Linux laptops: should you avoid buying Windows?
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Once you've switched to an SSD, any laptop with a hard drive will feel broken. Feel free to skimp on everything else when purchasing a laptop, but make sure you shell out the money for a solid state drive.
Not hugely helpful advice?
Among the things you shouldn't skimp on I'd also include the screen, keyboard and RAM. I guess you could skimp on the processor and graphics ... assuming you're not a gamer and don't compile large projects.
Plus, given the high price of SSDs, skimping on everything else might not even make up the cost.
I just got a laptop from system76.com instead and I'm very pleased with it. No messing about. I know it works with my OS.
If that's not appealing, then Linux works great on Apple laptops.
Yep.
Also, as an aside (relevant because hardware quality is an important factor no matter what OS you have installed): After 15 years of wrestling with non-Apple hardware, I bought a MacBook Pro in 2008, and another one in 2011. I tried using a PC laptop from work a couple of months ago, and I was shocked at how terrible the build quality was. A brand new laptop should not squeak when you use the keyboard or trackpad. Nor should it crash randomly once a day.
After six years of pain-free living with the Mac, I have no sympathy for those that complain about PCs but won't switch.
This is the same bullshit logical fallacy that keeps me firmly opposed to modern Macs. You think, that somehow, a $300 PC will be WORSE than a $1299 MacBook, and that ALL PCs are somehow terrible in build quality.
And then again more bullshit about Windows crashing twice a day. Yeah, maybe, if you have some crappy third-party wireless card with a driver written by some corporate intern in Pascal 18 years ago.
People like you are why my Air is sitting in my closet and why I'm still using a PowerBook G4 in 2013.
How does that in any way follow from what you said, and what do you even mean?
Essentially, this whole point that Windows laptops have no good ideas to be gleaned from and that Apple is God is making computers worse. I don't use the Air because it represents everything I hate about Apple: locked-down, stripped-down, un-customizable, unconfigurable, and untenable. Yes, it's damn pretty, but I don't just want pretty. I want pretty, fast, and functional. The PowerBook, and later, the 2006/7/8-era MacBook Pros, represent everything I love about Apple: well-designed, comfortable, functional, easy to use, and post-purchase upgradable.
Apple used to produce machines that were like that, but ever since Ive's been at the omnipresent helm of hardware design, everything I used to love about Apple's machines has gone down the river, so to speak. Yes, the new Mac Pro is exceptionally beautiful on a desk next to a huge 30" 4K monitor, but it doesn't have the functionality necessary to be called a Mac Pro. Studios need the expandability provided by PCI-e. TB still has too much latency to be able to be considered against true internal slot expansion. The Retina MacBook Pro is gorgeous, but it doesn't have an optical drive, so putting your high-quality lossless media on it gets to be a pain. It also doesn't have upgradable memory, or even a user-replaceable battery, two things that would be easily engineered if this "0.02mm thinner is better" mentality would die.
But, hey, you can't please everyone. I bet I'm going to be that guy with a 20-year-old computer who's running nothing but a shell and complaining about how the transparent, glass-screened, ultra-thin tablets of the future don't have user-replaceable hard drives.
This is not my view at all. I would buy from any vendor that's willing to drop legacy features such as upgradability in favor of improving the device for people. Apple is the only company that currently does that, so that's why I think their stuff is so hot.
I was wishing for a 15" portable without optical storage for years before Apple delivered it with the current retina MacBook Pro model.
But, hey, you can't please everyone. I bet I'm going to be that guy with a 20-year-old computer who's running nothing but a shell and complaining about how the transparent, glass-screened, ultra-thin tablets of the future don't have user-replaceable hard drives.
If you can think far enough to see this and formulate it in a sentence, as you have just done, then you don't have to become that guy. When you find yourself at odds with the world, you shouldn't instantly capitulate. But you should be ready to try to find out why people have a different view, and to change if what you find out necessitates it.
Back in the late 90s, I had a similar kind of animosity toward programming for the web. At the time, I thought Javascript was garbage, and traditional desktop apps would rule forever. Because I wasn't willing to actually look at the aspects of reality that were pertinent, the startup I did literally missed the web, which is one of the reasons it failed. (We used the browser as just a way to put up brochures about the software we were writing.) Now I write web apps for a living.
Don't get boxed in by your own stale, unchallenged assumptions about the outside world. Test them.
Except that most of these removals don't improve the device for people. If you weren't so blinded by the "Less is always better" dogma, you might have understood my previous point. The changes Apple made to their devices have continually made them harder to use on a daily basis for many people. Go on the forums, there's hundreds of complaints about the extremely small thermal envelope due to the thin chassis. There's even more about the removal of Ethernet, still a very, very viable technology, and yet more about the super-sharp palmrest bevel. There's tons more about the removal of Exposé and Spaces in post-Lion releases, and yet more about the "improved" document handling in OS X. The takeaway is that OEMs are running out of ideas, so more simplistic at the expense of function seems to be the only thing they can think of.
But hey, it's shiny, so it must be better.
You're dismissing the new as merely "shiny," but there's a lot more to it than that. Complaining about the lack of wired ethernet ports is pretty much the same kind of thing as people complaining about the lack of the floppy drive and ADB on the original iMac. A bunch of people complained vociferously about it on the internet, mostly before they even had a chance to actually use one. Despite all that, that same machine turned out to be the first in a long string of products that literally saved the company from bankruptcy.
If what you say about building for the future were actually true (that it doesn't improve the device for people), then you'd see it in the company's financials. It can take a few quarters, but companies in this industry fail when they don't offer what their customers really want. (Just look at RIM.) And in order to do that, they have to design and build these things ahead of time, which means their target is at least 12-24 months in the future for refreshes, and a lot longer than that for new product categories.
That Wayne Gretzky quote - "I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been" - really describes a major driver of Apple's success over the past fifteen years. Listening to customer requests for ethernet ports (most people use Wi-Fi), optical drives (most people download movies), IrDA ports (most people never used it), etc. is a great way to direct the limited resources of the company into building more and more products that people aren't as willing to buy (i.e., less profitable) by the time the company is ready to sell them.
At this point, I have to ask: Why are we having this conversation? If you think it's such a great idea to keep building computers the way they did in 2008, but just with better speeds and feeds, why don't you try making a business out of it? If not, why? This is not just a rhetorical device - I'm completely serious.
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As for the importance of what people have to say on forums, I submit the following:
Here's the way people reacted to the first iPod: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=500
"Sounds very revolutionary to me.
hey - heres an idea Apple - rather than enter the world of gimmicks and toys, why dont you spend a little more time sorting out your pathetically expensive and crap server line up? or are you really aiming to become a glorified consumer gimmicks firm?"
"I still can't believe this! All this hype for something so ridiculous! Who cares about an MP3 player? I want something new! I want them to think differently! Why oh why would they do this?! It's so wrong! It's so stupid!"
"It's now at the online Apple Store!
$400 for an Mp3 Player!
I'd call it the Cube 2.0 as it wont sell, and be killed off in a short time...and it's not really functional.
Uuhh Steve, can I have a PDA now?"
"All that hype for an MP3 player? Break-thru digital device? The Reality Distiortion Field™ is starting to warp Steve's mind if he thinks for one second that this thing is gonna take off."
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http://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/
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I'm not going to keep digging, but you can find lots more of this same kind of crap thinking at the iPhone launch. I remember talking to a friend (an engineer at a major chipmaker) that said, "I don't understand what all the hype is about this Jesus phone."
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And here similar things were said at the iPad launch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1080840
But that aside, I think the ThinkPad is great. I might try that for my next purchase, if the specs are comparable by the time my current laptop becomes obsolete.
I'm all for recycled hardware, but what a strange thing to do to leave a newer machine with current vendor supported OS in the cupboard.
Aside from upgrades, most people don't ever install new operating systems onto their computers. (Heck, I've stopped doing that myself.) I don't blame people for choosing things they don't have to futz with just to get to a place where they can get things done. That's why they skip right over Lenovo nowadays.
Like the feel of the keyboard. Case is solid and lightweight as hell. Very impressed. It was my first ThinkPad.
Also like the little joystick mouse thingy (also called a nipple mouse). The matte screen. And the relatively good screen resolution for such an old machine (1400*1050). Even newest laptops 8 years later often have a lower resolution than that.
I maxed out a Darter. I am happy with it and it was much cheaper than a comparable featured Macbook. It is crazy fast and I was happy about the touch screen (I have a toddler who likes to play some edu games).
Build quality is good, there's no creaking. I love that it has an HDMI out (1.3 I think?) so I don't need any adapters. Same with Ethernet. The battery is really small compared to the Macbook, so don't expect the same battery life. I bought a second for conferences.
The trackpad sucks but I almost always use an external mouse for serious stuff. It's fine for web browsing. I don't miss the sharp metal edges of the Macbook.
Edit: the Galago's trackpad doesn't have the buttons or weird texture on it, so I bet it is much nicer to use.
But the article glosses over the trickiness of keeping a Windows partition on UEFI machines. Not an issue for me, but it does make me want a Windows license refund more than before.
Suspend/Resume is also catching up.
sudo rfkill unblock all
If you run it the other way round, the battery life is half.
(that is with powertop optimisations and a fair chunk of other optimisations as well)
For WiFi, many (most) vendors simply refuse to provide open source drivers, which hinders inclusion in the kernel. The blame here is almost entirely on the hardware vendors.
1) Having a Windows installed strongly guarantees that you are going to have a functional machine no matter what. Depending on your experience with Linux you might screw things up. If it happens you still have Windows as a back-up.
2) If your aim is to communicate research results, it is very likely that you are going to need to use Office at some point, to interact with your supervisor, colleagues, that don't care about OS and just run Windows (the majority of people). You can use Office within Linux but I find it much easier to use directly from Windows (reduces the pipework and focus on the science).
3) It maybe no longer holds, but a few years ago it was really frustrating to use and connect machines running Linux on a projector. For instance let's say you have to give a talk at a conference, you want to be 100% sure that it will work out of the box and that you don't have to fiddle around to show your slides. Windows does that really well (drivers are primarily developed for it I guess) and allows you to focus on the presentation only (stressful enough). I've witnessed numerous times good science being badly communicated because of this issue, where people try to tune the resolution for 10 minutes before starting and the slides end-up being half-cropped.
In summary, dual-boots guarantees compatibility with the outside world (science research perspective), and you can use your Linux the rest of the time :-)
Given that I work in a research department, math/scientific research papers are typically written in Latex - Microsoft's support for formulae is pretty bad from what I hear. Also, it's quite likely that your supervisor will have a Mac, those are extremely popular with academics.
> 3) Windows does that really well (drivers are primarily developed for it I guess)
PowerPoint can really mess that up, you adjust the the screen so it's just right, then hit full screen and PowerPoint changes it a completely different resolution!
Also, I've seen tons of people struggle to connect to projectors, this is far from Linux-only problem, typical problems are not knowing the hot key to switch outputs, using the wrong resolution, extend vs. clone and not having an adaptor (typically mac, but not always).
That being said, I know I would suggest that the person in this article probably should go with a macbook air. It is better than windows in most respects and also has much of the capabilities of most linus distros.
I personally do not need exceptional speed, so using refurbished Thinkpads off ebay.
"This would enable you to wipe the hard drive and install Debian while retaining the option to load either Windows 7 Pro (which includes an XP mode) or Windows 8 Pro if you need them."
I would always suggest making an image of the hard drive using CloneZilla and using the Windows tool to make a restore DVD before wiping. Should you decide to flog the beast in a year or so, you can restore to factory state.
Newer i3/i5 based Thinkpads tend to be sold in smaller quantities by individuals so you just have to decide...
There is glugglug if an older X60 will do
Never bought from them but coreboot and a wifi card with fully free drivers look interesting. If they get newer machines to refurbish, I'll definitely look at one in the future.
In the end, it was small things that caused problems. For the dell xps 13, it was wireless performance. Also, I got the HD screen, which makes certain applications nearly unusable at the small screen dimensions.
I went back to a macbook air. I know you're not looking for a macbook, but that ended up being my sweet spot.
So, my impression is that it's actually become dramatically more difficult for most manufacturers because they're specifically trying to prevent customers from getting a refund just for bundled copies of Windows.
I've imagined that some of these policies might violate (or be unenforceable because of) antitrust, consumer protection, or copyright laws in some jurisdictions, but I don't know of specific cases where they've been challenged on these bases or what the results were. I still look forward to a future in which the price of proprietary operating systems is actually able to operate as a disincentive for people to buy them.