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

So to answer your question seriously I would say look at some of the newer laptops that have OLED screens and (if you need it) smaller dedicated GPU. These are going to be super future proof and you can sometimes get last years model very cheap. I do not have a ton of experience with them but personally might get something like the HP Spectre or maybe a Gigabyte or MSI laptop.

What really holds me back though is the damn keyboards on modern laptops - they all suck. The old keyboard on my Thinkpad T420 I love in comparison. There are people that are actually replacing the whole innards (you can even buy them premade and shipped from China) of I believe the Thinkpad X301 or similar with modern CPU, modern screen, etc etc. And on the plus side anyone who sees your laptop at a cafe is going to think its an old POS and not even think about stealing it!

I currently daily-drive a Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Yoga Gen5. 4k touchscreen, 15in, awesome Linux support.

I've tried Fedora and Ubuntu on it, but I use Arch Linux daily on it (EndeavorOS at the moment), and its great for web development.

I think it was ~ $1600 USD when new

Alright, then allow me to explain.

Before, there were a multitude of reasons not to develop in a VM: Poor support for accelerated instructions on laptops; Slow CPUs; limited RAM; slow file-sharing between the host and guest.

The M1 architecture solves most of the issues.

Modern laptops almost universally support accelerated instructions now. This means less overhead, so doing everything entirely in the VM is worth it now. So no more dealing with slow file-sharing.

The speed of the M1 also means you're not limited compared to your desktop. Depending on the benchmark (especially any benchmark relying on CPU cache size), it may be faster on the M1 air than on a 5950X. Even in workloads where the laptop is slower, it is now fast enough.

Running docker containers in a VM on a 16GB *non-M1* machine is untenable. The M1's RAM is not only higher bandwidth and lower latency, but the compression and caching has improved so much that you can fit much more in that same 16GB.

In use-cases where you need more than 16GB, the M1's NVMe disk is so low latency that swap usage is indistinguishable in performance from RAM usage. So the laptop has no memory limit, for practical purposes (though the wear on the disk is increased in this case).

In addition, ARM architectures were a pain to deal with before, so most people emulated x86_64 and assume that you'd still have to do that on the M1. Nowadays, there is no reason not to run an ARM Linux in the VM. Most programs run just fine, and the remaining holdouts are a few Docker containers that haven't been updated. But even those aren't a problem because recent improvements to Docker greatly simplify running x86_64 containers under QEMU.

Combine all of this with the Mac app ecosystem (which has its problems, but is generally OK to use, especially if your other devices come from Apple), improved battery, the return of the good keyboard, and greatly lowered TDP, there really isn't a choice to make anymore.

The remaining reasons not to use it are basically as follows:

1) Compatibility with external devices, or work on embedded controllers

2) Anything requiring significant GPU compute (ML, etc.). But this would likely be done on a desktop rather than a laptop, which wasn't the scope of the question.

3) Disk capacity requirements (though external NVMe over thunderbolt mostly solves this)

4) Extremely multi-threaded work (video editing, etc.) where a desktop CPU outperforms the M1's multi-thread score.

Less pointless now?

I absolutely adore my System76 Darter Pro. System76 is actually great for many different price points since they are extremely customizable. For example, you could do something like opt for a cheaper processor but more storage whereas many manufacturers force you to have more expensive everything (Apple is the worst offender, but all seem to do this to an extent).

Well, if you don't appreciate what Apple is offering, then don't buy one. I was just explaining what people see in it. Judging by the upvotes, I'd say it's fairly representative of why people like them.

> Just don't buy crap that doesn't work with Linux.

See, this is exactly my point. Blame the user... I don't want to have to research what works well. Even if I know it works, it may take quite a while to figure out how to get it to work. It took me two weeks of recompiling kernels to get my T42 to go to sleep, and the trick was "acpi_sleep=s3" as a boot parameter. (Technically, it went to sleep just fine, it just hung in the kernel on wake, which was arguably worse) Judging by other comments sleep is still an issue. That's with one of the major features of a laptop...

(The wifi wasn't a problem per se, it's just that Ubuntu broke the auto-detection at one point. It was working prior, and they've since fixed that, but I've never had that problem on a Mac.)

> why their 13" M1 MBP only works with 1 monitor while their old 13" Intel MBP worked with two

How many people are trying to power two monitors off a 13" MBP? I'm not saying Apple doesn't have issues (I'm using a 2018 MBP that's had the keyboard replaced once, and the letters have dissolved off five keys so far, and I wasn't happy about needing to buy it because I wanted to wait until the keyboard problem was fixed, which it was six months later, but my 2012 MBP stopped displaying pixels thanks to a client project which involved compiling all day, triggering the nVidia heatsink problem), but if you're the kind of person that needs two monitors, cheaping out on the laptop doesn't seem like a great idea. Next you'll be telling me they don't have enough RAM on their 8 GB laptop to run all the programs that would make two monitors useful...

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

Actually, I cannot. My favorite WM is sawfish, which requires some package that is a major pain to compile (or maybe there are too many for me to spend the effort, and the only extant packages are 32-bit, can't remember). The default Ubuntu thing was awful, GNOME too dumbed down, KDE apps crash all the time for me (but maybe I have some setting in the .files I've been copying around for 20 years?) and KDE's aesthetics historically managed to make Windows look polished. No, I explicitly don't want a tiling WM. So I've settled on XFCE, which has about the visual polish of KDE, but at least it's lightweight. And I spend most of the time on the Mac, where the window manager does what I want. (With the exception of sawfish's raising the app under consideration during Alt-Tab, that's a great feature, don't have to look at those icons, just look for the window I want)