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Ask HN: Are there any reasonable alternatives to MacBook Pro for developer?

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Re: Ask HN: Are there any reasonable alternatives to MacBook Pro for developer?

#331

Post by jwatte »

throwafk81 wrote: post #324
closeparen wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Friendly reminder that Lenovo made a deliberate choice to ship malware payloads to its customers from the factory [0] by preinstalling an SSL MITM proxy configuration from an adware vendor. This is not some suspicious technology with legitimate uses like Intel Management Engine. This is not concerns about the second-order implications of your voluntary uploads to Facebook and Google. It's not even an agency with a re…

Friendly reminder that nobody cares.

They did it twice (once in BIOS) and I care. Never again Lenovo!

Re: Ask HN: Are there any reasonable alternatives to MacBook Pro for developer?

#332

Post by jwatte »

The touch bar was the death knell for me. Unusable.

I had OK experience with Razer Blade 14 if you need high end GPU, and good experience with Dell XPS 15. The Razer and MacBook don't go higher than 16GB, the feel lets you put in 32GB RAM, which is useful for lots of tools or virtual machines.

I run Windows 10 host and VMWare Workstation guests (Linux and docker.)

Works for me, YMMV and so on. Just don't inflict the touchbar on yourself.

Re: Ask HN: Are there any reasonable alternatives to MacBook Pro for developer?

#334

Post by lloeki »

closeparen wrote: post #313
CoffeeOnWrite wrote: post #194

I’m on my 4th Thinkpad T-series - T520, T530, T450s, T460s - each one was a a winner. I ditched the T5XX series when they borked the keyboard layout by adding a numpad. Used to run Ubuntu, now I run Debian, stable or testing depending on point in release cycle at install time. I plan to take another look at Ubuntu now that they gave up on Unity. A coworker is happily on the T470s (first USB-C in the series). I always…

Friendly reminder that Lenovo made a deliberate choice to ship malware payloads to its customers from the factory [0] by preinstalling an SSL MITM proxy configuration from an adware vendor. This is not some suspicious technology with legitimate uses like Intel Management Engine. This is not concerns about the second-order implications of your voluntary uploads to Facebook and Google. It's not even an agency with a re…

IIRC the dev-beloved T- models were not affected though. (Can't find the reference right now though)

Re: Ask HN: Are there any reasonable alternatives to MacBook Pro for developer?

#335

Post by andy_ppp »

epmaybe wrote: post #82
andy_ppp wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, having upgraded from one I fully regret this decision, mostly because of the keyboard and the £2000 after trade in. I’m actually a big fan of USB-C, it’s much better.

Not to bring this up in every usb-c comment, but what do you do for backwards compatibility? I consistently (nearly daily) find myself having to connect older USB devices into my laptop, but end up grabbing an adapter/dongle to connect the device. Flash drives, external hard drives, and SD card readers are my main issues.

I actually have a dongle thing with monitor pass through, older usb, sd card reader, mouse etc on my desk. Get all of these with one port.

Bought a cheap usb c enclosure off Amazon for backups too (swapping the hd) and I love it when I buy a new device that has usb c because I only need the cable that comes with my MacBook for camera and wireless headphones charging. So actually I’m nearly dongle free at this point. Still think it’s a real shame they didn’t keep the inbuilt SD card reader.

Re: Ask HN: Are there any reasonable alternatives to MacBook Pro for developer?

#336

Post by jwatte »

BlackjackCF wrote: post #261
sametmax wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I own a dell xps 15. Same, i don't recommand it. Autonomy is abysmal, usbc support very poor, the bios took a year to be stable and the sound died after some months. Not worth the price tag. Mind you, the xps 13 doesn't seem to have the same problems. I still love my old samsung 9 serie and wish the brand would have worked out the quirks and made a new one. My next try will be a thinkpad carbon since every owner arou…

I have a Dell XPS 15 as well. Mine does the coil whine and the keyboard isn't great. It's kind of sad, but it's probably still the closest thing to a MBP that I've had out of a non-Apple laptop. I'm also running Elementary OS on it and it's been okay.

The Razer blades are more like MacBooks both in shape and in inability to upgrade the hardware.

Much faster GPUs, though.

Re: Ask HN: Are there any reasonable alternatives to MacBook Pro for developer?

#337

Post by lloeki »

saltcured wrote: post #308
jhoechtl wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HiDPI on Linux is pretty much non existent. I am telling from experience. I have booth a decent 4K external monitor and a HiDPI IPS internal display. The only setup which is ok in the sense of least horrible is Gnome mutter Wayland with experimental per monitor fractional scaling enabled. And this one is only ok if you can restrict yourself to the few ported pure GTK3 Gnome apps. Which means not that much. No Firefox…

So, what exactly is it that you expect as "HiDPI" support which is missing? As far as I can recall, it has been possible to configure the actual physical size/DPI for a monitor for many, many years. Any properly functioning X application should then be able to draw things a correct size on the screen, e.g. fonts sized in points or images and figures scaled to actual widths. I think this infrastructure may even pre-da…

Mix HiDPI screens and non HiDPI ones, lots of very real corner cases that you hit daily make the experience terrible in ways that can only be "fixed" through terrible hacks and tweaks, if at all.

Re: Ask HN: Are there any reasonable alternatives to MacBook Pro for developer?

#338

Post by merb »

aviraldg wrote: post #223
CoffeeOnWrite wrote: post #194

I’m on my 4th Thinkpad T-series - T520, T530, T450s, T460s - each one was a a winner. I ditched the T5XX series when they borked the keyboard layout by adding a numpad. Used to run Ubuntu, now I run Debian, stable or testing depending on point in release cycle at install time. I plan to take another look at Ubuntu now that they gave up on Unity. A coworker is happily on the T470s (first USB-C in the series). I always…

Do your co-workers not have issues with HiDPI support on Linux? I've heard it's not the best experience and can require quite some fiddling to get working correctly.

The biggest problem in linux is not directly HiDPI. HiDPI works (mostly).

However if you can't use wayland you will have a problem when you need the following:

Multiple monitors with different screen resultions. Lets say your laptop has 4k and you use two external monitors with 1080p than it gets tricky with older wayland or x.org. However on later stable/edge channels most things are probably better than when I tested this and I even have a colleague which has a 13" xps with ubuntu which works pretty will with its docking station.

Re: Ask HN: Are there any reasonable alternatives to MacBook Pro for developer?

#339

Post by lurker9 »

I'm on a P51 Lenovo, I had been using Apple laptops for the past 15+ years, I run Fedora with Gnome on it and have no 'major' issues with HiDPI, I highly recommend switching to Lenovo hardware, luckily I don't need any Mac specific apps, but if you did, there are certain configurations of Lenovo laptops that are relatively easy to get OS X working on.

Re: Ask HN: Are there any reasonable alternatives to MacBook Pro for developer?

#340

Post by gumballhead »

jnwatson wrote: post #133

I recent got a 15 inch Dell Precision. I’m running a recent Ubuntu. I don’t recommend. It constantly throttles the CPI. I get lots of PCIe recoverable errors. The USB bus runs out of available throughout. Plugging anything Displaylink is a disaster. The camera/microphone is below the screen, which sucks more than I expected. It takes 2 hands to open the laptop. It is possible to plug in the power supply such that com…

Huh... I had a Precision 5510 running Linux and I loved it
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