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Ask HN: Ultrabook for programming?

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Re: Ask HN: Ultrabook for programming?

#111

Post by aconz2 »

johngalt wrote: post #56

Considering your goals and price range. I'd recommend shopping the refurb market. Specifically business laptops that are off lease. Bigcorp IT departments tend to cycle their hardware every 3-4 years and flood the market with used cheap/good used laptops. They won't be 'ultrabooks' but they will be cheap, reliable and easy to maintain. Something like a Dell E6430 would be a good bet. https://www.dellrefurbished.com/l…

I'm 2 for 2 personally and 3 for 3 on family recommendations buying refurbished Dell Latitudes. I currently have the E6430u which is very nice and light with good Linux support; that's a bit old now but I just checked and you can get an E7250 (i5, 256GB SSD, 8GB RAM, HD Screen) for under $600! And you can upgrade the memory... yourself!

Just make sure you double check the wireless card support on Linux. The Latitudes use a variety of different chips.

Re: Ask HN: Ultrabook for programming?

#112

Post by nextos »

eustar wrote: post #96
nextos wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it all Intel? That's excellent! I presume you can get every component into powersaving states (which you can monitor with powertop). Tricky question, do you get battery discharge events via ACPI (run acpid, and unplug)? That's the gold standard for uber good Linux support, and allows for neat udev rules to be written. What material are keycaps made of?

> Is it all Intel? That's excellent! Yes. > Tricky question, do you get battery discharge events via ACPI (run acpid, and unplug)? I got this: $ acpi // plugged in Battery 0: Unknown, 100% $ acpi // unplugged Battery 0: Discharging, 99%, 83:38:49 remaining > What material are keycaps made of? Plastic. Edit: Just saw that you meant acpid. With acpid nothing happened: $ acpi $ acpi -f // to run in foreground $ Is this…

Thanks for checking this. Very few laptops support this, and its badly documented. But it's IMHO the difference between good and superb Linux support.

Run sudo acpid, will start the daemon in the background.

Then run acpi_listen. It will block waiting for events. E.g. if you press media keys, un/plug the adapter, etc you should start seeing events. One per line.

Just leave it running on battery for a while. Hopefully it has events at 1% or 5% discharge intervals. Or at least for critical battery levels, when you cross the 10% or 5% level. Emergency thresholds can be usually controlled through a variable in sysfs.

These events are needed to write udev rules that get fired by the kernel. Thanks!

Re: Ask HN: Ultrabook for programming?

#114

Post by dhimes »

_delirium wrote: post #108
johngalt wrote: post #56

Considering your goals and price range. I'd recommend shopping the refurb market. Specifically business laptops that are off lease. Bigcorp IT departments tend to cycle their hardware every 3-4 years and flood the market with used cheap/good used laptops. They won't be 'ultrabooks' but they will be cheap, reliable and easy to maintain. Something like a Dell E6430 would be a good bet. https://www.dellrefurbished.com/l…

One caveat is that the battery life on used or refurb laptops tends to be quite poor, because they don't usually replace the battery with a new one. All they guarantee is that it's tested/working, which can mean battery life as short as 15-20 minutes, just so long as it holds enough of a charge to turn on and run for a few minutes unplugged. Sometimes you get lucky and it might be hours, but I wouldn't expect anythin…

Depending on the model you might be able to get a new battery. Of course it could add $50-$70 USD to the price.

Re: Ask HN: Ultrabook for programming?

#115

Post by chx »

DanBC wrote: post #83
soyiuz wrote: post #81

I recommend the Asus Flip Chromebook (running Debian under Crouton for development) or a refurbished Lenovo X2xx series. The ASUS is tiny for travel. The X2xx is larger, still pretty mobile, and built like a tank (military spec moisture and dust resistance). As a side-note, the ASUS died on me during my India trip due to moisture.

> The ASUS is tiny for travel. The X2xx is larger, still pretty mobile, and built like a tank (military spec moisture and dust resistance). The X205ta is not robust and not recommended if you want to run Linux, unless you enjoy painful noodling to get anything working. It's a nice machine for what it is (A windows 10 machine for Youtube video and social media).

Parent didn't recommend an Asus Eeebook X205TA but a Lenovo ThinkPad X series tablet.

Re: Ask HN: Ultrabook for programming?

#116

Post by fest »

I own Chuwi Hi10 Plus with soft keyboard/case. It's a decent general purpose tablet but I wouldn't use it for work unless I had no other option.

Reasons:

  * keyboard is too small for me (I find T430s keyboard much more comfortable);
  * Windows performance was terrible (again, compared to 2nd or 3rd gen i5).
I ended up removing windows and installing Cyanogenmod.

Oh, and the stock RemixOS software was buggy to the point where it was unusable: crashes when using SD card and about 12 hours of standby time when keyboard is attached. CM build fixes these issues.

Also, if you're wondering: Chuwi's active stylus is not worth it- it's laggy, has bad palm rejection and needs too much pressure.

Re: Ask HN: Ultrabook for programming?

#117

Post by yellowapple »

aconz2 wrote: post #111
johngalt wrote: post #56

Considering your goals and price range. I'd recommend shopping the refurb market. Specifically business laptops that are off lease. Bigcorp IT departments tend to cycle their hardware every 3-4 years and flood the market with used cheap/good used laptops. They won't be 'ultrabooks' but they will be cheap, reliable and easy to maintain. Something like a Dell E6430 would be a good bet. https://www.dellrefurbished.com/l…

I'm 2 for 2 personally and 3 for 3 on family recommendations buying refurbished Dell Latitudes. I currently have the E6430u which is very nice and light with good Linux support; that's a bit old now but I just checked and you can get an E7250 (i5, 256GB SSD, 8GB RAM, HD Screen) for under $600! And you can upgrade the memory... yourself! Just make sure you double check the wireless card support on Linux. The Latitudes…

I've found that nowadays even the ones with Broadcom garbage work well enough with Linux. However, if your distro doesn't ship with non-free firmware, be prepared to plug into an ethernet port to rectify that issue.

Re: Ask HN: Ultrabook for programming?

#118

Post by lima »

tronje wrote: post #25

I'd recommend Lenovo laptops. I have a Thinkpad T460s, which is awesome. If you really want the tablet/laptop hybrid, maybe a Thinkpad X1 Yoga, or something from the 'regular' Yoga series will work for you. Yoga-series laptops start at around $500, whereas the premium X1 Yoga starts at something like $1.400 I believe. Edit: Linux support on Lenovo laptops is pretty good overall, and if you're a Windows person, they s…

T460s owner checking in. Can confirm the awesomeness!

Screen is great (make sure to use the HiDPI one)

Touchpad works very well (better than Windows)

Re: Ask HN: Ultrabook for programming?

#119

Post by yellowapple »

RossBencina wrote: post #33
tronje wrote: post #25

I'd recommend Lenovo laptops. I have a Thinkpad T460s, which is awesome. If you really want the tablet/laptop hybrid, maybe a Thinkpad X1 Yoga, or something from the 'regular' Yoga series will work for you. Yoga-series laptops start at around $500, whereas the premium X1 Yoga starts at something like $1.400 I believe. Edit: Linux support on Lenovo laptops is pretty good overall, and if you're a Windows person, they s…

> Linux support on Lenovo laptops is pretty good overall T series and X series sure. I'm not sure that the same applies to Lenovo's consumer laptops. For example, some of last year's models initially only supported Windows, although a separate Linux BIOS was issued later.[0] [0] http://www.pcworld.com/article/3139812/laptop-computers/afte...

ThinkPads are probably fine. It's the IdeaPads that are usually terrible even with Windows.

Typing this from a ThinkPad E545 running Slackware. Works like a charm (though OpenBSD was far less successful; the installer kernel panics pretty much immediately after the bootloader).

Re: Ask HN: Ultrabook for programming?

#120

Post by yellowapple »

amorphid wrote: post #60

I was playing around with the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) a couple weeks ago. I tried & failed to install two programs on WSL, Elixir & Debootstrap. It's worth mentioning that WSL isn't intended to be 100% Linux compatible. From the WSL FAQ ( https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/commandline/wsl/faq ): Can I run ALL Linux apps in WSL? No! WSL is a tool aimed at enabling users who need them to run Bash and core Linux…

Doesn't Erlang (and thus Elixir) have a native Windows version anyway? Or was that just a test to try out WSL?
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