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Best laptop for linux (probably Ubuntu)?

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Re: Best laptop for linux (probably Ubuntu)?

#21

Post by pgaddict »

Zelmor wrote: post #13

What I find painful in modern laptops are the crap chiclet keyboard layouts. Why can't we just have a classic, compressed keyboard like on the thinkpad t420 or x220? I get cramps from the keyboard of my dell e5570 I have from the workplace, I started using external keyboards 2 days after starting on it. Here's hoping for a retro thinkpad next year. Until then, I'll hold onto my money or just invest in an ergodox keyb…

Exactly this is why I still keep my T420s. Also, the new lenovos tend to have absolutely terrible touchpads that move (tilt instead of having proper buttons) etc.

Re: Best laptop for linux (probably Ubuntu)?

#23

Post by winteriscoming »

For the past 8 years, I have used 2 Lenovo Thinkpad models (the current one is E series, don't remember the exact model of the previous one). Used both of them with a Linux OS. I have had no issues with either of these over the past 8 years and their performance too has been excellent - I use these just for development activities which involves working on IDEs, running multiple servers (for coding and testing with them) and for the usual browsing and other things. I am not a video/gaming user.

The only issue that I sometimes have with them is that they heat up really quick, so using them on your laps is a problem. It's not a problem for me, because, most of the times, I use them connected to an external monitor, keyboard and a mouse - it's pretty much on my table with its lid closed down.

Re: Best laptop for linux (probably Ubuntu)?

#24

Post by grawlinson »

dan-bell wrote: post #10
grawlinson wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard that the only hardware difference between the standard + developer edition is the WiFi card (Broadcom vs. Intel) and that a lot of people just buy the standard edition and replace the substandard Broadcom card for the better Intel one.

I've been using the standard version with Ubuntu (Kernel 4.4) and the Broadcom driver is also perfectly stable for me.

I've had 3 hand-me-down computers, all with Broadcom drivers and they all exhibit bizarre behaviour which rendered the computers unusable. For one of them, the solution was to switch to the proprietary drivers and the other two just had to be replaced with equivalent Intel cards.

tl;dr mileage depends, but it's universally accepted that Broadcom cards are shit.

Re: Best laptop for linux (probably Ubuntu)?

#25

Post by replax »

Zelmor wrote: post #13

What I find painful in modern laptops are the crap chiclet keyboard layouts. Why can't we just have a classic, compressed keyboard like on the thinkpad t420 or x220? I get cramps from the keyboard of my dell e5570 I have from the workplace, I started using external keyboards 2 days after starting on it. Here's hoping for a retro thinkpad next year. Until then, I'll hold onto my money or just invest in an ergodox keyb…

I use a well specced out Dell E6440 at work (i7-4610, 16GB ram, 512GB SSD, 1080p IPS screen) and it does have a classic non chiclet keyboard. Besides the weight and size of it due to the integrated DVD drive it found it to be an amazing machine with a great keyboad.

Personally I still use a ThinkPad X220 and I would not consider the Dell's keyboard significantly worse (I prefer the key placement of the page up/down keys etc of the X220 though).

Re: Best laptop for linux (probably Ubuntu)?

#27

Post by wheresvic1 »

Thanks all for the helpful comments - it seems like the Thinkpad T420/T450 seem to be the preferred choice although I am really happy to see that there are also quite a few other options.

System76 also sounds great because they specialize in Ubuntu and I've worked on dell laptops before and love their build quality so it's going to be a tough choice :)

Re: Best laptop for linux (probably Ubuntu)?

#28

Post by blackflame7000 »

Any laptop, and I say that only half facetiously. I have 2 Identical computers. One with Ubuntu 16.04 and the other Win10. When the windows PC is on, the average temperature in my room rises a noticeable amount compared to its Ubuntu twin. Not the most scientific of tests but it does demonstrate that Windows 10 is doing a lot more background tasks than Ubuntu which will adversely effect battery life.

Re: Best laptop for linux (probably Ubuntu)?

#29

Post by antoineMoPa »

Acer Chromebook (CB3-111) with crouton. Nodejs and MongoDB work fine (redis, also). Perfect for coding everywhere in the home/city/world (mine went to Europe with me!). I also have Python 3 and LaTeX installed so my chromebook is 95% full.

Best battery-time vs price ratio ever.

However, you'll have to learn to live with small disk space.

To find disk usage:

    df -h
Also, this is useful to find large files:

    du -h . | grep "[0-9][0-9]M"
Since chromebooks have SSDs, these commands run faster than you would imagine.

Re: Best laptop for linux (probably Ubuntu)?

#30

Post by lew89 »

The only thing I can share is my experience with Thinkpad E130. I've got it for about 3years and I'm really happy about how it's working with Arch Linux. I remember I had a little problem with installing bootloader (EFI), but now everything's fine except SD card reader (but I've read that there is alternative driver to fix this).

It's totally enough for everything I do: web, movies (OK, very high quality happens to be a problem), music, programming, photo/video editing and even games (Half Life 2, Civilization V and Oblivion are level expected to work very well on high details). I don't know how It would manage with full blown KDE/GNOME desktop though (I prefer terminal+tiling WM). If you don't mind small size (I love it) I recommend it. Really the only thing that doesn't work well is that for some reason shutdown works like reboot so you have to turn of using power button, but who cares If you usualy just swith to the sleep mode.

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