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Ask HN: Best Linux Laptop Replacing a Macbook Pro?

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Re: Ask HN: Best Linux Laptop Replacing a Macbook Pro?

#11

Post by AdmiralAsshat »

The Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition is the usual recommendation as far as having the most "Macbook"-like design (e.g. slim, unibody aluminum, but powerful).* ThinkPads generally have pretty solid Linux support, and System76 makes a line of Linux-only laptops, although both of them will be a good bit chunkier than your MBP. Neither are bad laptops if you're willing to trade sleekness for a tad more power or durability. It really depends on what you're looking for.

* This excludes Huawei's "Matebook" line, which is more like a Chinese carbon-copy MBA clone, and doesn't come with Linux as a preinstalled option.

Re: Ask HN: Best Linux Laptop Replacing a Macbook Pro?

#12

Post by bebop »

I just got a Lenovo P1 Gen 2 and so far have been very happy with it. It has two NVMe slots and I think it can go as high as 128gb of RAM, 64 at least. The build quality and keyboard are very nice and it has an nvidia quadro T1000 w/4gb.

My setup is a 9th gen i7, 16 gigs and 256 NVMe, it was ~1600 USD, and I think it was worth the price. My only complaint is that it took over 3 weeks to ship.

Re: Ask HN: Best Linux Laptop Replacing a Macbook Pro?

#13

Post by xgb84j »

I had two Dell (XPS 13 and XPS 15), both had their share of driver issues. The XPS 15 also had severe hardware issues, which support could not help with (sound randomly starting and stopping to work).

Now I use a Lenovo T480s dual-booting Windows 10 Pro and Ubuntu 18.04 and everything just works.

For Linux I recommend getting a Laptop without a dedictated GPU. Regarding Linux distributions, I stopped having issues since I stick to Ubuntu LTS releases.

Re: Ask HN: Best Linux Laptop Replacing a Macbook Pro?

#19

Post by JoshTriplett »

pixelmonkey wrote: post #7

Lenovo X1C is the standard-bearer for a Linux notebook experience that is hassle-free, hardware-wise, and includes a great keyboard, trackpad, screen, battery, all in a slim ultrabook format. I wrote up my experience of a 4th gen model here: https://amontalenti.com/2017/09/01/lenovo-linux If you care about outdoor usage, opt for the matte IPS screen rather than the glossy options. Lenovo sells both types on almost ev…

Complete agreement; I've used the X1 Carbon since the first generation.

One issue, though: the 6th and 7th generations currently use a cell modem (the PCIe Fibocom L850-GL LTE-A) that doesn't work under Linux. The USB version works; the PCIe version has no driver.

Re: Ask HN: Best Linux Laptop Replacing a Macbook Pro?

#20

Post by tony »

bebop wrote: post #12

I just got a Lenovo P1 Gen 2 and so far have been very happy with it. It has two NVMe slots and I think it can go as high as 128gb of RAM, 64 at least. The build quality and keyboard are very nice and it has an nvidia quadro T1000 w/4gb. My setup is a 9th gen i7, 16 gigs and 256 NVMe, it was ~1600 USD, and I think it was worth the price. My only complaint is that it took over 3 weeks to ship.

Echoing this. Lenovo X/T/P series with the big warranty. This gets you quality components that should work well across linux distributions.

If you're doing external monitors that are 3K, 4k, etc it's very difficult to pull off. Gnome 3 with fractional scalings (Ubuntu 19.04, debian experimental gnome 3.32+) make this possible. It doesn't work with NVIDIA's proprietary drivers at the moment.

You can also try to meet things half way by using Windows 10 with WSL 2.

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