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Ask HN: Is there a developer laptop that does not suck and is not a Mac in 2022?

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Re: Ask HN: Is there a developer laptop that does not suck and is not a Mac in 2022?

#61

Post by jraph »

kodah wrote: post #54

I run a Lenovo X1 Carbon that I've yet to send to the grave. It also works exceedingly well if you run Linux that also happens to supports firmware updates.

I have both a Lenovo X1 Carbon Gen 9 and an HP EliteBook 840 G6 running Linux, I'm very happy with both machines. The HP has a better management of fn keys, seems to lack support for > 4K 30 Hz on its HDMI port with my screen (both that might be fixed on newest generations), the X1 has a better trackpoint handling. Both have fantastic battery life (around 10h) and are quiet. The X1 tends to spin the fan earlier than the HP, if it's an issue, setting the energy profile on "power save" in the KDE battery widget fixes it. Of course it makes the computer slower but it's still quite fast (the CPU is a Core i7-1165G7)

Make sure you avoid hardware that have issues with the camera on Linux, it's a shame we are back to have to check for this stuff.

Re: Ask HN: Is there a developer laptop that does not suck and is not a Mac in 2022?

#64

Post by captainmuon »

oxff wrote: post #58

Does Mac have anything like WSL or are you stuck using Virtualbox or Docker?

Mac is Unix under the hood, so you can do a lot of stuff natively. I do Python development and can do most things 1:1 the same on Mac and deploy on Linux. But if you use a compiled language there is more friction of course.

Re: Ask HN: Is there a developer laptop that does not suck and is not a Mac in 2022?

#65

Post by throwawaydell »

I still use 12year old Dell laptop. Runs Ubuntu 20.04 smoothly.

I have ES, MySQL, firefox with 20tabs, vscode and all running at the same time and still have half cores and memory free.

Android studio is the only thing I hate to run on this machine.

Re: Ask HN: Is there a developer laptop that does not suck and is not a Mac in 2022?

#66

Post by 2muchcoffeeman »

What country is this?

People are suggesting Frame Work laptops but if you don’t have official Apple support, it’s even less likely Frame Work ships to this country and if you managed to get one you’d have no support.

I imagine you need to go the Dell XPS or Lenovo route.

Re: Ask HN: Is there a developer laptop that does not suck and is not a Mac in 2022?

#68

Post by oakesm9 »

oxff wrote: post #58

Does Mac have anything like WSL or are you stuck using Virtualbox or Docker?

A Mac is unix-like on its own so a lot of Linux tools work directly on MacOS without the need for anything like WSL. If you want an actual Linux environment though, then yes you need to use Virtualbox or Docker.

Re: Ask HN: Is there a developer laptop that does not suck and is not a Mac in 2022?

#70

Post by Lutger »

I absolutely love my Framework laptop for dev. I feel the software support is also quite good, at least for Fedora which is explicitly supported. I got the DIY edition and put everything together, including installing Fedora, in under 1 hour. And I'm a really slow guy, haven't build a computer in 10 years - its too easy with framework.

This laptop is really build to be repairable and modular and it does not suck at all. I think it will last a long time.

The ability to choose your own edition also means I got a reasonably affordable laptop with loads of RAM, which I find is quite useful for development.

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