Good laptops for Linux
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I'm the market and I test drove the XPS 13, which was very good. That being said, I've had HORRIBLE customer service experience with Dell in the past.
I'm in the market for a new laptop here very soon and I can't honestly think of a reason not to get a MacBook Pro w/ Retina and just throw Ubuntu on it. I know there are issues with the boot order, but seems like most of those are solved now.
Anyone have experience with recent MBP w/ Ubuntu?
One button mouse is crap as well. You can emulate a right click by tapping with two fingers, but it sometimes doesn't work well with certain applications. I miss having a third button and pasting the highlighted buffer. Some keys are missing - no delete, only backspace. Loads of little quirks like this - you can work around but why should I need to?
Hardware wise it seems to work well though.And no real issues with Ubunutu recognising stuff.
Some other really annoying stuff like no HDMI, lack of ethernet port (who needs that you say? I did when I went to a boarding house in Germany, and that is how the internet was supplied. Plus its the easiest way to get into the secure network at work).
If I was paying out of my own pocket, I would not recommend this.
Is this something to do with the driver, because the current Apple mice are not one button unless you call multi-touch that.
Also, is the "fn + delete" not mappable in Ubuntu as that is the OS X mapping for a real delete?
The X220 was really good. The only thing it needed was a better screen, a decent trackpad, and a slightly less noisy fan.
It got all those improvements, but they messed up with the case, introduced a ULV processor, limited the amount of RAM and upgradeability, botched the keyboard, and many more things.
I've ended up going for Asus U500. It's good but not ideal.
I'm hoping that Lenovo gets their act together before my current one dies, but it is a pretty forlorn hope.
The screen is low end, and the track pad nothing to write home about, but the battery life and portability are unbelievable--a true 8 hours of usage in a machine about 2.5 lbs. heavy. ChromeOS itself isn't bad for just using as a browser and then crouton to fill in the gaps of missing stuff like a good text editor, development tools, etc. Even with just the basic 2GB memory and 16gb SSD version I have no issues with memory or disk space (about 8gb free once a basic ubuntu + unity install is added).
I really can't say enough good things about this setup. I wouldn't use it exclusively as my only machine since 11" is kind of small, but as a second machine for portability or browsing the web it is fantastic.
The specs are good enough, i3 3rd gen, 4gb soldered RAM, 500gb, 11.6inch 1366x768 glossy touchscreen, 1.4kg. (It's like a budget macbook air).
No use for the touchscreen (it's more of a hinderance, when someone touches the screen while pointing out something). Two major essential that I needed for a laptop, small and lightweight, and non-reflective (put a matte screen guard which works great).
Highly recommended.
In my recent experience I think the complaints about driver issues are fairly historical.
There is also a hardware compatibility list thing on an Ubuntu somewhere that someone could theoretically check in advance. However, by the time you get to search and get to that list you are likely to be typing something like 'nvidia bumblebee dell xps 15z' into the Bing! search engine.
I tried to fully wipe out the OSX partition, which I ended up reinstalling just to get the `bless` command back so I could boot off the drive. Ugh. So it is setup to dual boot now with Refit.
I am quite happy with it otherwise.
I'm not sure how Linux will look with a Retina display, though. That's why I stuck with the non-Retina 13''. The hi-dpi support in Linux desktops is pretty awful.
When I last ran Linux on Mac hardware (several years ago), it was a pretty disappointingly large gap.
It's fine on my laptop (Arch Linux), same as in Windows, but with an i7, GTX 660M and no optimus, and a 15.6" screen there's not much power to save.
You need to make sure that X has the right DPI setting and additionally make some explicit adjustments like resizing the mouse cursor and choosing big icons for everything. Once that is set right, KDE programs work nicely. Some non-KDE programs (such as Spotify) are rendered pixel by pixel the same as on a regular/low dpi screen.
So there are some glitches, but for day to day use it is absolutely workable :)
My big problem is that there is no support for different DPI settings for multiple monitors. This is quite unfortunate and keeps me from using the full resolution on the laptop's display. Right now I run the laptop display at 1680x1050 (still quite a bit higher than the non-retina 13"), which plays nicely with my 27" monitor at 2560x1440.
Besides the display issues, Linux runs great on the MBP retina (late 2013 MacBookPro11,1). Things run more smoothly than my last Macbook (a mid 2010 13" MacBookPro7,1) which had occasional wifi and suspend/resume nvidia issues. The only thing that I can think of that doesn't work is the builtin webcam, which was switched from USB to PCI-E and doesn't have a linux driver yet.
Wayland is supposed actually to fix this but its a little depressing how long we'll have to wait for that.
The install was easy enough. Setting up refit was pretty easy. The only slightly complicated issue was putting the wifi and other proprietary drivers on a thumb drive because the rMBP doesn't have an ethernet port.
My only gripe with this setup is, because I run it about 60% OSX/40% Ubuntu, is that I'm really only happy in Ubuntu when I have a USB mouse plugged in. I haven't figured out how to make ctrl-click equal right click and I'm one of those who likes to two finger scroll inverted (like an iPad), but use the scroll wheel on a mouse in the traditional direction. If anyone has figured out a magic solution to MBP trackpads in Linux, I'd love to hear it.
It looks like the GUI shows options for both devices, but the settings are split between trackpad and device. So it may do what you want.
I attempted Linux on a Chromebook Pixel and it was miserable, which is why I had shied away from the Retina. :-)
Linux support for PC laptops should be pretty decent across the board these days, IMO. Will require some tweaking for things like trackball and trackpad, but otherwise basic system functionality should be there out of the box.
Also, you'll probably want to know about this fix: http://askubuntu.com/questions/50491/detect-touchpad-as-touc...
If I knew my current ThinkPad required proprietary wifi drivers I wouldn't have bought it.
Strongly recommend against [System76]
1) They only test against one version of ubuntu, and they seem to patch the acpi bios specifically for that one, so good luck changing distros or versions.
2) Their bios has fun bugs, like how my serp7 (Serval Professional) turns itself off after 20 minutes on battery because it thinks it's about to die, even though the battery itself thinks otherwise. (It's not happening at the OS level, I already have that part configured correctly, it's the bios coordinating with the EC itself).
3) They don't bother to actually hook up the acpi bios correctly, so many of the generic acpi platform functions (e.g. get_brightness/_BQC and set_brightness/_BCM) don't work correctly. Instead, they rely on (going back to #1) the platform map that Seems To Work As Detected except that it's detected as something similar, but not correct. I had a bunch of things break on kernel upgrade due to the mapping having a bugfix to make it work correctly for the hardware it was intended for, which made it work incorrectly for the serp7 that was squatting on it.
4) When I called support about #3, their answer was "reinstall the ubuntu version it shipped with and try again." I asked for enough documentation to actually solve the problem- I intended to implement a system76-specific acpi driver (think "thinkpad_acpi.ko"); I was informed that that information was proprietary and would not be released under any circumstances.
5) These laptops are fragile. My company bought three different system76s (on my recommendation, ugh) and of those, only mine still works.
great customer service, and the computers hang together. amazing bang for the buck too, like mac.
i've had my hands on about 4 models of theirs. 1 had an unusable keyboard (flimsy + sticky spacebar), one had a very unpleasant trackpad, but beyond that it's been a beautiful experience from keyboard/trackpad to overall system performance to battery life to weight to, again, power for your dollar.
if i weren't happy with my thinkpad w520 (and my work 13' MBA) i'd grab a snares from thinkpenguin (or contact them and see what other models they may be able to hook me up with).
The dells and the acers are junk.
Overall I really like it for web development. Everything I've tried works out of the box (volume control, brightness, webcam, etc) with Ubuntu. Before that I was running Arch, with limited success in getting brightness and resume from suspend to work.