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Ask HN: What’s a good laptop for software development at around $2k?

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Re: Ask HN: What’s a good laptop for software development at around $2k?

#81

Post by kuschku »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #57

serious question: what is the practical difference between MacOS and Linux? Do you have a habit of modifying your wifi drivers and recompiling the source? I am big on open source but have never felt my life was improved chasing dependencies vs just brew install ... I have never had a satisfactory battery + sleep/standby experience on a linux machine, vs a Mac I can leave unplugged for weeks and it wakes back up where…

I like being able to replace individual parts of my laptop with newer, better hardware without having to throw out the whole device. I like that this new hardware just works, instead of the OS vendor only supporting a handful of approved internal Wi-Fi modules.

It’s awesome that I can build custom PAM modules and disk encryption unlocking solutions to enforce that both a password and a YubiKey need to be present to unlock the disk. I love being able to configure my display manager to discard the decryption keys for my user pool when I log out to get the same kind of security that I’d have on a phone.

Being able to modify soft- and hardware allows you to add features that other OS vendors don’t yet support, or retrofit new features and functionality onto old hardware to make it usable far beyond its planned EOL.

Re: Ask HN: What’s a good laptop for software development at around $2k?

#83

Post by teva »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #57

serious question: what is the practical difference between MacOS and Linux? Do you have a habit of modifying your wifi drivers and recompiling the source? I am big on open source but have never felt my life was improved chasing dependencies vs just brew install ... I have never had a satisfactory battery + sleep/standby experience on a linux machine, vs a Mac I can leave unplugged for weeks and it wakes back up where…

Docker is very slow on MacOS

Re: Ask HN: What’s a good laptop for software development at around $2k?

#84

Post by jokethrowaway »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #57

serious question: what is the practical difference between MacOS and Linux? Do you have a habit of modifying your wifi drivers and recompiling the source? I am big on open source but have never felt my life was improved chasing dependencies vs just brew install ... I have never had a satisfactory battery + sleep/standby experience on a linux machine, vs a Mac I can leave unplugged for weeks and it wakes back up where…

The UI is atrocious on Mac OS X or on Windows.

Out of the box, Linux UI is a bit better - but it's easy to make it excellent and make it fit like a glove. Tiling or partially tiling managers outside of Linux are terrible.

Whether you like a default full fledged desktop experience with Plasma or you go with a super tuned sway, you can really get what you want out of your machine.

The UI is the main reason I try to use Linux as much as I can but there are tons of other advantages. Docker works natively and fast, developing anything (but iOS apps) is a smooth experience. Package managers are 20 years ahead brew or chocolate on Windows.

If you use Arch you get an even better package manager experience compared to other distro: you get bleeding edge packages + AUR, a user contributed repository of scripts to build and install custom packages.

If you use something like NixOS you get to define your system with a configuration file and you can truly bootstrap and switch between different systems with a CLI command.

Re: Ask HN: What’s a good laptop for software development at around $2k?

#85

Post by cehrlich »

adhesive_wombat wrote: post #6

Second hand ThinkPad T series gets a lot of bang for the buck (maybe not as good as they used to be, but still good, repairable, generally upgradable and very available as ex-enterprise machines). Good matte displays, good hinges and great keyboards. Don't sweat the battery, they're removable, upgradeable to larger ones if you have to go a longer time on a charge and easy to replace. For the change left over from $20…

Absolutely. IMO the best current ThinkPad in terms of performance per dollar is the T480 (Quad Core Intel 8th gen). You can find them shockingly cheap if you're patient. Like only 50% more than the T420, which has an ancient Dual Core.

Re: Ask HN: What’s a good laptop for software development at around $2k?

#86

Post by resonious »

OJFord wrote: post #47

> I looked into the Framework laptops and so far it looks like they are still a bit beta. I'm not sure that's fair, (and it's pedantically wrong - they're in production - but I know what you mean) the hardware is the nicest I've seen besides Macbooks (I agree with you about macOS, but I do like the hardware, keen for Asahi one day but that is very much beta ( alpha actually I think)) and Linux is Linux? It works fine…

I use a Framework and it's been fantastic. Even the fingerprint works "out of the box" (in quotes because in Arch Linux nothing is really out of the box... I just had to install the right package). The only particularly disappointing thing is that the battery drains mega fast while suspended. This is something I might be able to tinker away, of course. And for what it's worth, non-functional suspend is basically par for the course for every Windows laptop I've ever owned.

Also, I get the feeling that the Framework isn't your typical first product. It's built to be upgradable, so unless you find something fundamentally off-putting about the shape of the board, I'm not sure if you get much by waiting for the next generation. If they release a slimmer case, better keyboard, touch screen, or whatever, then you should be able to retrofit the new thing onto an old machine. Of course, the product is still young. Time will tell if this actually pans out.

Re: Ask HN: What’s a good laptop for software development at around $2k?

#89

Post by silon42 »

martinald wrote: post #28
Casteil wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely not mature enough for a daily driver. It's an alpha, and there are significant things that don't work yet including HDMI, displayport, thunderbolt, GPU acceleration, video acceleration, and sleep/deep idle. https://asahilinux.org/2022/03/asahi-linux-alpha-release/

I've rarely seen a Linux laptop with solid display out, GPU acceleration and sleep/wake ever though...

I'm happy with my T480 (has NVidia, but I disabled it -- it did mostly work with open source drivers, just warmish)... USB-C DP, PD works.

The only issue I have is that original Docking station sometimes fails to switch audio outputs (Ubuntu LTS).

Re: Ask HN: What’s a good laptop for software development at around $2k?

#90

Post by inter_netuser »

flowerbreeze wrote: post #53

I use a slimbook with Manjaro/i3, and it's fast. Far more performant than Macbook Pro 2017 13-inch 16GB with iOS I have to use at work (a bit older hardware to be fair) and 1/2 in price. No freezing, can run PyCharm, VSCode and be on a video call with screensharing + run a pacman install at the same time and I've not been able to get it to slow down even a bit. Meanwhile Mac crawls to a halt with Google Meet or Slack…

How good is the keyboard?
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