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Ask HN: Best Developer Linux Laptop?

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Re: Ask HN: Best Developer Linux Laptop?

#251

Post by mgedmin »

mironathetin wrote: post #59
mahmud wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The battery part is actually true, but I thought it was only me because I use older TP models. My girlfriend's HP gets at least half a day. I don't think she even bothers to charge it during the day. But hers is a crap laptop with lousy, fragile keys; short screen (WTF IS THAT?) that's twice as wide than it's tall, and sucks for everything but listening to music.

Actually, it is the power management. Most likely it can be configured. But that is one of the points (admin time): you have to configure it. On Macs, it works.

Not really. Most of it is lack of proper power management in the drivers, especially graphic drivers. Work is ongoing, things will improve. In a few years.

I have only about 2--2.5 hours of battery life in my T61 under Ubuntu (standard 6-cell battery, 3 years old). Luckily that's sufficient for my needs.

Re: Ask HN: Best Developer Linux Laptop?

#252

Post by mgedmin »

pw wrote: post #241
mahmud wrote: post #29

You can't go wrong with a Thinkpad, in fact, I wouldn't use any other laptop if it came free. I ran thinkpads exclusively for the last 10 years. My last desktop machine had an AMD Duron and 256 megs, that's long ago it was. They're not the most good looking, but they're rugged and functional as hell. A Thinkpad looks the same after 5 years, most others peel and scratch. When I was backpacking, my road-mate had his ma…

Have a T61. Very solid. Wonderful keyboard. But...horrible LCD. Now most laptop screens aren't very good (MBPs being a notable exception), but this is bad enough that it's almost unbearable if you're used to a desktop LCD or decent laptop screen. And, unfortunately, poor screen quality seems to be a Thinkpad family trait.

I've a T61 and a desktop LCD next to it (Samsung 193p+). The colour profiles are noticeably different (and I grumble about lack of just-working color correction in Linux), but I don't notice any qualitative differences.

Do you prefer glossy or matte laptop screens? Thinkpads are all matte, which makes the screen easier to read in various lighting conditions (no reflections), but makes the colours less vibrant.

Re: Ask HN: Best Developer Linux Laptop?

#253

Post by yummyfajitas »

wtallis wrote: post #234
yummyfajitas wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a macbook with an 80gb HD, and a music collection that was about 400gb. I suppose I could have configured ~/Music/iTunes as an NFS mountpoint. But why bother with this when iTunes won't play my ogg or flac files?

iTunes already has a solution for this: shared libraries. It's much, much easier to configure than NFS, and it's fully supported. Why do you demand the ability to reinvent the wheel? (Also, iTunes will play ogg files if you install the Xiph codecs for QuickTime. This has been the case since at least 2006, and you've stated that you last used iTunes in 2007, so I suspect you're not even trying to be fair in your criti…

As far as I'm aware, shared libraries only allows me to share with another iTunes library. My fileserver is not a mac. In principle, I could have screwed around with some linux server that attempts to convince iTunes it is a real mac. Or, somewhere in the preferences, I could have told iTunes not to copy to the local folder, and just run it off NFS.

In principle, I could have hacked my way around most of iTunes shortcomings. I freely admit that I didn't try very hard to do so since I saw little advantage in it.

Re: Ask HN: Best Developer Linux Laptop?

#254

Post by pocoloco »

samstokes wrote: post #246
pocoloco wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. I got mine about two months ago. I also installed 10.04. I love the trackpoint (the red pointing stick in the middle of the keyboard) and the mouse buttons just below the space bar (don't have to leave the keyboard to use the mouse). The only major issue that I have now is the inability to control the backlight. This seems to be due to a bad driver by nvidia [1]. The backlight controls work if you use non-…

Yes, the backlight is the only thing that doesn't work so well. I can control the backlight - I think I had to tweak some setting that I found on Google, but I don't remember which - but its auto-darkening on inactivity is pretty broken. When I move the mouse or type a key, the screen brightens again, but only about halfway back to what it was before the auto-darken, so I then have to manually jack the brightness up…

Yes, the forums' website is down. Here is the google cache [2]. The link [1] entitled "NVIDIA Quadro NVS 3100M on Lenovo Thinkpad T510: NVIDIA Backlight Control Causes Buzz" is the first result in the search for "t510 backlight" [3].

The issue has also made it to Canonical's launchpad [4]. The link [1] is mentioned in comment #27 [5].

[2] http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:4dJW3r_...

[3] http://www.google.com/search?q=t510+backlight

[4] Bug #562005: Backlight controls of laptops with NVIDIA NVS and Quadro FX 880M GPUs no longer function while using proprietary drivers https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nvidia-graphics-dr...

[5] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nvidia-graphics-dr...

Re: Ask HN: Best Developer Linux Laptop?

#255

Post by igrekel »

lusis wrote: post #150
buro9 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uncanny. I'm also 4 months in and am running Ubuntu in VMWare. That's now where I spend all of my time and I'm wondering why I haven't just dual-booted already or just over-written the OSX partition.

Last company I was at provided me a quad-core 8GB mac pro. After the first week I wiped it and put Ubuntu on it so I could actually get some work done. The biggest problem with OSX is that, for a unix-based system, it's so un-unix alike in key places that it's frustrating.

You mean un-unix or un-linux?

Which parts?

Re: Ask HN: Best Developer Linux Laptop?

#256

Post by mgedmin »

kls wrote: post #123
jacoblyles wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel stupid whenever I sit down at a computer without multi-touch and spotlight now. The software of a mac is just so nice and polished.

I could not live without multi-touch now. It is a true mouse killer. I am sure it has added 30% to my productivity alone. Someone turned me on to BetterTouchTools and the rest has been history. With 3 finger click copy, 4 finger click paste I can blaze through a lot of tasks.

I love my TrackPoint -- zero-click copy (just select some text), one-click paste (middle-button).

Re: Ask HN: Best Developer Linux Laptop?

#257

Post by jerf »

mironathetin wrote: post #135
jerf wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Earlier power-saving technologies were pretty proprietary from what I recall; there was "pre-ACPI" and also a fairly substantial period of "ACPI that still only worked through Windows because Windows could tolerate a lot of errors in the ACPI tables where Linux actually believed the tables". Now most of them are through standardized interfaces and work in Linux just fine.

My Thinkpad had ACPI. But - no offense meant - this is the standard answer, if something does not work. Just upgrade. You do that 20 times, and then you get something that works now, and not after the next upgrade.

For Linux, I personally separate the issues into two issues: "Hardware support is possible but doesn't exist", and "hardware support is impossible because the hardware vendor or standards bodies are either withholding documentation, failed to follow their own standards, or in some cases even actively fighting Linux developers". The "ACPI that only works in Windows" spent quite a lot of time in the latter case. If you had an IBM laptop that is now 6 years old, it probably fell into that category, based on the timing.

(A surprising amount of hardware fails to follow standards. I have a hard time laying the blame on Linux when that happens. I realize that as a user you may not care, but assigning blame to the proper entities is important if you want it to be fixed; cussing out Linus when in fact the hardware vendors are deliberately withholding specs may feel good but is not productive otherwise.)

Re: Ask HN: Best Developer Linux Laptop?

#258

Post by bitwize »

c00ki3s wrote: post #176
bitwize wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just bought a ThinkPad T510. What caused me to convert was the advertised EIGHT HOUR battery life. Yes, it's true. Under moderate load you can expect to get maybe six or seven; under heavy load maybe four. But that's not bad. Better than many netbooks and this is a full-sized laptop.

Just wondering, is this under Linux or Windows? And what version? Thanks in advance.

Arch Linux, no desktop (just a bare window manager with xterms, emacs, and stuff), and I turned the screen brightness down to the lowest comfortable level.

Re: Ask HN: Best Developer Linux Laptop?

#259

Post by mgedmin »

pocoloco wrote: post #80
khandelwal wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a particular wireless chipset I should choose that works better with Ubuntu? Options seem to be: ThinkPad bgn Wireless and then various Intel Centrino variants.

When I got mine, I had an option for "Intel Centrino Ultimate-N 6300 AGN". That's what I selected and it works flawlessly. I don't know about the others.

Intel wireless cards should be a safe choice.

Broadcom wireless cards ought to be avoided at all costs (except they finally saw the light and released an open driver for their latest 802.11N, yay, but likely it's not integrated in any distro yet).

I've no idea what "ThinkPad wireless" actually is.

Re: Ask HN: Best Developer Linux Laptop?

#260

Post by mgedmin »

kls wrote: post #229
trevelyan wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Relax! No-one is putting words in your mouth... this is a discussion board. The statement to which you're reacting negatively was a rhetorical flourish.... :) My comment was in reply to your statement that you can virtualize Linux and that makes the MBP an equivalent platform, and I posted because I've gone through these issues and it wasn't fun. The MBP really isn't good for Linux because of the battery issue and th…

or work with almost anything coded in C or C++ Right, and I agree 100% I would not do sys-dev on OSX unless it was OSX sys-dev. But he specifically listed an array of web-dev technologies not sys-dev and that is why I made the recommendation that a MBP would suffice. He did not mention Photoshop but I assumed if he is doing web-dev he will need it at some point unless he works with a team and has a dedicated graphics…

There are various kinds of web-dev. OSX might be perfect for front-end development (Photoshop, HTML, CSS) while sucking for back-end development (3rd-party Python libraries with random C/C++/Fortran--NumPy, if I'm not mistaken--extensions).
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