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Ask HN: Disappointed by the new Macbook, what alternatives do we have?

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Re: Ask HN: Disappointed by the new Macbook, what alternatives do we have?

#91
post #58

What is so special about iTerm? Features, font rendering? For features and portability, I can warmly recommend SecureCRT[0], you won't find a more capable terminal app anywhere. [0] https://www.vandyke.com/products/securecrt/index.html

I like the ability to easily have multiple panes without having to learn tmux.

I find that Terminator solves this problem.

You can control it with the mouse and the keybindings are much closer in simplicity to iterm than tmux.

https://linux.die.net/man/1/terminator

Check it out :-)

Re: Ask HN: Disappointed by the new Macbook, what alternatives do we have?

#93

No terminal is on par with iTerm. I was using Linux and *BSD for years, used many terminals, and of all iTerm is bread and butter (and with that font rendering and retina screen, nothing comes close). I would recommend to evaluate your needs, but be objective! If you can live with 16GB of RAM (I can, I do not do anything that would require me to use 32GB of RAM) then buy last year model. I have it, amazing machine. A…

What exactly is it that makes you think iTerm is so good? I've started using a MBP after years on ubuntu and I don't think which terminal I am using makes much difference. All I am going to do is open tmux anyway.

I commented above. Ascetics wise macOS has better font rendering. (A lot of nice community made themes for iTerm too). But clipboard works flawlessly out of the box with tmux/zsh/vim/emacs, TrueColor support is awesome too, splits and tabs are amazing and work nice (I know that tmux has something similar to offer, but I really like tabs in iTerm, and I use it in combination with tmux). Amount of customization is staggering really, and app overall always performs well, no latency or lag whatsoever, and is really stable too. While on Ubuntu things were crashing, a lot!

Re: Ask HN: Disappointed by the new Macbook, what alternatives do we have?

#95
post #28
post #17

What's wrong with your current laptop?

My first thought. Do you really need to change because you broke your macbook, or do you want to change because its "trendy" ?

Few problems:

CPU is slowing down lately, even switching tabs in Chrome sometimes takes a 1sec to actually render the page.

Disk is getting too small. I use a lot of VMs for work and I never have enough space to run them all.

Laptop is dead, if I replace it I will be without a laptop for weeks according to Apple.

I let it drop once making the fan very noisy, not really a problem just annoying.

Re: Ask HN: Disappointed by the new Macbook, what alternatives do we have?

#96

I mostly used Macs for about ten years, but I don't like the direction the ecosystem is taking (cloud, app store, etc.), so recently switched to an XPS 13 (developer edition) running Ubuntu. (I actually also gave an SP4 a good chance for a few months, but couldn't get on with Windows.) It's pretty decent (both the laptop and Ubuntu) - sometimes wish the display was brighter or speakers louder, but depends on the envi…

Just making sure you meant to say what you did; did you say the xps13 was a bit heavy? I thought it was rather light.

Re: Ask HN: Disappointed by the new Macbook, what alternatives do we have?

#97
post #23

I asked the same question and read replies to others. Just a quick summary; - Lenovo has decent laptops. Personally, I'd not touch anything from Lenovo after their shady stuff. (Maybe not an issue on Linux, maybe it is. I don't trust them) - Dell XPS series are really good but people complain about coil whine, worse battery life compared to MBP and hit/miss trackpad. It might not be that big of a problem. And if you…

Important corrections: - Lenovo's ThinkPad line has decent laptops. Lenovo's more popular line, Ideapad, which are branded just "Lenovo", are terrible. - Dell XPS series are good, but if you're looking to run Linux on them, make sure to get the Developer Editions

Instead of XPSs, we bought Precisions 15 5000 at work [1]. They are basically XPS 15, (virtually indistinguishable apart for the engraving on the bottom), but you can spec them to bits (you can even get a Xeon processor if you want,have them with no OS / Ubuntu). All of us are reasonably happy with them.

[1]: http://www.dell.com/uk/business/p/precision-m5510-workstatio...

Re: Ask HN: Disappointed by the new Macbook, what alternatives do we have?

#98

I'm in the same situation and right now leaning towards a beefy hackintosh desktop + maybe one of the small macbooks. It's such a pain though.

Would using one effect your Apple Developer status if you are seen using one of these?

Re: Ask HN: Disappointed by the new Macbook, what alternatives do we have?

#99

I mostly used Macs for about ten years, but I don't like the direction the ecosystem is taking (cloud, app store, etc.), so recently switched to an XPS 13 (developer edition) running Ubuntu. (I actually also gave an SP4 a good chance for a few months, but couldn't get on with Windows.) It's pretty decent (both the laptop and Ubuntu) - sometimes wish the display was brighter or speakers louder, but depends on the envi…

Just making sure you meant to say what you did; did you say the xps13 was a bit heavy? I thought it was rather light.

I think this is more about feeling heavier than it looks. Pretty sure it's heavier than my 13" MBA though (despite being smaller, area-wise).
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