What would I recommend? A 2015 MacBook Pro.
Seriously. Until Apple's fixes all it's mistakes, the 2015 model is still the best money can buy.
Ask HN: Are there any reasonable alternatives to MacBook Pro for developer?
341–350 of 502 posts
Re: Ask HN: Are there any reasonable alternatives to MacBook Pro for developer?
#342I’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…
Thinkpads weren't affected [source] (https://support.lenovo.com/lu/en/product_security/superfish).
You're welcome to boycott the company, but the corporate models are protected.
Re: Ask HN: Are there any reasonable alternatives to MacBook Pro for developer?
#343Haven't seen these two suggested: The Razer Blade is a pretty excellent machine. Its gaming focused, which surfaces a little bit in their design language, but all that really means is more beefy specs. The Stealth model in particular might be a great choice, or you can up-market. I've heard nothing but great things about it. The Surface devices are also an expensive but excellent choice. They do suffer in that I don'…
I have a late-2016 Razer Blade and every time I compile something the fans spin up to aircraft-turbine levels of noise, it's ridiculous. I'm currently thinking of throwing the whole thing out and getting a Macbook Pro instead, because it's basically the loudest thing in our office.
Same here with the fan. I use Goland as my main IDE and man does it kick up a fuss whenever indexing occurs.
Re: Ask HN: Are there any reasonable alternatives to MacBook Pro for developer?
#344I 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
I have a Precision 5520, it's pretty flawless aside from the TB16 dock having an issue with offloading CRC checksums... but you can work around it pretty easily: `sudo ethtool --offload eth0 rx off`
I mean, the hardware/batterylife/support/build is great, although it does soak up grease from my fingers super easily.
Re: Ask HN: Are there any reasonable alternatives to MacBook Pro for developer?
#345Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
OK, so I guess the problem comes from trying to fuse everything into one screen? In the old days, we would run X with separate screen numbers to get multiple outputs via multiple graphics cards. You could slide your mouse between screens, but you couldn't drag a window across or have a window spanning the two screens. Each window remained confined to one screen, and only a few apps knew how to open windows on more than one screen from the same app instance. (A few, like emacs, even understand opening windows on multiple displays!)
Out of curiosity, what is a non-broken behavior supposed to be if the screens are combined? Do people expect the low-dpi screen to be a blurry version of whatever would appear on the high-dpi screen, or do they expect it to act like a magnifier, perhaps with pan/zoom controls?
Re: Ask HN: Are there any reasonable alternatives to MacBook Pro for developer?
#346Earlier 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…
Try KDE on Wayland. Full support for HiDPI, full support for multiple monitors of different DPI even.
I did. I recently switched from KDE after more than 15! years to Gnome because KDE on Waykand is broken beyond usability. It comes for a reason that even Neon, which I used back then, doesn't come with Wayland out of the box.
And frankly, X is a dead end.
Re: Ask HN: Are there any reasonable alternatives to MacBook Pro for developer?
#347Re: Ask HN: Are there any reasonable alternatives to MacBook Pro for developer?
#348Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
OK, so I guess the problem comes from trying to fuse everything into one screen? In the old days, we would run X with separate screen numbers to get multiple outputs via multiple graphics cards. You could slide your mouse between screens, but you couldn't drag a window across or have a window spanning the two screens. Each window remained confined to one screen, and only a few apps knew how to open windows on more th…
> In the old days, we would run X with separate screen numbers to get multiple outputs via multiple graphics cards
Those days are gone. No matter how hard you try - either you are simply not runing on current hardware, have very modest expectations or close your eyes to realize that the Linux desktop in this regard is at least two years behind, minimum!
Re: Ask HN: Are there any reasonable alternatives to MacBook Pro for developer?
#349Earlier quoted context omitted.
Try KDE on Wayland. Full support for HiDPI, full support for multiple monitors of different DPI even.
I did. I recently switched from KDE after more than 15! years to Gnome because KDE on Waykand is broken beyond usability. It comes for a reason that even Neon, which I used back then, doesn't come with Wayland out of the box. And frankly, X is a dead end.
> broken beyond usability
Were you using Nvidia? On AMD and Intel it’s been working amazing for me so far, never had any issue. Nvidia is known for disobeying the standards.
Re: Ask HN: Are there any reasonable alternatives to MacBook Pro for developer?
#350As somebody who got later into macbooks, and begrudingly had to admit they were objectively superior, here's what I'd like to know about a competitor. 1. Does the screen ever flicker? 2. Has a key ever come off? 3. Does it ever fail to sleep when you close the lid 4. Would you worry if you drop it from waste height 5 times (closed, but running, onto a hard-wood floor) ? 5. Have you had any driver problems, have you e…
I have a 2015 rMBP from work, and I answer "yes" to 1, 3, 4, seen 5 several times with colleagues, 6, 7.
My personal rebadged Clevo running Linux is "better", as the screen never flickers and it pretty much never crashes. The Linux laptop is also more reliable at waking from sleep than the Mac.
I do like the Mac's body -- it's got a much better build quality. But it also cost twice as much for half the spec.