There are other nice machines to run Linux on. AFAICT people buy Apple laptops to run macOS; for that you have pretty little choice.
For a while a Macbook was the best Windows laptop. Not sure if that's still true.
That's for recent models then? When I had it (around 4 years ago) it was ok, but lacking on the driver front: fans were running high for seemingly no reason, battery life was worse than under OSX even when idling (could be windows itself though I doubt it) and one of the drivers would write meaningless messages to the debug log like every single second.
First everyone complained there MBP was shit and that they weren't going to get one. Now apparently it's so good people are wanting them to run Linux on.
The input devices are on SPI, not USB Things like this make me wonder if Apple is deliberately going for proprietariness as a sort of vendor-lock-in, because I can't see any other compelling reasons for coming up with a completely different interface for such basic and existing devices. USB and PS/2 are standardised to the point that hardware and software for them are widely available and cheap. They're also extensib…
I imagine it's more that they don't care and SPI is simpler/cheaper than USB when you custom make your hardware.
I don't necessarily think Apple cost minimizes in that way. They build and engineer in ways other companies cannot or won't risk. My example being their 10k cnc machine purchase for MacBook cases. Or I could be totally wrong and this is what they're doing, of course.
Tangential Question: Would you say that Thinkpads are still the safest bet if you're looking for good RHEL/Fedora support & updates?
XPS 13 and 15 (or the equivalent Precision series) No question about it. Lenovo has hardware whitelists and has frequently broken Linux compatibility with its BIOS.
>* frequently broken Linux compatibility with its BIOS.*
The input devices are on SPI, not USB Things like this make me wonder if Apple is deliberately going for proprietariness as a sort of vendor-lock-in, because I can't see any other compelling reasons for coming up with a completely different interface for such basic and existing devices. USB and PS/2 are standardised to the point that hardware and software for them are widely available and cheap. They're also extensib…
> I can't see any other compelling reasons for coming up with a completely different interface for such basic and existing devices. I don't know enough about the implementation to speak to why they made this choice, but for what it's worth, SPI is a standard[1] - and a quite old one. I suspect, were we to follow this down the rabbit hole, that we'd find it's related to power management. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…
That well may be (regarding the power management), but while SPI as standard is old, the use of SPI is not standard. I've implemented quite a few SPIs (mostly FPGA) to interface with various commercial devices and virtually all of them had a different protocol, i.e. 8bit vs 7bit words, different bits to denote write or read, etc. Some of them didn't even use SS signal. I wouldn't really called them standard, and I say that with regret. More hardware could be used in a more standard manner.
My issue with Razer: As far as I can tell, they only ship laptops with the country's keyboard layout. I move around a lot and always buy laptops with US keyboard layout. At the moment, I'm in Germany and can only order Razer Blades with the awful German layout :( I know, pretty niche, but both Apple and Dell allow you to do this.
This page gives a drop-down with the choice of an American or Nordic layout. There's clearly something dodgy with the site, when the German page offers me the Nordic layout. http://www.razerzone.com/de-de/store/razer-blade-2015
Thanks for your detective work. Unfortunately that's the 2015 Razer Blade, not the 2016 model. Very weird site indeed.
There are other nice machines to run Linux on. AFAICT people buy Apple laptops to run macOS; for that you have pretty little choice.
Can you recommend a good Linux-compatible laptop. I saw that Dell no longer sells Linux pre-installed on its XPS machines. What are some good alternatives?
I'm very happy with my System76.
(I have an galago ultrapro - they don't make them anymore but still provide support). They used to have pretty bad reviews, but most if not all the people/colleagues I've asked are now happy about their purchase. YMMV.
If I were to buy a laptop to run Ubuntu on today I'd go for their Lemur.
I've been running Linux on my MacBook Pro for quite a while (years?), and while there are a couple of hicups due to Apple weirdness, they are minor. I would definitely call my MacBook Pro a good (and workable) Linux machine.
Mind elaborating on the hiccups and generation?
I've been making some notes going along as I have figured out different things over different generations of MBP:
The input devices are on SPI, not USB Things like this make me wonder if Apple is deliberately going for proprietariness as a sort of vendor-lock-in, because I can't see any other compelling reasons for coming up with a completely different interface for such basic and existing devices. USB and PS/2 are standardised to the point that hardware and software for them are widely available and cheap. They're also extensib…
> I can't see any other compelling reasons for coming up with a completely different interface for such basic and existing devices. I don't know enough about the implementation to speak to why they made this choice, but for what it's worth, SPI is a standard[1] - and a quite old one. I suspect, were we to follow this down the rabbit hole, that we'd find it's related to power management. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…
You are right that SPI is a standard, although like RS232 it only exists in hardware and data layers, while USB is up to application layer.
You argument in this case is very similar to defending use of custom TCP protocol for web browsing. While TCP is standard, there is nothing standard about it to browse the web, we have HTTP for that