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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?

#391

Post by weberer »

pb7 wrote: post #325
SpacePortKnight wrote: post #144

I've seen your post as a comment before. For India, I recommend buying Dell / Lenovo if you really want on-site repairs for cheap, otherwise I recommend Asus. I recently bought Asus Zenbook 14 Oled (12th gen) over M1 MacBook Air and I absolutely love it. It has 75Wh battery, excellent speakers and with a nice 90Hz 14inch display. However, I can't use Fedora on it since sound over speaker doesn't work yet. Dell's Insp…

It’s completely unreasonable to not be able to play audio through your built in speakers in 2022 (or even 2002). The things people will justify to keep using Linux is insane.

Read that comment again, but slowly this time.

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

#392

Post by APhoenixRises »

sofixa wrote: post #156
ur-whale wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For 2022 I decided to buy a "gaming" laptop and switch to 100% Linux. I researched this option before opting for an LG gram. I might research it again soon. Would you care to share exactly what gaming laptop you picked?

Not OP, but I've heard great things about the Asus ROG Zephyrus line, and that's what I'll probably get when i refresh my current Asus laptop which id approaching 8 years.

I had a Zephyrus G15 (2021) which ran great, but the screen brightness wasn't great. When I heard this year's G14 had a brighter display and an AMD CPU and GPU, I dove in and installed Fedora. Other than standby, everything just worked.

The thing I will ding Asus about is serviceability. It's easy enough to remove the screws to take the bottom panel off, but there was always one screw for NVME/Wifi that had so much loctite that I ended up needing a special pair of plyers to remove.

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

#393

Post by Biganon »

eastbound wrote: post #349
NorwegianDude wrote: post #174

You don't say where you are located, but unless you are in one of the few places where Dell doesn't offer on-site next business day support then XPS 13 is a great laptop. Their support is amazing: "We're not sure what is causing it, but we'll send someone to replace the whole motherboard tomorrow." "OH, your currently halfway across the world on a island? No problem, we'll be there tomorrow" I really don't understand…

> then XPS 13 is a great laptop. No, clearly not. Apart from the overheating the first experience you’ll have is opening it: You pull the screen upwards, but the hinge is too strong, so the bottom comes with the screen, and then since the handle is slippery you lose the screen and the whole block slams on the desk. That’s on paar with the DELL experience. Pretty much everything is wrong about it.

Every single laptop does this, except bulky Lenovos. Is it really too hard to use both hands? How many times a day do you open your laptop anyway? Let alone with one hand unavailable?

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

#394

Post by zivkovicp »

aerique wrote: post #198
zivkovicp wrote: post #137

Please excuse the long-winded answer... I have also given up on Apple, but mostly because I can't see the value in it anymore, otherwise my experience with them has been satisfactory (Intel CPU models). For the past few years I used a Microsoft Surface Pro because it seemed to have good build quality and high screen resolution, but despite this I have had to replace it as part of a recall due to a graphics hardware i…

Due to Lenovo shortages I could pick an MSI gaming laptop (GS66 Stealth) to replace my broken work laptop. It's awesome. Happily been running Guix on it for the past six months. (As expected, since it is Linux on an unsupported machine, I had to put in some time to get it running smoothly but the person after me does not have to do that anymore.)

I bought an HP Victus, mostly because I came across a great deal and it has GeForce RTX 3070 graphics.

I'm running Pop! OS linux and it worked out of the box, no special setup necessary. So far I'm happy with it and starting to ask myself why I didn't do this earlier. :)

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

#395

Post by nirimda »

pb7 wrote: post #325
SpacePortKnight wrote: post #144

I've seen your post as a comment before. For India, I recommend buying Dell / Lenovo if you really want on-site repairs for cheap, otherwise I recommend Asus. I recently bought Asus Zenbook 14 Oled (12th gen) over M1 MacBook Air and I absolutely love it. It has 75Wh battery, excellent speakers and with a nice 90Hz 14inch display. However, I can't use Fedora on it since sound over speaker doesn't work yet. Dell's Insp…

It’s completely unreasonable to not be able to play audio through your built in speakers in 2022 (or even 2002). The things people will justify to keep using Linux is insane.

It's not a matter of what year it is. It isn't Linux's fault, it's a consequences of split responsibilities. On a laptop, Linux is essentially an aftermarket addon -- the product has to be released before it can be adapted.

And if Linux is a viable choice, then there really isn't a viable alternative to Linux. On the one hand, Mac OS is probably already ruled out due to some property of Apple and Windows is probably ruled out because it is too excentric to make for a smooth development platform. On the other hand, a lot of people who would prefer to use FreeBSD use Linux on their laptop as a pragmatic compromise (others use MacOS - this is one case where Linux and Apple are probably both legitimately in contention).

And so people just have to live with the fact that, when you buy a new laptop, it might be better after six months than it was on the day you got it. This isn't actually that big a deal. Most people are capable of tolerating disappointment and incomplete satisfaction, and it's usually considered as sign of emotional maturity not insanity.

If you don't like that, it's a matter of different priorities, not insanity.

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

#396

Post by cruano »

neogodless wrote: post #351
jmyeet wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The M1/M2 Macbooks are a total game-changer. You made your switch in the Intel era. I certainly get that because it was the dark days of the pointless Touch Bar and the awful butterfly keyboard. But now an M2 Macbook Air for $1500-2000 (depending on options) is hard to beat. The only complaint seems to be in heat distribution. Some people use a cheap heat spreader on their desk. Apple definitely chose a stylish packa…

The thread is about having terrible support from Apple, and the comment you replied to was about getting away from lock-in, but you reply that the more efficient Apple Silicon is a "game-changer." It doesn't change any of the above deal breakers, so your comment comes off as tone deaf.

> the comment you replied to was about getting away from lock-in

The comment was about them giving up on Apple because "I can't see the value in it anymore", and he pointed out how the value proposition changed with the non-intel macs

Exactly which deal breakers do you mean? it literally says "otherwise my experience with them has been satisfactory" ?

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

#397

Post by cesarb »

chaosbolt wrote: post #99
samuell wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TIL one can collapse HN threads. With all the clear labels on HN, perhaps a [collapse] link would have been clearer.

>Account created in 2013 Are you joking?

> Account created in 2013

Which means that, when the parent poster started using this site, these Javascript-only thread collapsing buttons didn't exist (I took a quick look at archive.org to confirm). Since these buttons are so subtle, it is plausible that the parent poster didn't notice when they appeared.

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

#398

Post by kitsunesoba »

sofixa wrote: post #156
ur-whale wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For 2022 I decided to buy a "gaming" laptop and switch to 100% Linux. I researched this option before opting for an LG gram. I might research it again soon. Would you care to share exactly what gaming laptop you picked?

Not OP, but I've heard great things about the Asus ROG Zephyrus line, and that's what I'll probably get when i refresh my current Asus laptop which id approaching 8 years.

The problem I ran into with a Zephyrus G15 that I owned for a short bit is that it was inanely fussy about GPU drivers. I had the 5900HS/3080 version, and under Windows if I we’re running anything other than the OEM Nvidia drivers, I’d lose 20% GPU performance without a corresponding reduction in heat. Didn’t matter if the drivers came from Nvidia or Windows Update, same problem.

What made it worse is that locking the Nvidia drivers to a specific version is not straightforward — if you only lock the main driver with Windows policy manager, Windows Update will update other parts of the Nvidia driver and leave you with drivers that are partially broken.

I didn’t try Linux since this machine was intended mostly for gaming.

I ended up returning it at the end of its return window, because I don’t have time for a machine that won’t run properly without absurdly specific drivers. Built a gaming tower with the money instead, which has not only been better behaved but doesn’t sound like I’m cooking it alive when I’m running games on it like the G15 did.

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

#399

Post by what-imright »

weberer wrote: post #192
begueradj wrote: post #190

Quoted post unavailable.

>Wow ! It took you 10 years of suffering? This sounds suspicious to me. You'd be amazed by the amount of people still using Windows in 2022, and cursing it every single day while doing so.

Windows is a terrible OS. I don't even consider it an operating system, rather just malware that imitates macOS.

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

#400

Post by zivkovicp »

benjaminwootton wrote: post #330
zivkovicp wrote: post #137

Please excuse the long-winded answer... I have also given up on Apple, but mostly because I can't see the value in it anymore, otherwise my experience with them has been satisfactory (Intel CPU models). For the past few years I used a Microsoft Surface Pro because it seemed to have good build quality and high screen resolution, but despite this I have had to replace it as part of a recall due to a graphics hardware i…

I am the same with regards to value. Even though I can stretch to it, the prices for MacBooks in the UK are off the charts. Tempted to look elsewhere on principle next time.

That's really what did it for me, I like Apple products and think they are great quality, but I don't think they are good enough to justify the price; and for me, the "status" that comes with it (if any) is worthless.
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