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Ask HN: Best Developer Linux Laptop?

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Re: Ask HN: Best Developer Linux Laptop?

#71

Post by kls »

bradleyland wrote: post #62
kls wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So MacOS is Unix anyway, you say? I don't recall saying that it is or is not in my post above. Please don't put words in my mouth. but it is not nearly as good a platform for developers as Ubuntu by any means you are painting a pretty broad stroke there. I do web and mobile development, both require application like Photoshop, professional video editing tools while web specifically Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera and…

Just a heads up, you can feel perfectly confident saying that OS X is Unix. Snow Leopard is UNIX 03 certified. http://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3581.htm

Sure, I was more offended by words being placed in my mouth. Whether it is UNIX or not is irrelevant to me if it does what I need it to do, I don't really get hung up in the dogma.

Re: Ask HN: Best Developer Linux Laptop?

#72

Post by hendler »

Currently having the same debate. Will I stick with a MBP, or go with a non-Apple and run Ubuntu?

I currently run VMWare Fusion on 4gigs of ram. The decision points, for me, revolve around:

* battery life - quad cores are 48nm, which is why MBP stuck with i7 32nm presumably. * price/performance - for $800 I have a 6 core desktop with 8 gigs of ram. For a $2000 budget I can get a desktop and a laptop, and have the VM on an external drive, swap the drive between machines out depending on where I'm working from. * durability, convenience and stability - can you do what you need to do without things breaking? DRM? Package management. There are a lot of trade-offs in either direction * job requirements - still need to debug in browsers on mac and windows. running osx in a virtual machine isn't super easy/legal.

Since I've come to terms with most of the issues above, I've been wanting to not get a MBP. I can always keep my old mac, too. I'm not developing ipad/iphone apps...

Re: Ask HN: Best Developer Linux Laptop?

#74

Post by daleharvey »

I made the switch to a macbook pro a few months ago

Its nice to have a laptop that just works, suspend resume is really awesome. The polish on the whole thing is pretty nice too.

It still isnt a flexible as ubuntu and I dont feel quite as productive in it yet, lots of little nagging issues with installing stuff and hardware support which I havent had with ubuntu for a long time.

Re: Ask HN: Best Developer Linux Laptop?

#76

Post by buro9 »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #69

If you want to do development in a language other than python/ruby, or even want to use python libraries written in c, avoid the macbook. If you are certain you will stick to {svn, git, django, python, vim}, you'll be fine. My mac ownership timeline: Day 1: Ooh, pretty. 2-3 days: I fucking hate iTunes. Luckily ports install mpd works. 1 month: Ooh, the pretty magsafe connector saved me from dropping it when I tripped…

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.

Re: Ask HN: Best Developer Linux Laptop?

#77

Post by RossM »

metamemetics wrote: post #30

For linux just avoid anything with an ATI graphics card and go with nvidia. ESPECIALLY if you want to attempt triple booting MacOSX\iATKOS on it. I've gotten good mileage out of a Dell XPS Studio 16 w/ubuntu but can't recommend it due to driver issues with wireless (avoid intel5100) and graphics (radeon hd3760). If I was buying a new laptop I would search the hackintosh and iATKOS forums to find models that can insta…

I have a Dell Studio 15 (laptop) and while it's a fairly nice build I'd have to say stay away from Dell if you want to run Linux - when I started using Ubuntu (around 8.04) I had so many driver issues it was silly. 10.04 hasn't been bad though (yet to test out 10.10).

Re: Ask HN: Best Developer Linux Laptop?

#79

Post by dlokshin »

Not to add to a bevy of positive reviews for Lenovo, but the quality of these laptops is just so far above the rest. And I found driver support for them to be excellent with Ubuntu. Pretty much everything worked out of the box.

My T30 recently died after six years of excellent service and I switched to an Asus to save $200. I have regretted that decision more than I can tell you. Ubuntu has taken endless tweaking to get working, keyboard buttons started falling off after only a year, plastic moldings are pealing off, touchpad is of poor quality, and I could go on. Do yourself a favor and buy a Lenovo, the quality is outstanding.

If you choose to go the MBP route, it does come with its own problems. Take a hard drive failure, for example. 20+ screws to remove the thing and replace it. You basically have to take the entire bottom apart. On a lenovo, unscrew a single screw, run whatever processes you can on it to save your data, and pop a new one in.

Re: Ask HN: Best Developer Linux Laptop?

#80

Post by pocoloco »

khandelwal wrote: post #67
samstokes wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Got a T510 here (with the extra-high-res 1920x1080 display) and it's great. Everything works in Ubuntu 10.04 (I don't have any problems with suspend-to-RAM or -to-disk). I spent a while looking into MBPs and it seems the Linux support is still fairly laughable - the latest models won't even boot it, and even the older ones require a kernel recompile to get sound working. I'd buy an MBP without hesitation if I wanted…

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.
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