparable to Linux to a 7 year old Core2Duo (2 threads) machine with 7 year old RAM and an SSD running Ubuntu (an OS not known as efficient).

The older machine with the slower CPU was faster.

It wasn't about the comparison, actually. It was about my surprise at how slow such an impressively spec'd machine can be -- and my regret that I didn't get the XPS 13.

Even a 10 year old machine with an SSD would be faster than a machine with a 5400rpm disk. Other things just don't matter when comparing operating system performance.

The author is promoting a machine he has never used and is comparing a non-SSD machine to an SSD machine. This would have been semi-interesting if it was discussing the XPS 13 DE under actual use.

Where do you live? May I bring you some tea and massage your feet while I rewrite my post to please you?

I linked to an exhaustive review of the XPS, if you read my entire post: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/04/it-just-works-dell-xp...

Mbp 2012 15" is actually dual purpose. I own one. Apart from computing, it doubles up as a room heater.

The author could just replace the hard drive with a SSD and add more RAM. Probably will run $200 to $300 depending on the size of the SSD. I did that with a 17" MBP, and it's still doing fine after 3 years.

http://blog.laptopmag.com/how-to-replace-your-macbook-pros-h...

Still. If his intent is running Linux on it, there's no point paying the 25-50% Apple tax just to get a PC you wont be running OSX on.

If you say you have to dump money into a brand new, already expensive computer right after you buy it, then that supports the argument the author is making. You shouldn't have to do that, and there are plenty of alternatives where that isn't necessary.

The hardware in macbooks is not on par with the competition. The reason you buy it is for the OS. But even that has gone down hill recently...

Apple's inflated prices for 128GB SSD and 8GB of RAM is 'only' $300. You can do better from NewEgg but when you have time ordering parts and installing them and warranty issues it works out.

I've never had warranty issues. I had to send in my macbook pro with a 3rd party ssd and 3rd party ram for repairs, and they fixed it no problems. Even better, they swapped out my budget brand ram for OEM.

The specs on that MBP are bizarre. Why would anyone order a new machine with a 5400rpm drive and 4gb of ram? That was a bad purchasing decision.

I think the article would have been more helpful with some kind of first hand account about using the device. I'm super curious about it, but am still leaning towards a think pad x series. The keyboard alone is almost too attractive to pass up, and they appear to be quite Linux compatible.

Edit : correction, MBP not MBA. Typo.

This must have been an older MBA. All the recent MBA ship with SSDs.

The article mentions that it is a macbook pro. Not an MBA.

May be he had to order within a budget and the macbooks are shit if you are within a budget.

That's the base config of almost every laptop out there. At least Lenovo has almost all the T-series coming with a 7200RPM drive now.

I suppose I should have clarified that the specs are bizarre for a developer's laptop. The cost associated with the upgrades are relatively minor, considering the life of the machine, and devs are typically customers that know how to spec out machines.

When they were ordering it, all I knew was it would be MBP 15-inch. I didn't know they would go to the low end on the HDD and RAM. I was a little hands-off to be polite with coming into a new job.

Fair. I totally understand that. It's a habit I share myself, although having been stung by it as well I now try to be as assertive as possible about my needs.

I personally find Mountain Lion more bloated than either Ubuntu or Windows.

If I boot up my Mac and Linux workstation with our environment setup and open up my day-to-day apps, the Mac is about 1GB ahead in RAM use. But after you start using them for a few hours they even out.

Firefox, Chrome, terminal windows, some Ruby sessions MySQL Workbench, FileZilla, a couple LibreOffice documents...

I'm terribly confused here.

"continue to run Ubuntu in a VM on the MacBook with its relaxed HDD"

Did he try with bootcamp on Ubuntu 12.04 (the LTS version)? I just tested on two macbook pros (mid 2011, early 2013) and both seem fine.

The one time I tried bootcamp (to run Windows 7) I ended up being unable to boot anything at all. Had to reinstall from DVD.

Apple hardware sucks at running Linux.

If you are a kernel hacker and the idea of fixing compatibility bugs sounds like a regular afternoon then Apple hardware isn't so bad.

Why didn't this guy just buy a 13" MBA in the first place?

Any word on if the SSD it user changeable? I know the RAM is not which is a shame.

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