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

Ask HN: Feasible Alternative to the MacBook Pro?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

471–480 of 628 posts

Re: Ask HN: Feasible Alternative to the MacBook Pro?

#471

Post by JDiculous »

pkalinowski wrote: post #106
JDiculous wrote: post #41

It depends on what your priorities are, but I recently bought a LG Gram 17" and absolutely love it. It has a massive 17" 2560-1600 screen, yet is as light as a Macbook Air, and practically as thin too. 13 hour battery life, and super comfortable keyboard. Even the charger is smaller and lighter than any other I've seen. Honestly I've never seen anything like this in my life, and only $1,448 ( https://amzn.to/2P2txdv…

How do you find the touchpad? I disqualified LG Gram because of it, feels like cheap $500 HP laptop

Apple laptops have the best touchpads bar none. But the LG Gram's touchpad is fine, certainly no worse than any other non-Apple laptop. My only real complaint would be that it's only clickable halfway down (unlike the Macbook touchpad where you can click it from the top), but as far as I'm aware that's how it is on every other non-Apple laptop (including the Dell XPS 15)

Re: Ask HN: Feasible Alternative to the MacBook Pro?

#472

Post by Joeri »

fortran77 wrote: post #377
bufferoverflow wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What ads??? I've been on Windows for decades, never saw a single ad by the OS.

I agree! I don't see ads. I'm running the "pro" version with almost all default settings. Do they consider pre-installed "Candy Crush" an ad? And if so, why isn't MacOS "iTunes" an ad?

They probably mean onedrive and office 365 ads. If you don’t use those windows can get pretty persistent about getting them.

Re: Ask HN: Feasible Alternative to the MacBook Pro?

#473

Post by NilsIRL »

vips7L wrote: post #365
gherkinnn wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have been working on Windows machines (C# ftw) for a while now. I hate it. Everything. Kafkaesque configuration UIs, horrible window management, mouse acceleration is off, font rendering is atrocious, the updates make me unreasonably angry, mixed design systems leave me confused, File Explorer isn’t even trying, many apps are downright insulting, and the entire thing just reeks of PMs in ill-fitting suits prodding th…

> mouse acceleration Maybe it's the gamer in me, but who uses this? It's just going to make your mouse movements way less accurate. If you haven't tried it yet pwsh integration with C# is amazing, I wish there was something like it for the JVM.

There's a reason why it's enabled by default on most OSs.

Mouse acceleration can be really useful on small mousepads.

Re: Ask HN: Feasible Alternative to the MacBook Pro?

#474

Post by msbarnett »

ColanR wrote: post #438
SomeOtherThrow wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In summary, earlier versions of OSX are perfectly fine (my one remaining mac is on 10.10), but Apple has not been doing itself any favors with the dev community in more recent iterations of the OS. The GNU/Linux community also isn't bending to my will arbitrarily either. Frustrating, to say the least. In all seriousness, people are all happy to talk about how easy linux is to customize until you broach the subject…

It seems like you're using OSes that are trying to cater to a diminishingly technical crowd. I read (somewhere, a year or so ago) that the generation now in their late 20s/early 30s was the last one that actually needed to care about how their computers worked, because their computers occasionally needed to be fixed. Generally speaking, I think that the newer generation has likely never been exposed to a computer tha…

> > people are all happy to talk about how easy linux is to customize until you broach the subject of changing keybindings to use a mac-like scheme (using command for gui interactions as a rule of thumb, readline bindings everywhere there's text entry)

> BTW, I'm using i3, and I think it would be (relatively) super easy to change the keybindings around to what you're describing.

Really?

How does one go about configuring i3 such that, say, any time you hit ctrl-w it deletes backwards to the previous white space (a common readline binding) in any text entry box in, say, Firefox, IntelliJ, Spotify, VLC, Amarok, Gimp, etc?

Are you quite certain that “readline bindings everywhere there’s a textbox” is really in the scope of i3’s customizations? What OP described goes quite a bit beyond window manager customization.

> It sounds like you may need to find an OS that's designed to expose the level of customization that you want.

On OS X this can be achieved by placing

    {
      "^w"        = "deleteWordBackward:";
    }
in $HOME/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeybindings.dict, so I rather think he already is using an OS that exposes this level of pervasive customization.

Re: Ask HN: Feasible Alternative to the MacBook Pro?

#475

Post by dguaraglia »

I've been using a Matebook X Pro for... I guess almost a year now. I only have good things to say about it. Other than the touchpad (Apple's are just superior) and the stupid positioning of the webcam (if you use it) everything else works great, it's a great looking laptop with good battery life and super portable.

Re: Ask HN: Feasible Alternative to the MacBook Pro?

#476

Post by slumos »

rsync wrote: post #417
cytzol wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In a hotel (=on Mac), everything is stylish and cared for, but you have very little freedom to change things. I've heard this over and over — that Macs are locked-down, uncustomisable machines — and I don't agree with it at all. I use replacements for almost all the built-in apps. I use a custom launcher. My editor config Git repo is approaching ten years old, and my shell config Git repo is almost eight. There are…

"I use replacements for almost all the built-in apps. I use a custom launcher. My editor config Git repo is approaching ten years old, and my shell config Git repo is almost eight. There are standard interfaces to per-application Preferences and keyboard shortcuts. When I sit down to use someone else's Mac, I have no idea how to use it!" I run an environment, on OSX, similar to this although (I assume) much less ambi…

The only reason mouse focus was ever useful to me is NOT raising the window. That way you can type at one window while reading the other. Otherwise you are just saving ... one click? ... when your hand is already on the mouse? Why not Cmd-TAB instead?

Re: Ask HN: Feasible Alternative to the MacBook Pro?

#477

Post by sbuk »

dotancohen wrote: post #467
exikyut wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps the mild cognitive dissonance caused by the choice of reference points. Possibly also cross-domain projection of various strongly held views.

Some very vocal, very opinionated people are on a crusade to remove the idea that man with woman, or woman with man, is the default configuration for sex. They actively downvote any comments that suggest that M-F is "normal" all over the internet, from Reddit to StackOverflow. I would say it's been happening for a while but the past few months have been very extreme.

Nope. It’s about objectification.

Re: Ask HN: Feasible Alternative to the MacBook Pro?

#478

Post by zarkov99 »

gherkinnn wrote: post #322
fortran77 wrote: post #259

Windows 10 on good hardware is very, very nice. My advice is "don't fight windows". I've seen many people try to make Windows like Unix. Don't. Use Windows versions of things, not things compiled under Cygwin or MinGW. Learn to use Powershell and Powershell scripting language. I do development (C/C++/CUDA/Erlang/Python) all day long on Windows 10 and in addition use desktop applications like Microsoft Office and Adob…

Have been working on Windows machines (C# ftw) for a while now. I hate it. Everything. Kafkaesque configuration UIs, horrible window management, mouse acceleration is off, font rendering is atrocious, the updates make me unreasonably angry, mixed design systems leave me confused, File Explorer isn’t even trying, many apps are downright insulting, and the entire thing just reeks of PMs in ill-fitting suits prodding th…

Don't forget the file system and how locking by a rogue program can stop your build (and your workflow) until you figure out which program has a handle to the file you want to rebuild. The lack of scriptability of most tools. The perpetually behind C++ compiler. The lack of a proper terminal. The fucking ads. The broken updates. The relentless ratchet to control your machine and how you use it.

Re: Ask HN: Feasible Alternative to the MacBook Pro?

#479

Post by JDiculous »

mduerksen wrote: post #168

Any serious contender should have an answer to the MBPs extraordinary touchpad. It is key to working without a mouse, and therefore being truly mobile and comfortable at the same time. So please post at least some information for this aspect, which is one of the things the OP explicitly listed. Some examples: - Would you be able to do some solid Photoshop/Sketch/Gimp/Inkscape/Blender work with the touchpad/knob of yo…

Are people really working in Photoshop/Sketch/Gimp/Inkscape/Blender using the trackpad? Sounds extraordinarily inefficient compared to using a mouse.

Re: Ask HN: Feasible Alternative to the MacBook Pro?

#480

Post by NotSammyHagar »

gherkinnn wrote: post #322
fortran77 wrote: post #259

Windows 10 on good hardware is very, very nice. My advice is "don't fight windows". I've seen many people try to make Windows like Unix. Don't. Use Windows versions of things, not things compiled under Cygwin or MinGW. Learn to use Powershell and Powershell scripting language. I do development (C/C++/CUDA/Erlang/Python) all day long on Windows 10 and in addition use desktop applications like Microsoft Office and Adob…

Have been working on Windows machines (C# ftw) for a while now. I hate it. Everything. Kafkaesque configuration UIs, horrible window management, mouse acceleration is off, font rendering is atrocious, the updates make me unreasonably angry, mixed design systems leave me confused, File Explorer isn’t even trying, many apps are downright insulting, and the entire thing just reeks of PMs in ill-fitting suits prodding th…

People don't wear suits at Microsoft, even PMs. Some of my best friends are PMs, and they were offended. The rest is all true though.
Post reply on HN