141–150 of 156 posts
I'm honestly thinking of switching to Thinkpad X1 Carbon now, but I HATE windows. And from what I've heard, Linux doesn't bode well with it. Anybody here Linux running on X1 Carbon?
Not X1 Carbon but on new T480. Runs flawlessly.
-Batt life --> TLP + powertop; I consume 5-6 watts idle with this setup
Posting this from my six month old Macbook Pro 15" on which the spacebar has just started doing double spaces. Going to try and clean it with compressed air, but even if that works, it's unacceptable in my opinion that such a key piece of hardware on such an expensive machine should be so fragile. The fact that at some point I'll have to take it back to Apple and probably be without it for several days due to the com…
I try to keep spares of anything mission critical. I get that computers are expensive, but you owe it to yourself to make sure that your productivity cannot be broken by a single object's destruction or absence. (That doesn't mean you need a spare new macbook pro. An older device that is maintained, and a good environment setup process, is sufficient.)
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I try to keep spares of anything mission critical. I get that computers are expensive, but you owe it to yourself to make sure that your productivity cannot be broken by a single object's destruction or absence. (That doesn't mean you need a spare new macbook pro. An older device that is maintained, and a good environment setup process, is sufficient.)
I do have a spare, but really I shouldn't have to invest time in setting it up over such a seemingly trivial issue.
Tangential rant ahead: I've been pretty disappointed in the latest MacBooks as well (mostly just the keyboard and mediocre performance improvements over previous generations), so as a hedge I thought I should give Linux another try, hoping in the ~5 years since I last attempted it one of the more user-friendly distributions would have figured out how to make installation painless. Nope. It's easy enough to get a basi…
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Thinkpads generally work out of the box without any tweaking. I'd suggest using a distro with a recent kernel and you shouldn't have any problems.
Why do you still recommend a Thinkpad? Thinkpad screen resolutions stink across the board. X-series RAM caps out at 16GB where my XPS15 gets 32. I understand TPs work well with Linux but it's 2018, a lot of things work pretty darn well with Linux.
Ram-wise, 16Gi is plenty for me. The nvme ssd more than makes up for any issues. I regularly run multiple IntelliJ/Goland windows, docker containers, VMs, etc. without a problem. If I need more, I have a proper desktop. Laptops are meant to be portable.
The carbon is half a pound lighter than the comparable macbook pro, and better in all respects that matter to me - keyboard, weight, battery life, repairability, durability, linux compatibility.
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Counterargument: for a long time Ive had Jobs to push back on Design excesses. Now there's nobody that has the same kind of design sense at the top to push the product in practical directions. It's like Lennon and McCartney, they wrote better songs when they were together than apart (I'd argue).
I actually don't think that's a counterargument at all. If someone like Ive is able to run unchecked and produce the failure that is the MBP keyboard, then that's a problem outside of Ive.
What were the design goals of that MBP? Looking at it with an industrial designer eye I feel "symmetry" and "thinness" were higher up the list of requirements than "a good keyboard".
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I am, it's awesome with Fedora 28. There a couple of things to twiddle, mainly regarding sleep, but after that it's flawless. I can detail it a bit more if you like once I'm not on a phone.
Would love to hear it. I'm mainly concerned about the trackpad, wifi performance and power consumption.
Power consumption - pretty much the same as Windows. I did enable tlp and put `powertop --auto-tune` in the startup.
Trackpad is fine but it suffers from the same issue my XPS 13 (2016) has under Linux - occasionally tap-to-click stops working. A couple of clicks and it comes back but it is annoying.
Wifi performance is awesome, i'll max out my 300mbit internet on it, it's a league above the 'killer wifi' that Dell persist with.
The biggest issue and one that's apparently shared with the new XPS models is that Microsoft decreed their 'connected standby' sleep modes can't coincide with s3 (normal sleep). As Linux doesn't seem to support the new mode you have to patch the initrd line to insert a new ACPI table. It's a pain in the arse but you only need to run it once on each BIOS update. It's detailed here https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Lenovo_ThinkPad_X1_Carb...
Once that's done Fedora 28 is awesome on this, and the keyboard is leagues above the XPS or the latest Macbooks. Highly recommended.
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Am convinced but cannot prove that the new keyboard is causing wrist/hand pain I thought I’d banished 20 years ago.
I do almost all of my keyboarding with kinesis. It cured severe finger pain a few years back. The only time I use the native keyboard for mac or anything else is if i am on the metra or library or customer visit. I highly recommend it.
I want my magsafe charger, i want my displayport and ethernet port, i want my CD drive, i want to be able to replace the battery myself (done it twice), and to swap hard drives (done it four times) and RAM (once) easily, I want physical keys for escape and media buttons.
I have gone so far as to personally take out the motherboard and replace a single tanatalum capacitor with an aluminum-polymer capacitor (requiring me to scrape off some of the soldermask off so i could solder to the ground plane easier since the Al-Poly cap is much larger) because the tantalum one was causing GPU kernel panic crashes. (Big thanks to Louie Rossman for the tutorial video!)
I've brought this thing back from the brink of death many times and i will continue to do so until Apple cleans up their act and makes a true developers laptop again.