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Ask HN: Best linux laptop right now?

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31–40 of 163 posts

Re: Ask HN: Best linux laptop right now?

#31

Post by ralphc »

I'm dual-booting Win 8.1 & Ubuntu 15.10 on a Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro and Ubuntu works great, including touch screen, video, sound & Spotify, the whole works. As a bonus, if you're a distro explorer is has a "Novo" button in addition to a power button. "Novo" takes you straight to the Setup/boot menu, and distros boot well from SD cards. I've played with Kali, Tails and Ubuntu Gnome this way.

Re: Ask HN: Best linux laptop right now?

#32

Post by Glyptodon »

bischofs wrote: post #19

I just got a Dell precision 15 with ubuntu 14.04, $2K after tax - I returned it because the wifi rarely works, The gpu switching makes the gpu basically unusable because of screen tearing ( X.org sucks), and the battery life still is terrible( without some heavy optimizations). In 2016 it is sad that there still isn't a good seamless hardware/software linux laptop out of the box, It could be a great OS for day to day…

Ha ha, I was just posting because my Boss is having some similar fun with the same model.

Re: Ask HN: Best linux laptop right now?

#33

Post by kccqzy »

nextos wrote: post #18

All Intel (but not Skylake) tends to be pretty good. My old MacBook Air 11 2012 (which Linus himself used to use) is almost perfect. It's only missing ACPI events for battery discharges (something I've only seen in x220, but I hated its fan noise). I'd like to point out that some very cheap Chromebooks that are getting Libreboot support (not ready yet for prime time though): https://libreboot.org/docs/hcl/index.html#…

Interesting that Linus himself used to use a MacBook Air! I'm curious what he uses now.

Re: Ask HN: Best linux laptop right now?

#34

Post by DanBC »

It might be useful to say what you do for work, and which features you're more interested in.

Do you need huge amounts of ram? Do you need very powerful processor? Or are you more interested in long battery life?

Re: Ask HN: Best linux laptop right now?

#36

Post by gambiting »

MichaelGG wrote: post #30
glogla wrote: post #24

My advice: 1) If you're used to a retina macbook pro, you're doomed. There's nothing with as good display and touchpad. 2) If you can handle low resoltions (1920x1080 or even 1366x768) and generally lower quality screens, get a Thinkpad. New ones are very expensive but generally solid, while older ones are cheap and work well with Linux. 3) If you want a good screen, there's only Dell XPS 13. If you live in one of th…

Nit: Some ThinkPads have 2560 x 1440 displays now (or higher, I think, on the big ones). And their keyboard and touchpad buttons are vastly superior than Apple (though some people have wrong opinions on this). They also don't overheat like Apple, generally speaking.

"And their keyboard and touchpad buttons are vastly superior than Apple (though some people have wrong opinions on this)"

There's no wrong opinion. Just an opinion.

Re: Ask HN: Best linux laptop right now?

#38

Post by bpizzi »

My Thinkpad T440S from 2014 works almost great under Ubuntu 14.04. Everything's going properly (keyboard, battery, etc) but the Wifi is not. Seems like a RTL8192EE isn't a linux' first class citizen :/

Btw I tried different distros before sticking with Ubuntu 14.04: it really the most finished (at least on my t440s).

Re: Ask HN: Best linux laptop right now?

#40

Post by alfiedotwtf »

MichaelGG wrote: post #30
glogla wrote: post #24

My advice: 1) If you're used to a retina macbook pro, you're doomed. There's nothing with as good display and touchpad. 2) If you can handle low resoltions (1920x1080 or even 1366x768) and generally lower quality screens, get a Thinkpad. New ones are very expensive but generally solid, while older ones are cheap and work well with Linux. 3) If you want a good screen, there's only Dell XPS 13. If you live in one of th…

Nit: Some ThinkPads have 2560 x 1440 displays now (or higher, I think, on the big ones). And their keyboard and touchpad buttons are vastly superior than Apple (though some people have wrong opinions on this). They also don't overheat like Apple, generally speaking.

Agreed. My Dell XPS 15 is running at 3840x2160. Unfortunately, there's a few quirks:

  - Wireless drivers broken in Jessio (unless you build your own kernel)
  - UI elements are EXTREMELY small (you have to set DPI before window manager starts)
Apart from that, it's an awesome machine
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