I'm having a good experience with the Dell G15 (Core i7, 32gb of ram, NVIDIA GTX3060) on Ubuntu 20.04. Everything works (besides, ofc, what has never ever worked ever in Linux: suspend) and it's a very performant machine.
Ask HN: Is there a developer laptop that does not suck and is not a Mac in 2022?
31–40 of 538 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is there a developer laptop that does not suck and is not a Mac in 2022?
#32The three aspects to consider when buying a laptop:
Weight, Performance and Price.
Laptops that are cheaper and lighter weighted usually have a lower performance.
Laptops that have higher performance and lower price usually are heavy weighted.
Laptops that have higher performance and lighter weight are usually pricey.
You have to sacrifice one of the three.
I’d personally go for the Dell Precision 5520.
Cheap, high performance, moderate weighted.
P.S. (usually) heavier laptops are more upgradable and repairable so thats why I chose to sacrifice the weight for the other two…
Re: Ask HN: Is there a developer laptop that does not suck and is not a Mac in 2022?
#33I think the Dell XPS line is fine.
Had some issues on recent Ubuntu with my XPS 17, but it runs wonderfully on Fedora.
Re: Ask HN: Is there a developer laptop that does not suck and is not a Mac in 2022?
#34Frame work laptop
I'll second this recommendation, as I've found it very pleasant to use as a developer laptop.
Re: Ask HN: Is there a developer laptop that does not suck and is not a Mac in 2022?
#35I'd look at the Xeon Lenovo machines (I think it was P series I was window shopping), Asus for design/gaming (their dual screen models are so nice in person, I found them to be slimmer than I expected), and Dell for something really solid/mass produced.
Essentially... Xeon Lenovo for "ultra enterprise", Asus for speed/looks/features, Dell for a "good laptop".
Re: Ask HN: Is there a developer laptop that does not suck and is not a Mac in 2022?
#36regardless of what you buy, I have a 1tb Linux/Ubuntu drive attached to my laptop through USB -c I dual boot into for certain projects. great for gaming/personal on windows and then doing work on the Linux drive. I share files via cloud services if needed and it works seemlessly
That is really interesting. Have you noticed a performance penalty at all? E.g. with large concurrent IO like compiling, or other dev use cases?
eSATA never seemed to take off for that application, and on paper usb-c should be pretty good!
Re: Ask HN: Is there a developer laptop that does not suck and is not a Mac in 2022?
#37I will second the others who have recommended Lenovo: I have a Legion 5 I originally bought for gaming but the keyboard is so good I find myself using it for nearly all my development. Additionally, the Dell Precision line (the business workstation-replacement line) is exceptional for development, but those can be as expensive as equivalent MacBooks. Stay away from Dell's pure consumer line: the build quality is abso…
Any idea if Lenovo has fixed the coil whine issues on X1 Carbon's?
The constant noise makes it really difficult to use these machines for any kind of focused work.
Re: Ask HN: Is there a developer laptop that does not suck and is not a Mac in 2022?
#38system76 dot com
I have one for home for 4 years and a new one for work. I like them a lot. I had one issue upgrading the OS after installing steam, but they have good support.
I really like a Matt screen and these have them. They’re rebranded Clevo machines but I found them to be decent quality. I had to replace a fan In the older one which I was able to do (we have a husky…..). They’re expandable and fast enough. Depending on the model some have a descrete gpu.
Re: Ask HN: Is there a developer laptop that does not suck and is not a Mac in 2022?
#39I’ve owned approximately 8 apple products with essentially zero issues in the past decade sans some slight Bluetooth connection issues with my AirPods Pro. Apple makes the best laptops at the moment and it’s really not close. I’d take my chances if I were you.
Re: Ask HN: Is there a developer laptop that does not suck and is not a Mac in 2022?
#40I had an xps 13 9300 and struggled with battery life on any Linux distro ( tried fedora, Ubuntu, pop, elementary, solus, Arch, void ) and I'm not a beginner or anything. Even with combinations of tlp, powertop, gnome power profiles, kernel shit to make it run lower speed.
Framework is really nice from a hardware perspective, but the display res is wonky with scaling, 100% is small and 200% is big, which puts you in the no no zone on most display servers which employ fractional scaling. MacOS is the only I've ever used that doesn't completely butcher oddball scales. Battery life I've observed to be around 4 hours of light usage on stock fedora. (11th gen main board)
I personally run a new MacBook Pro M1 running any Linux I want in Lima or parallels, depending on GUI needs. Damn thing is god tier on battery, outlasts any other laptop I've ever owned by a factor of 3 at least.