Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Best laptop/computer, OS, IDE/text editor for development?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 23 posts

Re: Ask HN: Best laptop/computer, OS, IDE/text editor for development?

#11

Post by japhyr »

Thinkpad T430S, running Ubuntu 12.04. I use emacs for the most part and focus on django development.

I had been reading mixed reviews about Thinkpads for a long time, but finally jumped in and bought one. It's easily the best computer I've ever owned, and it makes me want to work. I love the keyboard, the display is exactly what I need, it's easy to carry around.

If you go with a Thinkpad, buy the bare model that you want from Lenovo and then buy upgrades from crucial.com or another supplier; it's much cheaper than building the machine you want on Lenovo. I replaced the dvd with a bay battery, and happily get enough battery life.

Re: Ask HN: Best laptop/computer, OS, IDE/text editor for development?

#12

Post by sharms »

japhyr wrote: post #11

Thinkpad T430S, running Ubuntu 12.04. I use emacs for the most part and focus on django development. I had been reading mixed reviews about Thinkpads for a long time, but finally jumped in and bought one. It's easily the best computer I've ever owned, and it makes me want to work. I love the keyboard, the display is exactly what I need, it's easy to carry around. If you go with a Thinkpad, buy the bare model that you…

I have gone back and forth on a bunch of different setups, and the T430S with Linux is a great combination. The keyboard / trackpoint are awesome and they are very fast, durable machines that work out of the box with Linux.

Re: Ask HN: Best laptop/computer, OS, IDE/text editor for development?

#15

Post by pestaa »

S4M wrote: post #10
wunki wrote: post #4

I love my Thinkpad X1 Carbon with Arch Linux. I think I have a pretty optimized work environment thanks to the following software: Emacs (Editor, Email, IRC, Org-mode), XMonad (Window manager) and Conkeror (Browser). You can find all my dotfiles online: https://github.com/wunki/wunki-dotfiles

May I ask, what do you find special with Arch? Since it's the Window manager that you use mostly, you could use any other distro. On the other hand, I remember having many issues with Arch when they changed some settings, and since I switched to Debian, which I find more stable.

I, for one, can't stand how all other distros do package management, especially package names. Ubuntu is the worst offender in this department in my opinion.

Re: Ask HN: Best laptop/computer, OS, IDE/text editor for development?

#16

Post by X4 »

gcb0 wrote: post #3

Anything cheap from Asus or hp. Debian. Check online if the model you want run Linux fine. Vim and then a bunch of scripts to suit your project. Build. Collaboration. Etc.

Avoid HP, they suck unless you buy their Premium models which again might have driver problems with Linux

Re: Ask HN: Best laptop/computer, OS, IDE/text editor for development?

#18

Post by hbien »

b3b0p wrote: post #14

Those using Linux on your laptop is the sleep, suspend, and hibernate functions working? That's my number one reason I have kept on using Mac OS X. The other being iOS development.

Yup (on a Thinkpad x220 + Arch), although I had to configure it. The ACPI daemon provides hooks, so you can run commands on certain events like "laptop lid close" or "power button pressed". I just added a single line to "pm-suspend" for those events. More info here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Acpid

Honestly, I think it's dependent on the laptop hardware and distro though. I imagine Ubuntu has it working out of the box for most hardware.

Re: Ask HN: Best laptop/computer, OS, IDE/text editor for development?

#19

Post by replax »

S4M wrote: post #10
wunki wrote: post #4

I love my Thinkpad X1 Carbon with Arch Linux. I think I have a pretty optimized work environment thanks to the following software: Emacs (Editor, Email, IRC, Org-mode), XMonad (Window manager) and Conkeror (Browser). You can find all my dotfiles online: https://github.com/wunki/wunki-dotfiles

May I ask, what do you find special with Arch? Since it's the Window manager that you use mostly, you could use any other distro. On the other hand, I remember having many issues with Arch when they changed some settings, and since I switched to Debian, which I find more stable.

I am using a Thinkpad x220 with arch and never had any problems whatsoever. Except that I had to set some key functionality myself (volume keys etc.), it almost worked perfectly right out of the box.

Also, i had less problems with arch than other distros, but more importantly, if you had problems it was significantly easier to fix under arch because you knew how everything worked.

Re: Ask HN: Best laptop/computer, OS, IDE/text editor for development?

#20

Post by dagw »

11" Macbook air for hacking while traveling, at cafes, in the sofa etc. HP Mobile Workstation 8570 running Windows 7 (but honestly wish I had Windows 8) for when I need more power and to run all the Windows only applications I need. I run Crunchbang Linux in a VM on both laptops. For text editing I use PyCharm for python, Webstorm for javascript and sublime for everything else.
Post reply on HN