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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?

#691

Post by lhl »

jnwatson wrote: post #209
noduerme wrote: post #192

This is probably an unpopular view, but I kind of use laptops as if they were terminals. If you want to spend $2k, I'd invest $1600 of that in a great desktop machine, and spend the other $400 on a cheap chromebook and tablets / keyboards / gizmos to log into it remotely.

I agree, except I haven’t found a ChromeBook I’ve liked. For $900, you can buy an M1 MacBook Air. It is the sexiest dumb terminal I’ve ever used. I had used Linux on a laptop for about 15 years prior. It is a fine 90% solution. The Air is barely the same class of device: no noise, almost instant-on, battery lasts forever.

Modern Macs are fine as terminals I suppose, unless you travel a lot or are on metered Internet. If so, then you have a lot of stuff to turn off. See:

https://gist.github.com/mmillar-bolis/dcfb3d1814fb0532eb3c71...

https://github.com/keithbarrett/Mac/blob/master/DisableMacSe...

https://gist.github.com/b0gdanw/40d000342dd1ba4d892ad0bdf03a...

I haven't used a Mac full-time for years, but the straw that broke the camels back for me was when I was traveling through multiple countries (including in New Zealand and on flights) and I could not get my damn Mac to stop sucking down, well, whatever it was doing. The number of default services running seems to have gotten even worse since then by the looks of these scripts...

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

#692

Post by 300bps »

electroly wrote: post #624
ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's every Ask HN thread, every time I want to ask a question here I give up because I find myself listing the obvious, requirement-breaking answers that I know will come but that I don't want to see. It's not like stack-overflow where often the users are beginners and don't know what they want and it's sometimes helpful to point out XY problems. Here people are technically literate and know what they want yet the re…

IMO it goes beyond Ask HN. If you make a post and you know people are going to make a particular reply, it doesn't matter if you preemptively address that reply right in your post; you're going to get that reply anyway. People skim, they don't read, and they don't think deeply about posts. They're just pattern matching on a couple words and slamming out a reply. The reply is practically locked and loaded before you e…

People are in such a hurry to talk, they don’t listen.

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

#693

Post by goosedragons »

prewett wrote: post #433
rmbyrro wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why Mac seems to attract so fanatic behavior? They seem to want to push everyone to use Mac, like religious fanatics try to push everyone to their "truth". I think this is a result of some marketing tactics Apple employed for decades, and it only pushes me away from this brand.

Macs have a certain set of features which is not even close to being matched by any other laptop, as far as I'm aware. Not everyone values these features, and for them, the Mac is just overpriced. - solid and beautiful chassis, no plastic-y uninspired 2008-Dell design here. - large, beautiful, high-DPI screen looks great and has crisp text. You can seamless rescale the UI to get effectively a 17" resolution or 13", d…

- It's not 2008. Plenty of great looking PCs these days. My Xiaomi Mi Air 12 was IMO a better looking MacBook, clean and free of branding.

- Pretty much every modern Windows trackpad has two finger scrolling that works fine.

- You can also get mice with free scrolling wheels like the Logitech MX Master line that switch between free spinning and ratcheted. Sometimes ratcheted scrolling is better particularly for gaming or if you only want to scroll a small amount.

- Wifi works on my Linux laptops too. Sleep too. Just don't buy crap that doesn't work with Linux.

- Maybe there is an Apple store 2 hours away. Maybe there's one 5 hours away. Or a an hour flight away. Maybe 2 hours is still too far away for you so you're stuck mailing the stupid thing while your friend gets the Dell tech show up at his house.

- Just get the size you want and spend considerably more. Want a 16" laptop? Just spend $1500 more.

- Try explaining to your tech illiterate friend why their 13" M1 MBP only works with 1 monitor while their old 13" Intel MBP worked with two.

- At least you can use your favorite WM on Linux?

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

#694

Post by SxC97 »

rmbyrro wrote: post #326
JabavuAdams wrote: post #200

** "I don't want to use a Mac" ** "I've had these problems with Mac" Reasonable response: Cool, use what works for you. EDIT> Here are some suggestions that match your constraints. Annoying response 1: You should reconsider because Mac works great for me. Annoying response 2: Your problems aren't real problems. Annoying response 3: Let's live debug your problems in this thread to see if they're real problems. Guys. I…

Why Mac seems to attract so fanatic behavior? They seem to want to push everyone to use Mac, like religious fanatics try to push everyone to their "truth". I think this is a result of some marketing tactics Apple employed for decades, and it only pushes me away from this brand.

Have you not noticed the rabid Linux fan base on HN?

It seems like every discussion about Macs or macOS has at least 2-3 comments about how someone had used macOS for years, then got sick of apples (intel) hardware or lack of software customizability and switched to a Linux machine running Debian/Fedora/Ubuntu/Manjaro and they are never looking back (except for commenting on every Mac related post on HN).

The only reason we don’t see many Windows fanatics on here is because the user base is more dev focused here and most people prefer *NIX based machines. If this was a gaming focused forum, you would see a lot more Windows fanaticism.

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

#695

Post by warrenm »

electroly wrote: post #624
ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's every Ask HN thread, every time I want to ask a question here I give up because I find myself listing the obvious, requirement-breaking answers that I know will come but that I don't want to see. It's not like stack-overflow where often the users are beginners and don't know what they want and it's sometimes helpful to point out XY problems. Here people are technically literate and know what they want yet the re…

IMO it goes beyond Ask HN. If you make a post and you know people are going to make a particular reply, it doesn't matter if you preemptively address that reply right in your post; you're going to get that reply anyway. People skim, they don't read, and they don't think deeply about posts. They're just pattern matching on a couple words and slamming out a reply. The reply is practically locked and loaded before you e…

A better Ask HN title would've been "of these 4 Linux-based laptops, what are your experiences"

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

#696

Post by sokoloff »

warrenm wrote: post #695
electroly wrote: post #624

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO it goes beyond Ask HN. If you make a post and you know people are going to make a particular reply, it doesn't matter if you preemptively address that reply right in your post; you're going to get that reply anyway. People skim, they don't read, and they don't think deeply about posts. They're just pattern matching on a couple words and slamming out a reply. The reply is practically locked and loaded before you e…

A better Ask HN title would've been "of these 4 Linux-based laptops, what are your experiences"

The current title gets way more eyeballs and engagement. I say that only one-quarter jokingly.

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

#698

Post by lhl »

Kon-Peki wrote: post #407
jll29 wrote: post #24

Lenovo ThinkPad X1 or X1 Nano are my favorites. Small, light, but powerful. Before I used the ThinkPad X230 and DELL Latitude 7270, each for many years and bought second hand. The DELL was particularly sturdy. All of these are Ubuntu LTS friendly boxes. Avoid Microsoft Surface Laptops, which require patches to run Linux, Microsoft doesn't offer an Image ready to burn on a stick. And although I'm writing this on an M1…

> Avoid Microsoft Surface Laptops, which require patches to run Linux, Microsoft doesn't offer an Image ready to burn on a stick. Is this indeed the case, and likely to continue for the foreseeable future? If so, that is really disappointing. I came in to recommend the Surface Laptop 4. You get the choice of an AMD or Intel processor, excellent build quality, and a 200dpi 3:2 touchscreen. And if you choose the "busin…

You can use this to track Linux compatibility on Surface Laptops: https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface/wiki/Supporte...

If a 3:2 screen is something you really want, I think getting a Framework is a better option, but if you can settle for 16:10, you'll have a lot more options now/in the near future.

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

#699

Post by yumraj »

Freaken wrote: post #276

I can vouch for the Framework. It doesn't feel beta at all. I'm running Xubuntu 21.10 on it an it rocks. Someone created a repo with salt scripts which works all the kinks of the laptop under Ubuntu. The only thing I needed it for was to fix the touchpad issue after resume from sleep (it would be at max acceleration) and to enable hibernate (just note that you must disable secure boot first). https://github.com/light…

My current problem with framework is the small screen size. As someone who doesn't use an external monitor, the 13.5" screen is smaller than I'd like.

Hopefully they'll launch a 15"-16" variant in the near future.

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

#700

Post by dayvid »

rmbyrro wrote: post #326
JabavuAdams wrote: post #200

** "I don't want to use a Mac" ** "I've had these problems with Mac" Reasonable response: Cool, use what works for you. EDIT> Here are some suggestions that match your constraints. Annoying response 1: You should reconsider because Mac works great for me. Annoying response 2: Your problems aren't real problems. Annoying response 3: Let's live debug your problems in this thread to see if they're real problems. Guys. I…

Why Mac seems to attract so fanatic behavior? They seem to want to push everyone to use Mac, like religious fanatics try to push everyone to their "truth". I think this is a result of some marketing tactics Apple employed for decades, and it only pushes me away from this brand.

Mac hardware just works.

PCs are usually cheaper and can pull better benchmark numbers, but most Windows laptops have weird little issues and quirks that add up. I find myself a lot more productive on a Mac than a Windows laptop, which more than makes up for any price difference. I can add hacks to make Windows work, but even those aren't as intuitive as Mac productivity software.

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