Would you use a Linux based computer, better or equal to a mac in quality? | Hacker News Reader

Would you use a Linux based computer, better or equal to a mac in quality?

43 pointsakoder118 comments

Does the idea of a computer that bundles a linux distro into one amazing piece of tech like d mac, at a lesser cost, appeal to you?

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It's got nothing to do with cost, which is IMHO a complete canard. Spec for spec, MacBooks are actually quite competitive in the market in which they compete[0]. I'd love to see a linux based laptop that is as well integrated and as well made as a Mac. It'd be great if it wasn't fugly too. If it's cheaper, that's a bonus, but in all honesty, I've yet to find a brand new laptop that costs less that £700 that isn't a piece of junk. Below that price, all sorts of noticeable compromises are made; from screen resolution to overall build quality.

[0]I do a lot of procurement in my current job and spec for spec, Macbook Pros actually sit in the middle of the market place based on cost and I argue that they are placed higher in terms of build quality than most other brands too. Extensibility is where they fall down massively, but then after 3 year, all our machines are retired anyway, by which time they are financially written off. For the record, I buy HP zBooks which are more expensive than Macs and in my experience not as well integrated with Windows or Linux.

As a veteran system builder, I was rather surprised when I looked into laptops recently to find macbooks very competitive.

I dislike Apple as an organization due to their marketing practices, closed ecosystem, and apparent lack of respect for their customers demonstrated in their reaction to bend/antenna gate. Apple even works hard to hide what processors their systems are actually running!

After much digging, though the hardware costs slightly more, MBPs come out far ahead as a package with OS X - a full featured OS with a healthy ecosystem and excellent battery life. I couldn't find a better option for my intended user.

I keep seeing nice Chromebooks with IPS displays and usually unibody plastic build construction.

Sub the plastic for aluminum and it shouldn't add more than $100 to the ticket price. Make the keyboard good for another $50. That is only like $500 now, so we want some actual storage in this device, so throw in a 512GB SSD and call it a day at $700 with a Haswell dual core.

>> Sub the plastic for aluminum and it shouldn't add more than $100 to the ticket price.

You'll be surprised! I'd suggest closer to $200.

>> Make the keyboard good for another $50

Agreed.

>> ...throw in a 512GB SSD and call it a day at $700 with a Haswell dual core.

Can't argue with the storage, but the CPU is still not an i5/7 and the graphics card isn't Intel Iris/nVidia class. Add those in and we're beginning to hit Macbook price territory. Throw in a decent trackpad and a hi-res screen, and were there. Actually, it'd give us one of these; https://play.google.com/store/devices/details?id=chromebook_... which cost £200 more than a MacBook Air and £50 more than the base model MacBook Pro Retina. Alright, the Pixel has a better screen with touch, but the Air has better graphics and more storage and the Pro blows the both out of the water in performance terms, so on balance I'd argue that the MacBook Pro is better value than both the Air and the Pixel.

$200 just for an aluminum case? The price of aluminum is under $1 per pound. Where do you get that amount?

Raw Aluminium needs to be processed. Even as ingots, there is a considerable amount of manufacturing required to form and make it into a sturdy enough case. As illustrated by the pricer point of the Pixel, my guesstimate seems closer than the original $100 - if anything I'm also a bit too low...

$200 is ridiculously high, even $100 is too much. $200 is the estimated bill of materials for the entire iPhone6 (which uses aluminum). I wasn't able to find an estimate for the MBP case, but Ford's cost of changing F-150 to aluminum (for an entire truck!!) is $500:

http://news.pickuptrucks.com/2014/11/fords-switch-to-aluminu...

You are comparing pressed sheet aluminium to CNC milled aluminium. It really is a very, very different process. For one, the tooling is much cheaper. There is less waste. The quality of the raw materials if different. The finish is different. The volume is different. Most importantly, the manufacturing process is very different. A product (a car, a boat, a phone, a computer, even a building) is considerably more than the sum of it's BOM. It's an incredibly facile way to evaluate the cost of something.

The cost of the material is negligible, we're talking less than $5. You can buy a pretty decent CPU for $200. Are you telling me that the overhead of cutting a piece of aluminum (the waste can easily be reused) is about the same as building a CPU?!!

Yes. I'm sorry, what is you manufacturing background? It's relevant as you seem to be under the misapprehension that material cost is the only consideration here.

You are forgetting the first lesson of economics: supply and demand. There are enough people willing to pay to cost so they will charge as much as they can get away with. The actual cost of the case is no more than $50 at most. Manufacturing in China is really really cheap.

I go to a consumer website. I select laptops priced between £500 and £750 (this includes VAT at 20% which is reclaimable if you're a VAT registered business user. £750 is $1160, but UK/US proce comparisons are tricky).

What's wrong with, for example (at £596): http://m.dabs.com/products/toshiba-satellite-pro-c70-b-10e-i...

I can see some sub-optimallity (max ram is "only" 16 GB) but I wouldn't describe it as a piece of junk.

(I've never used on! Maybe it's a horrible machine)

PS: you don't have any contact information in your profile but I am on the lookout for an old but mostly working cheap laptop. If you - or anyone else in the UK - has any suggestions they'd be gratefully recieved.

http://laptopsdirect.co.uk used to be good for refurbished laptops.

The piece of junk comment was admittedly flippant, but I genuinely believe that value != cheap. I've had my share of laptops in the price range you mention; all have lasted approximately 2 years, give or take...

I am already using the Linux on laptop better than Mac. It is called Thinkpad (an older model).

Now the problem is that Lenovo is trying to be more like Apple and this does not go well with them. You can ask how much people are pleased with the new single button touchpads or how they like 16:9 screens instead of 16:10 screens or how they like the lack of Delete button.

So yes, I would buy a laptop (I would not buy a branded PC for obvious reasons) that has very good ergonomics and is made from quality components. This would be not a Mac'1, and unfortunately, if nothing changes in Lenovo, it would be also not a Thinkpad.

Based on my gut feeling based on the surfing around, I would bet that I am not alone. Therefore I could say that there may be a market opportunity.

'1 due eye strain and need to move hands away from keyboard.

> Now the problem is that Lenovo is trying to be more like Apple and this does not go well with them. You can ask how much people are pleased with the new single button touchpads or how they like 16:9 screens instead of 16:10 screens or how they like the lack of Delete button.

I have one of those newer lenovos, and if the trackpad is their attempt to "be more like" Apple, they really have a very long way to go in terms of copying functionality. For one thing, Apple correctly understands that we humans have our thumbs (which, lenovo, is the part that most comfortably moves independently of the rest of our hand) on the inside of our hands, so perhaps that's why the buttons are supposed to be on the bottom and not the top, where pretty much any scroll + click activity requires two hands with the lenovo. It's a UX disaster.

Yeah, nobody likes the new trackpad. I think dissatisfaction in corporate accounts will lead to changes there. (edit: ps, thanks for SQLAlchemy!)

I'm pretty sure the buttons on the top are meant for people using the trackpoint nub. My last computer was a W520, and it had two sets of buttons, one for the trackpoint, one for the trackpad.

And, quite honestly, I wouldn't switch back to a thinkpad from my macbook, at least with what they're offering now. Build quality alone would make it for me, but also having my computer come with a POSIX compliant operating system that's well integrated with the hardware, as opposed to installing Arch and hoping for the best are huge pluses for me.

T440p here. I can right click at the top or the bottom of the touchpad, so I'm not sure what you mean.

you can right-click on the bottom right w/ your thumb and that works as a right-click ?

Yes.

Buttons at the top of the trackpad were normally used with the trackpoint. They're underneath that.

It's kind of weird to see developers not loving the trackpoint and those three buttons because it's exactly where you want them and really freaking useful when yu get used to it.

The only other pointing device that I like was the Microsoft IntelliMouse (which they don't appear to make anymore).

yeah. but now, they have two pointing devices. the trackpoint, and the trackpad. the buttons are in the middle. I'm a trackpad guy so...why even bother having a trackpad if the buttons are designed for the trackpoint? the two alternate interfaces in one package is kind of a fail to start with, they should pick one or the other and stick with it.

I had a lenovo ideapad and I didn't find the trackpad that difficult to use. Which one do you have?

Sorry to derail: but does anyone have any experience with the Y series of lenovo laptops?

I have an X201 that I got used and it's started dying on me sporadically (fan kicks up to it's highest speed for ~5sec then shuts off) whenever I try to compile anything.

Ugh, I really hope Lenovo steps up their game. I do remember Thinkpads being nice, but the new ones are terrible. We have two models at work, and one has the awful new trackpad with like 1/4" of squishy-click travel, and both have wavy plastic bits above the keyboard, with rattle-y gimmick media buttons, and I've noticed that the bezel around the screen on both laptops is very flexible, especially at the bottom. They remind of cheap Dell laptops from early/mid 2000s.

Of course but DO NOT BELIEVE that you can make something of better quality than a hundred billion dollar company can do.

Apple has lots of legacy code, you know, when you see instant vector graphics in apple maps, Apple is using decades of software done by dozens of genius programmers over time when efficiency mattered(for example for drawing fonts on the screen). This code, then, became accelerated.

Apple bought a hardware semiconductor company that designs specific hardware for them that makes for example instant photos or slow motion video, or hardware acceleration of playback(which makes battery last way longer than anyone else).

Apple sells millions of devices and this means they have access to a supply chain and prices you can't get. period.

If you want to compete with Apple, do what Apple will never do:

- Add the option to replace the battery and RAM. - The option to use it on sunlight, like Pixel Qi. - Make the hardware open source. - Make the case also open so people can 3d print it or mechanize or whatever, like a Harley Davidson. - Make it rugged so people can use it in the beach.

You have to find your niche in what the big boys will never care to compete or just scares them.

Forget about lesser cost, your prices need to be way higher than Apple because at first you will be selling thousands st most, not millions.

I have a company. I don't care if I have to spend double or triple what an air cost if it solves a problem no body else solves(and it makes me money). I spend 50.000 or 60.000 dollars in some machines(because they give me lots of money back).

"Apple sells millions of devices and this means they have access to a supply chain and prices you can't get. period."

How does that explain the higher cost of Apple products?

i) they tightly control the chain thus demand higher quality

ii) every business wants bigger margins. Either increase price of product sold; or reduce cost of making the product; or do both.

I don't agree with the premise that Apple products have a higher cost, at least here in the US. As far as I can tell, if you want something similar to a Mac you'd have to pay just as much if not more, and it's honestly hard to find something that can compare.

I think if you only look at the "computing relevant" specifications it might be possible, but what I think is much more difficult to find is other products that offer the same quality for the other things. For example, I haven't been able to find another laptop that can offer the combination of good battery life, keyboard, screen quality (not necessarily resolution), and trackpad. They are also quite nice looking although that's subjective obviously.

If you know of another laptop that has all these things please do recommend it as I am looking to upgrade soon! Preferably Linux compatible =]

So I'll say this as a mac user for the last 5 years: I'm mostly buying the hardware, not the software. I'm actually not really that fond of OS-X. I feel like in theory I should like it (a nice unix with great graphics?), but it finds a lot of subtle ways to annoy the hell out of me. Apple is great at beautiful UI's, but I think they kind of suck at UX.

The only reason I haven't switched to linux is I find most of their UI's are more annoying. (Gnome 2 was solid, but Gnome 3 and unity are a mess, and KDE feels like it's in a perpetual state of not-quite-done although if I were to use any of them, that would probably be my choice)

I guess I'd also say though, that linux as a selling point would mean nothing to me (good or bad). Like I wouldn't care that it's a linux computer at all, I'd either be excited or not because it's a well put together machine.

Interestingly I find the Ubuntu Unity UI the best that is there for wide screen laptops as it does not waste the vertical screen estate with unnecessary UI elements - when windows are maximized then menu, title and the information bar are integrated into one area.

It has its merits. I think it does use space well. It would be silly if I said it was bad, because it works for some people, obviously.

My main criticism was that it relied a lot on search (which I basically never want to use), and it had an annoying habit of hiding things. I really hate it when UI's get super clever and try to guess what's useful to me, I'd rather things just stay in one place and I'll remember where it is. Whenever UI's try to "adapt" to users, I just find it makes them unpredictable, and efficiency is more about predictability than anything else.

I have to agree on the current version of Ubuntu Unity, which I use on a Samsung Series 9.

Absolutely, yes.

I like the idea of System76, but I find the quality of the chassis they use to be abysmal. I considered installing Linux on Mac hardware, but the hoops you need to jump through to install it and the challenges with drivers on recent hardware were a turn-off.

That left me with my year-old Lenovo T440p, which I currently run Ubuntu on. It's not as nice as Macbook hardware, though. I don't care for the trackpad or the keyboard layout (though the action is great), and the backlight bleed on the screen is really disappointing. But it met my needs of a 14" laptop with a 4-core i7, 1080p display, and discrete graphics chip, and I'm completely satisfied with the performance. I'd love to see another high-end manufacturer out there.

I like the Yoga 14 for a decently priced 14 inch laptop. Though it doesn't come with an SSD, which is an effing joke.

Well, you can change your storage yourself, not a big problem, IMHO. Is screen good though?

No.

MacBook Pro 2009:

Aluminium Unibody deforms if dropped. Glass trackpad can shatter. Stupid fucking magsafe connector is too weak - a connector cable that fails even though it's only held on with magnets is severely sub-optimal. Only two USB connectors. chicet keyboard. Sharp edges. No trackpad buttons or trackpoint. Gloss screen.

Give me:-

* A great keyboard. See Apple Powerbook for an example great keyboard. (Obviously Thinkpads had great keyboards too).

* high impact ABS. This doesn't look as nice as aluminum. It probably doesn't feel as nice. But it survives knocks and falls better. My Asus EEE PC 701 was robust as hell, so whatever that was made out of.

* don't solder the drives to the board. Or have a very good quality SSD soldered to the board with one (better 2) drivebays.

* 4:3 monitor!!!

* take three popular Linux distributions (say Ubuntu; Arch and Fedora) and instLl them on your computer. Test them rigorously. Write clear detailed guides and how-tos and faqs on your site to cover the tweaking needed. Contribute any code back upstream. Make sure the following are working out of the box:-

- wifi

-acpi or similar (especially sleep on lid close; and make sure the system correctly wakes after)

-power management

* give it a huge battery and make sure the OS is set to give at least 8 hours use.

* allow a stupid large amount of ram to be installed. Offer very fast very good very large prefitted tested ram as a purchase option.

By mentioning Mac you've introduced a bunch of weird things that fistract from the conversation you actually want. Better would be "would you like a computer like Thinkpads used to be?" Or "imagine the best bits of all the laptops you've ever used, all together in one great machine, with Linux".

Its not just Macs that have soldered components-a lot of ultrabooks also have soldered RAM, at least.

Yes - it's always annoying when ram is soldered in no matter who does it.

Sounds like less a laptop, more a luggable. Definitely not the thing Apple's going for. Used to like Panasonic Toughbook for the Humvee of laptops.

I've given the wrong impression if you think "toughbook" or "luggable".

There is the MacBook Air (an engineering marvel) and the MacBook Pro (a more sensible size). I want something like the MacbookPro but not aluminium (which is heavy and which bends and stays bent) but plastic (which is a bit lighter and absorbs impact better).

Yes, if it's a laptop (DIY will always be better for PCs). But until I see it, I won't believe that you or anyone can pull it off at a price that's competitive (or equal) to a Macbook Pro/Air.

Apple's laptop line is actually quite competitive. The keyboard (layout), trackpad (quality/design), integration of hardware and software (battery life + feel), and overall build quality are what sets Apple apart from the competition. I have yet to buy an Apple product, but I also haven't replaced my laptop in over 3 years. Every time I think of doing so, I go through the same exercise:

1. Eliminate laptops with idiotic layouts (I'm one of those people that type with the right shift key). This first step already cuts out the majority of low cost laptops.

2. Filter by battery life. Suddenly Apple pricing isn't looking that bad.

3. Filter by specs - screen, etc. Now you are left with laptops that are all in the same (or higher!) price range as Apple.

And this is all before taking into account other factors like Linux compatibility. By time I get the list down to models that are competitive with Apple, the price is almost always equal or higher. And usually, none work 100% perfectly with Linux. So I end up buying nothing.

If you could pull off such a piece of hardware, where the hardware is designed to fit the distro's look and feel (a very underrated pro for Apple products in my opinion), at a competitive price, I'd be first in line to buy one.

I would love one. Currently in between real laptops (long story, currently using a £200 15" craptop with debian XFCE) and I am genuinely puzzled what to do next.

Macbook air (my last real laptop, 11") was awesome, but you have to upgrade the storage at the start (I learned the hard way). There's no option for a smallish SSD + big spinning data drive (which, in practise, turns out to be extremely useful.) I could break the bank and order the 500GB SSD, but then I get worried about longevity. Additionally, I'd have to live with Yosemite for the time being, which it seems is the Lion of this generation of OSs (much much slower than its predecessor).

So I started looking at ThinkPads as the traditional Linux laptops. I met a guy in a coffee shop, literally yesterday, who was still running a 32-bit X200 and said he wouldn't change it for the world. Looking at the latest of that line (X240) I am tempted (especially by the NGFF SSD slot, and the much higher resolution) until I read the reviews everyone is posting about how awful the mac-style trackpad is. I love the apple touchpads, I actually own the bluetooth external one, but the USP of them is clearly their drivers. It sounds like the X240's trackpad is going to be even worse than my craptops, which at least has buttons!

I've just had a look at the System76 brand, but their smallest device is a 14"-er! So no dice there. It would have two full HDD slots though, which would allow for some serious storage customisation...

So what to do? At the moment I'm tempted by the X240, and being prepared to carry around a USB mouse in case it is impossible to hack that trackpad.

I'm on the same boat as you. At my workplace ThinkPads are standard and lots of people install Linux. It seems there is some hacks to make the (2|4|5)40 trackpads work. IIRC it is a combination of kernel 3.17 and some X configuration fiddling. So not all hope is lost.

I've already found about 4 tutorials - and the X240 is reduced in the new year sales! This makes them both cheaper and better than the equivalent macbook airs (with hybrid over straight SSD, higher res, etc) so it looks like that's the only choice...

No.

Linux makes for a good server setup, but the desktop side is lacking in high-quality applications that are considered standard on other platforms. Linux simply has too many cooks to ever achieve the mostly homogenous experience of Windows or Mac. That is both it's blessing and it's curse.

Besides, I get 90% of what I need from Linux on a Mac and the other 10% I can get from a VM running Linux or a remote box.

Few days ago I've installed Ubuntu on at work. I cannot open folders under many directories because I don't have permissions. Then I gave permissions, with the terminal. And guess what? I has started to reset its static IP. I wanted to ad cron jobs, they didn't work, also you write them as text, I have no idea how they work. When you shut down Ubuntu from terminal the PC goes for sleep, it doesn't power off. You don't have administrative rights in your PC, you always need to open terminal and sudo su. There are some workarounds that they either don't work or breaks other things. You don't have wizards when installing a software, you need to study the manuals and then sudo su in to the terminal to configure the files, and then you have to learn how to write a file from terminal. If you are lucky it works. Do you know how to enter Google Public DNS IPs to the settings? You have to ask it to your friend. Tip: use comma. It is good for servers because it is free. However not so much user friendly for desktop users. Thanks for making it guys. It is second best OS, after FreeBSD.

It sounds like you ended up reading some out-of-date forum posts and older documentation.

While reading this comment, all through it right until the last word, I thought you sounded like an accustomed Windows user fresh into Linux territory, wayward and misguided by some unknowledgeable sources.

Every single pain point you listed can be summed up simply by, as you said, "I have no idea how they work".

At that last word: it all went further confusing. I don't see how FreeBSD doesn't have a permissions model, or text-edited configs, or has installer wizards (yuck!). Did you mistype 'OS X' as 'FreeBSD'?

As a consumer family, during 2014 we bought several used Win 7 i5 Lenovo T410 and T510 from a simply-lovely and adorable eBay vendor. $200-$250 price class.

The ones with video GPUs chips went to the kids. They're extremely happy, so the laptoos must be good enough. They use them daily. I got The Beast, and added an SSD and BluRay player drive. I'm very happy too.

It's been a great year for used computer hardware. The available used hardware with Win 7 is great. YMMV.

Merry Xmas!!

Are you joking? Of course I would. But "better" and "amazing" are pretty ambiguous words. And, well, for that matter, I'm already using Linux laptop, not produced by Apple. There are some decent ones. Thinkpad T440s is pretty good, for instance, although I like metal cases indeed.

And one thing to remember is that one advantage of MacBooks as they come isn't the hardware itself, but that OS is well optimized for that particular hardware: if you're installing Linux on your MacBook battery lifetime becomes quite shorter. Wouldn't it be nice to optimize Linux that way? Yeah, it would, but I personally don't know how we can do that.

I don't mean to be critical, but it seems like kind of the wrong question to ask. Anyone who would answer yes to this question has already answered it in practice: I have a mac, and I could well install linux on it, but I don't. I used to use thinkpads when they didn't suck, and I tried linux but always had driver and media troubles (that was a decade ago and has absolutely gotten better, but definitely not perfect).

There are plenty of good computers out there, and anyone who would actually go full time linux has probably already made that decision.

So instead, ask who's put their money where their mouth is and purchased a personal computer to dedicate at least mostly to linux.

(Not me).

I do exclusively use Linux Mint on a Macbook Air 13'' (deleted the Mac partition) and I am extremely happy with it so far. The hardware is great and there is support for pretty much every piece of hardware on the device.

How's the battery life?

I bought the Clevo 730SU from Xotic PC without an OS (it is the same model as the System76 Galago, but I was putting Arch on it anyway and didn't care). I knew I'd have to buy a replacement NIC because it came with some junk realtek one (I always buy Atheros AR9452s from Ebay because they are cheap and good, they get a good 30MB/s bandwidth for me and good bluetooth for like $12). Got a Crucial m550 ssd to pair with it, and was thinking of doing FHD on both drives, turns out the Hitachi drive it came with didn't support it and the Crucial drive only used bitlocker rather than ATA passwords so I just used luks on the mechanical and my home directory partition and kept the base system unencrypted so I don't have to do any early boot password nonsense.

I also have a workstation, a 4770k on an Asus z87i deluxe with a (now) MSI 290 GPU, a Samsung 840 Pro SSD, and another one of those Atheros NICs.

Both machines run Arch, and I do all my development work on them. I can't stand the OSX UI anymore, and I do hobbyist KDE development work.

So hardware woes:

As per usual, there is no motherboard vendor that "supports" Linux. So you are blindly throwing darts on good EFI implementations, of which there is one, and its called Tianocore and nobody uses it because they are all dumb. So in my time I have gone through three motherboard vendors, Asrock, ASUS, and MSI, and I have only ever had a flawless experience on the MSI board. The Asrock board wipes its EFI boot table every update, and the ASUS board has so many problems its insane. It only accepts one EFI boot entry, the integrated GPU cannot PRIME as a secondary card because of EFI breakage, it doesn't report temperature sensors right, for the longest time it just randomly overvolted or undervoled the vcore because it has an onboard custom vrm controller, and the interface is shit and the update procedure requires you to put the firmware blob on a fat32 usb and install it from there. The Asrock board had DHCP support so it could just update over the Internet. They are all shit, because I shouldn't need to do any of this crap and should just have my kernel as a coreboot payload if the world made any sense.

I should mention I also had an "old" workstation using a 920 and gtx 285, which was originally running Windows Vista before I saw the light. For a while the Nvidia driver worked ok on there, but suspend broke it and it couldn't resume the video device, and when I eventually gave that workstation to my mother (who reads email on it now) Nouveau worked flawlessly and was able to resume and do dvi -> hdmi audio perfectly out of the box.

Otherwise I had a 7870 I just gave to a friend for Xmas when I first built my workstation, and like I said I replaced it with a 290 now that the card has good radeonSI support. That thing worked pretty flawlessly, and if I ran PRIME from the integrated to the discrete it was a great multi-gpu experience and worked flawlessly.

The only problems I've ever had with my workstation are that since I run btrfs on it, I've had the file system become corrupted and unrecoverable three times, and I was able to recover it two more times. I always keep weekly backups of the disk (its a 256GB SSD paired with a 3TB internal HDD and two 1TB externals for backups plus Spideroak) so I just do weekly images and reimage whenever the filesystem dies. My general policy is once I go six months without it failing catastrophically I can start recommending it to everyone else.

No.

The hardware is only part of the problem, and I think something like Dell's XPS 13 is of reasonable quality.

The problem is (as it has always been) that linux lacks the quality, polish, and application ecosystem to make it a suitable desktop environment (for me, at least).

What about System76? Aren't they in the exact market space/niche you're describing?

https://system76.com/

Yep, and I probably will buy one of those once my MBP needs replacing.

I replaced my work laptop (MBP 15") with a System76 GalagoPro. I wanted the Galago for my personal machine, but stuff like the trackpad just didn't work half as well. I bought a Macbook Air for my personal machine, and will end up getting a Linux desktop for my home office.

I got the Galago model from another retailer because they were cheaper and I was hearing horror stories at the time about system76 support. Apparently they got their act together and made a big positive PR campaign in the months following that won back mindshare though.

Yea, the trackpad is shit. But all trackpads are shit, including the MBP trackpad, having used at least the 2010 and 2013 models my friends have for a few days at a time. I always use a bluetooth or wired mouse with a notebook. The hinge scares me to death though, and the screen has more flex than a veteran stripper. The revised keyboard I actually really like though. I use a mechanical one at my workstation and honestly do not mind the chiclet keyboard on the Galago at all.

The connectivity is fantastic. HDMI and displayport out means I can run triple monitor off the thing, and the i7 with Iris graphics means it can actually run three monitors. Three USB is great, the battery life is fine (I get about 4 - 6 hours of web browsing and emailing, 3 - 4 of movie streaming). The size is fine. If they had made it unibody aluminum and got rid of the screen flex by making it slightly thicker, I would have paid another $100 and been completely sold. I just threw a 256GB SSD in plus the 1TB mechanical it comes with and it is a portable monster that is actually compact.

End of the day, it was a much better buy IMO than a $2000+ MBP, despite the shortcomings. Though I'm actually really interested in trying out a low end Chromebook with Kubuntu on it to see how that plays at some point.

The GalagoPro is better when you don't actually have to use it as a laptop, then you don't have to deal with the limitations of the hardware.

The 13" Macbook Air is the best laptop on the market, IMO. Those 13" Retina's look great, but the killer feature on a laptop is battery life. I can take or leave graphics, memory, and power, but if the battery life sucks, then it's basically tethered to a power brick.

Funny thing is battery life isn't that big of a deal on a smartphone. I have a Nexus 5 and I don't mind that I have to charge it every day. I have a wireless charger that I put it down on, no big deal. But I don't want to have to do that with a laptop. Strange why I feel that way.

Skip the low-end Chromebook. I tried it, the fact that the battery still drains when it's in sleep mode makes it a non-starter. I don't want to be plugging it up every time I use it. Linux just hasn't been tuned well-enough to make it a decent laptop OS.

>> Linux just hasn't been tuned well-enough to make it a decent laptop OS.

Exactly this! Take the time to tune and integrate the OS to the specific hardware, which would probably mean making a custom Linux, but isn't that the joy of OSS? I know that it's frowned upon to mention aesthetics, but they do matter. Marry that with build quality and you'd have the right ingredients for success. Price point is what it is.

System76 are just Clevo rebrands. Low quality too.

I, personally, want the T420 with a better (16:10) screen and speakers. The processor is also starting to get a bit long in the tooth for what I do.

I don't even need a 4:3. (I prefer two side-by-side columns for coding.)

Oh, and the system should wake from sleep properly 100% of the time rather than 96% of the time (as my t420 does) and I shouldn't have intermittent wi-fi problems (as my t420 does.) So, I think the bigger key is having the tech work perfectly rather than look pretty.

Completely agreed. I've been able to work quite effectively on a T520i -- but I've also experienced occasional frustration with the hardware integration. Every time I upgrade Ubuntu, I worry that I'm about to knock my system's stability off its precarious perch, and sometimes it happens. Things just aren't bulletproof.

For my next computer, I'm willing to spend the extra $1000 for a Mac, where I can believe that things really will Just Work™.

You can buy a system76, thinkpenguin, Dell XPS 13, or Zareason computer and expect Ubuntu to just work™. Stop buying Windows computers and saying its the Linux distros fault the hardware isn't fully supported or stable, it is the same thing as trying to install OSX on a Windows computer and complaining nothing works. You gotta get supported products, and they do exist now, they are just a small and growing market. But it will only grow if people actually buy barebones / Ubuntu machines to send the message people are willing to buy them and not just add to the sales figures of Windows laptop nine million.

http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1pwwr0/system76_is_sc...

When I last checked the reviews of the system76 laptops, there were more problems than the T420. The Zareason systems have those awful keyboards from the looks of it, and even the "UltraLap" looks bulky. And it includes a terrible resolution screen. (Why is anything shipping with 1366x768 anymore?)

They either aren't thinking of programmers, or they don't have the money to compete.

I'm considering the XPS 13, but the screen is too small. I want a thin 14 or 15 inch laptop. (The T420 doesn't quite make it in that regard, but it's old technology at this point.) And, of course, the XPS 15 doesn't have a ubuntu edition.

I'm willing to make a sacrifice for weight if the keyboard and monitor are top notch (like the T420) but nobody is taking keyboards seriously anymore. And as far as I can tell, the best keyboard and screen today is Apple.

I've spent the last 3 years with my personal laptop running Linux. I'll probably stick with this until I can't anymore. But I'm not willing to sacrifice my productivity "to make a point."

I have the Clevo 740SU from Xotic, due to the negative press around System76 from early last year. You can get it without an OS and the only requirement is replacing the wifi card if you want a good wireless nic.

Its 14", thin, powerful, etc - only downside is battery life, which only gets 3 - 6 hours depending on workload.

Why not try another distro? I have been using Fedora since version 17 on my T530 and using fedup to upgrade without issues. Now I'm on Fedora 21 and it works perfectly fine.

No.

There's more to it than the hardware and the OS.

I've got ancient thinkpads (great machines), an old desktop, and an iPad Air1. I use a fair amount of linux here and there. I'm not wed to any platform for surfing, editing, writing, email, etc. I help support and maintain a lot of friends' machines that are Apple, and 100% of my interactions with the hardware and/or company have been successful, and relatively painless. Sometimes, even delightful. As a 40 year veteran of computers (back to punch cards), it's the best i've seen.

Still, hate it or not, Apple integration across a spectrum of devices is a big factor. I think only Google comes close, and they have some drawbacks.

So no... i would not consider a linux box to save a few bux. it's not what you pay, it's what it costs.

final note... linux updates too frequently for my tastes...an artifact of its dispersed development.

> linux updates too frequently for my tastes...an artifact of its dispersed development.

Do you even notice how often Mach is updating in OSX? Does it show up anywhere? If you use Linux and you use it as a tool and not as a playground, you should not care what kernel you are running, besides checking device compatibility. Most users should be running an Ubuntu LTS and only upgrading every two years, and that should be fine for most people.

> t's not what you pay, it's what it costs.

And my counterargument is using Apple products means you are putting blind faith in Apples proprietary software to work in your interests. We already know Windows is backdoored and wire tapped systemically, and Apple is usually a bit better by open sourcing their plumbing, but iOS and the Lion app store should be a tangible warning on how Apple is trying to take you out of the your computer equation. Software freedom is about owning your hardware, and it seems Apple is trying pretty hard to go against that.

Honestly no.

The crowd who uses Linux primarily currently is well versed with installing it on a Mac, or any laptop really. Linux is built on the notion of self-reliance, self-development, do it yourself, laugh in the face of danger [1]. So marketing to people who hold these principles is challenging.

On top of that MacOSX is a full Unix w/ Bash + GNU utils. So functionally from a developers perspective you don't gain much of anything. Interacting with a Mac or Linux from the CLI is pretty much the same.

[1] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/linux.dev.kernel/qeeP5...

My experience installing Linux on a recent macbook pro was not very good. It picks the nvidia card as the gpu and does not give me an option to switch to using the intel gpu.

It is true that OSX is a full unix, but it does not come with a package manager resulting in a subpar developer workstation experience out of the box. In practice I have never found homebrew / fink / macports to ever be as reliable as yum / apt / ports on Linux / BSD.

Also setting up gdb on mac currently is a bit of an exercise.

Wow, I just realized I cannot imagine how anyone can develop software on a Mac considering the lack of package management outside Homebrew. I never even though of that, I just didn't use Macs because the UI looks like shit and the whole display manager and up is proprietary.

No.

But a lightweight (<1kg) passively cooled laptop with a great keyboard, an excellent e-ink screen with at least FullHD resolution, good battery life, and fully open source software and firmware would. Any arch (MIPS, ARM, SH4, whatever) is fine with me.

Recently I've read a bunch of people who want eink screens.

I'm a bit confused: the refresh rate is terrible for eink. Typing text would be painful. Maybe the year 2020 will have great quality fast eink but today it'd be a pretty lousy experience.

Somebody has to be the first to try it and spend som R&D on trying to get it to work.

During the last summers I've been reading and commenting at HN and other forums at the beach with the lousy browser on my ultra-slow Sony PRS-T1 e-book reader.

It's a pretty terrible experince, agreed. Scrolling and waiting for eink refresh every now and then, text input is laggy. Still I do it since it is so easy to read in sunlight!

I'm sure with a faster CPU to render webpages quicker and some engineering ingenuity to perhaps allow quicker refreshes but lower contrast it could become a real product for early adopters.

I'd be willing to pay $500 for something that is just a step above the current terrible level, and if it works great and is hackable maybe $1000.

I'm disappointed the Pixel Qi screens haven't become more popular. Sol Computer (http://www.solcomputer.com/) makes a few devices with them, but they're overpriced and underpowered from what I can tell. Otherwise their sunlight performance would be great.

Touch-typists don't need to look at the screen while typing.

More clock time is spent reading than typing.

E-ink is much less stressful on eyes.

Touch typists don't need to look at the keys while typimg. While it's possible for people to type without looking at the screen most people find it really difficult to do so.

I'd love an e-ink screen. But I remember how horrible it was to use the Kindle browser.

Those who prioritize an e-ink screen will design ways to improve typist feedback, just as those who prioritized touchscreens developed ways to improve the typing experience.

The closed, limited function, version one, $1000 Sony DPT-S1 is selling briskly even with EU importer markups, with one of the top feature requests being an external keyboard.

So I use linux on my laptops as my primary OS. Mint on my thinkpad, crouton with xubuntu and chromeos on my chromebook.

I often talk to other developers here in the bay area about their computers, which are almost invariably macbooks. The reason that they continually cite for macbooks is battery life. 10 to 12 hours of typical usage including web browsing. A bit less if you are doing a fair bit of compiling.

If you want to make a laptop, you can do fine with commodity hardware, provided you pick devices with an eye on power. That may mean working with suppliers to get better drivers. I personally don't care if they are proprietary blobs or open source... but power consumption on linux vs. windows is often tracable to driver issues.

I mean a reasonably good screen and keyboard and trackpad are all important, but reasonably good ones exist out there.

Iou need to spend a lot of time tuning battery life. You need to figure out which commodity hardware devices draw the least power. You need to make the computers sleep instantly when the screen is closed. Get battery life up.

If you are going to innovate on hardware, this is where I would do it. Lenovo has a internal battery so you can hotswap external batteries. Dell had a separate arm processor with their Latitude |ON feature and got crazy battery life, and the Moto X had a separate dedicated processor for certain functions to improve battery life... maybe have your machine include a low power multicore arm processor and use that as much as possible, only using your intel cpu when the arm is overwhelmed or can't run a specific program.

The other thing is you have to make your first product good enough so you can improve your second product. Because to really make something good, you have to innovate.

I'd love to see something along the lines of the chromebook pixel, but with more memory and a larger ssd. I have one running crouton, but because of those two limitations I don't use it as often.

For me yes, but I already use separate Linux and MBP laptops. I think about upgrading my Linux laptop from time to time and I'd like something with the power of my MBP with its form factor.

However, I'm a current Linux user (my primary dev machine) who'd be upgrading, not converting from Mac to Linux.

IMHO, Linux is a kickass dev OS once you really get Linux. However, it does lack the refinement of Mac OS, so I think it's a long shot that a substantial number of devs would switch. My $0.02.

Not really.

Just thinking about general use personal computers (not remote boxes, servers, etc.), the only thing I feel like Linux adds to the OS X experience is tiling window managers.

But I only care about them on my giant 4K screen at home, where I only /need/ to use OS X for certain non-linux apps and where similar functionality comes from 3rd party apps. On my laptop(s), I tend to full-screen basically everything anyway, which works about the same on every system.

So, desktop PCs....no. You can build something better than any company can offer for similar or less money and with the compromises you want instead of the ones someone else decided on.

And for laptops, no. I find that I can get what I want from products that are already on the market. I /would/ pay for an Apple Laptop with a 12" 16:10 very high resolution screen and a trackpoint without thinking, though.

Most often you get more bang for your buck if you do not need to limit yourself to Apple hardware. So, if you use Linux you - very likely - have already more hardware to your disposal for lesser cost.

So, I think the answer to "Does that appeal to me?" is yes. :-)

I've been checking the laptop I bought in October 2012 for under a 1000 euro, an Asus N56VZ-S4044V. Let me compare it with the Mid 2012 MacBook Air, say the 1400 USD model (although they are usually 1400 euros). Help me if this is the wrong comparison!

http://support.apple.com/kb/SP670 http://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Asus-N56VZ-S4044V-Notebo...

First MBA, then Asus:

* Screen estate: 13" vs 15"

* Resolution: 1440 x 900 vs 1920 x 1080

* Processor: Dual Core i7 on 2.0GHz vs Quad Core i7-3610QM on 2.3 GHz

* Memory: 4GB DDR3 vs 8GB DDR3

* Storage: 256 GB vs 1 TB

* Graphics: Intel HD Graphics 4000 (no other?) vs Nvidia GeForce GT650M plus the HD4000 GPU

All the other things might cancel out a bit. Bang & Olufsen speakers I don't care for so much. Or Bluetooth 4.0 on the MBA. Ah, the battery life. That one might be a pro for the MBA.

But perhaps things did change in the last two years! If I buy a new one, I probably will go again for a laptop that ends up high at http://www.notebookcheck.net/ though. I always go for good hardware.

I have the 2013 XPS 15. Side by side with a macbook pro and they're almost identical. The touch pad is a bit better on the Macbook, but it's not a huge difference. Keyboard layouts are basically identical, and I like the tactile feel of both. Build quality on the XPS 15 is excellent. The only problems I've run into were driver problems that have been resolved. It's pretty amazing for a dev machine on ubuntu. The one major advantage of the Macbook is battery life. I only get 3.5 hrs with the 6 cell battery. Apple definitely has some great battery voodoo.

Anyway, I'm super happy with it as a high end Linux laptop.

Depends on the cost, and the hardware & software components that are used. I currently run debian jessie on both my desktop (home-build), and on my cheap hp laptop that I bought a few years ago. I won't buy a new apple computer simply because they are well outside of my budget. I did buy a macbook refurb some years ago, and enjoyed it a lot, but I still stuck with my hp laptop for most work.

I would get some peace of mind knowing that all hardware components are going to be supported by the linux kernel. However, I'm probably going to rip the OS out of the system and install my own.

I have a MBP and an old F20 T61 beater, and both are great. Ubuntu 14 is great, too, and I sporadically run that in places but we all have our preferences and I like the EL-family of distros more.

Windows 7 is perfectly fine, too. They even seem to be rescuing 8 post-Nadella.

Really, the thing is a web browser and a shell. Anything with a physical keyboard is better than a phone or a tablet.

Either of them run VMWare or VirtualBox just fine, so I can run any OS I like, regardless. Generally I got with the MBP for that reason, because the build quality is good enough of the licensing PITA that Mac makes for virtualizing OS X.

"Does the idea of a computer that bundles a linux distro into one amazing piece of tech like d mac, at a lesser cost, appeal to you?"

I'd want replaceable battery, replaceable hard drive/ssd and would put up with a thicker case, the X classic series Thinkpad form factor or a tad thinner would be OK. A decent keyboard (agnostic as to chicklet/traditional but with sensible key sizes) would be needed.

Warning: I'd expect Trisquel or gNewSense to 'just work'. No proprietary anything. De-blobbed kernel.

A linux computer of the quality of a mac is basically ... a mac. Yes, the mac isn't an open source-based computer but every other aspect of what makes it "a mac" is the quality of function, design, and integration. If anyone could bring a computer to market that had those qualities without the walled garden, I'm sure it would be wildly popular, but the challenges inherent in doing that are obvious. The post begs the question.

I cant use a Mac laptop because it doesnt have CUDA.

Unequivocally yes. As a developer having an identical setup on my local machine that I do on my server saves so much time. Besides none of the commercial OS's have a package manager that comes close to the package managers on linux / bsd.

Homebrew.

That's not a package manager, that's an hack.

The thing is - it is rarely identical. Let's say you run Ubuntu LTS both on your local machine and your servers. Chances are there will be the occasional build dependency, library, conf setting that you have installed/configured locally but not on your servers. Or you did install in both places but forgot about it. A new team member comes and "it works on your machine but it doesn't work on his/her".

I don't think identical setup on local and remote machines is the solution. Something like Vagrant + a provisioner (Ansible, Chef Solo, just a bash script) is miles better in my experience. And is not host OS dependent, you can run your dev VM on Mac or Windows too.

I agree about the package manager. Using a workstation without a proper package manager is a bit annoying once you get used to pacman/apt/yum.

Gosh yeah. I use Linux as my primary OS now on a cheap-ish laptop (student), and even with the low-DPI screen, so-so keyboard and odd hardware compatibility issues, I love it. I'd pay quite a bit for some high quality hardware.

I don't like Macs nor Apple.

I already use Linux on a ThinkPad and I'm very happy with it.

I would worry that the bundling bundling would be along lines I don't like. I currently use a System76 laptop, but wind up ripping out much of the default setup. That said, I'd certainly look at it.

No, I have to use linux desktop at work form time to time and constantly amazed how fucking terrible it is. I think I would rather use OSX on Asus hardware.

I think biggest problem about Linux is X server. Without modern and fresh display server Linux desktop enviroments just trying to be alive with hacks and workarounds.

Eradicating tearing throughout my desktop and applications has always been an enormous problem for me. I'm ready for X to die.

It's Chromebook pixel. Unfortunately, Google didn't provide option for memory and SSD upgrade. Otherwise, I would stop using apple and use linux on it.

Yes. I am using a Lenovo Thinkpad, and I think about getting a macbook and installing Linux on it all of the time.

I hate OS X, but love the hardware.

Sure it appeals to me, but what's the point of this submission? A thought exercise or are you assessing interest?

I wanted to assess the interest. I wanted to know if there are other people out there who would love a linux laptop. This is actually a personal itch of mine. i feel the only thing holding back linux is quality hardware which truly brings out the best in it. Hence, after gauging the interest here I have started communicating with a few manufacturers. So stay tuned! :)

Yes that's it exactly. I've tried to use Linux on the desktop in several startups. Each time, the hardware had outstripped Linux support. We'd have raid scsi controllers; Linux would use them as single drives. We'd have good graphics cards; Linux would run in the lowest mode.

So we switched to running supported OSs, with Linux running in a virtual machine for the tools we couldn't get otherwise. (We were building software for embedded Linux devices)

I suppose it had something to do with Linux being done open-source. Which means it has to wait for some interested party to get around to supporting new hardware. I used to say, we could use Linux full-time once it had a 'have disk' button like other OSs. Meaning once I could install drivers from the manufacturer frictionlessly.

I imagine all that's been fixed by now? I haven't been tempted to use Linux in 5 years.

Already have several. Nothing special about them, just the myth that they are better.

Just get me a laptop with a trackpad as good as the mac and i'll be there.

And when you are at it, add a good trackpoint for good measure.

I think it depends on how much of "a lesser cost."

There's always the Dell XPS 13.

I have both an XPS and MBAir (2012 model).

I routinely boot the same linux-USB desktop distro on both.

The XPS is probably a bit faster (i7), and screen DPI is better. But, MBA provides and overall better experience.

The most glaring things that stick out in MBA favor is: (a) keyboard, (b) touchpad.

The XPS touchpad is really sub-par given the focus of the machine as a development platform. Often while typing, the slightest brush against it will cause the cursor to jump. This is not an issue on the MBA.

How is the power management on the XPS? Does opening and closing the lid work decently?

I have an XPS 13 Ivy Bridge generation running Ubuntu and power management is perfectly fine.

My WiFi does seem rather poor in terms of signal strength/stability compared to other devices I own, however.

Yes.

This is the chromebook. Maybe it's not 100% there just yet, but in a couple years it might be. In any case, HTML + CSS + JS is the UI of the future, and your OS will be irrelevant by then.

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