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Dell Announces A Linux Laptop Designed For Developers

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Re: Dell Announces A Linux Laptop Designed For Developers

#61

Post by jiggy2011 »

huggyface wrote: post #48
pkmays wrote: post #15

I'm surprised they think developers would be interested in this. Having worked with Dell in IT, you couldn't pay me to use anything they put their name on. Dell have a bad reputation in both hardware and peopleware, and it's well deserved.

Dell servers are excellent . They are beautifully engineered, sacrifice nothing, and are extremely well supported. Such "Dell sucks" anecdotes are generally of the "my company bought 400 of the cheapest desktops that Dell manufacturers, of which a couple presented troubles. Therefore Dell sucks." variety.

Very true, you tend to often hear the same sort of thing from recent Mac converts too.

People who will argue that all PCs suck because their old $300 netbook compares unfavorably with their new $1000 Macbook Air.

Re: Dell Announces A Linux Laptop Designed For Developers

#62

Post by pm90 »

dman wrote: post #40

I think this thread is a great example of why developers are notoriously tough customers (myself included)

Actually, the things that we are asking for are not that difficult for a hardware vendor to implement. Besides, we usually tend to buy the higher end models rather than the entry level ones, so the profit margins are higher for each developer

Re: Dell Announces A Linux Laptop Designed For Developers

#63

Post by kamechan »

sophacles wrote: post #17
ntkachov wrote: post #6

How about a laptop with a better key board, slim figure, larger special character keys and more feedback for keys? Then shove a great processor, a mouse pad that's not accidentally click able while typing, and a high resolution screen. That's a developer laptop. Ill install my own software, Thank you very much.

On top of that, I will never consider switching away from my Macbook until the following things are true: * battery will last several hours (macbook still at 4+ hrs on full charge and it is 1.5 yrs old) * very good (open) acpi support - if I can't 100% trust closing and opening to just suspend and resume correctly, I won't use it for anything other than toy purposes. (and open because I will be using my own kernel, o…

Thinkpad already has both problems solved. Getting 12-14 hours on my thinkpad T420 with a 9 cell and a power script written to make all the items found "bad" by powertop2 turn to "good". Switched from x220 (which was getting roughly the same battery life) because its 1366x768 screen wasn't quite enough for on-the-go work.

As for the lid opening and closing doing what it's supposed to, it does. Coincidentally, the ACPI also works flawlessly on my wife's 5 year old Japanese Toshiba laptop running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

Edit: here's a link to a thread in which I described the steps I took to get great battery life out of my thinkpad T420. May need tweaking for different thinkpad models, but I used it on my x220 as well with only minimal changes:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3562267

Re: Dell Announces A Linux Laptop Designed For Developers

#64

Post by Karunamon »

fierarul wrote: post #39

>Project Sputnik, a product of Dell’s new internal incubation fund, features not just full hardware support for Ubuntu on the XPS13, but a notion of “profiles” for developers They could have stopped at "full hardware support for Ubuntu". Nobody cares about their crapware. Just two weeks ago I bought an HP ProBook for a colleague for the sole reason of being Linux certified. It came with a Suse license but he's using…

Not sure if I'd classify it as crapware.. they're going to be legitimate and useful tools, not "CLICK HERE TO INSTALL OFFICE 2012!!"

Re: Dell Announces A Linux Laptop Designed For Developers

#65

Post by glogla »

This is kind of sad. XPS 13 is not exactly good -- the display resolution is terrible, there's no ethernet port, and for ultrabook it is not very thin, feels real cheap in hands, and the keyboard is not very good. It's almost like someone tool everything bad from the ultrabook trend and nothing good from it.

And when people won't care because the hardware is not worth it (especially when it's not that much cheaper than MBA), it will be interpreted as "no one wants linux".

Re: Dell Announces A Linux Laptop Designed For Developers

#66

Post by oemera »

huggyface wrote: post #48
pkmays wrote: post #15

I'm surprised they think developers would be interested in this. Having worked with Dell in IT, you couldn't pay me to use anything they put their name on. Dell have a bad reputation in both hardware and peopleware, and it's well deserved.

Dell servers are excellent . They are beautifully engineered, sacrifice nothing, and are extremely well supported. Such "Dell sucks" anecdotes are generally of the "my company bought 400 of the cheapest desktops that Dell manufacturers, of which a couple presented troubles. Therefore Dell sucks." variety.

I own nothing from Dell beside my 23" Ultra Sharp monitor and I will tell you that I will never ever buy anything from Dell again.

The monitor is really awesome at its price point and I don't want to miss it but the service Dell is doing is the worst I have ever seen.

Let me tell you why. When I bought the monitor I was really happy to get a 3 year ultra warranty service from Dell for free. So the monitor gets shipped and I plug into my MacBook Air. The monitor works but the colors are really bad like a 16 bit color scheme. I call the Dell "ultra service" and tell them just what happened. After changing three different employees the guy on the other hand asks me what happens and tell him that the screen looks broken when I plug it into my MacBook and his answer is "oh we don't Mac's cause Apple doesn't conform standard graphical ports. I really don't know about Mac's so I can't help you. Don't you have a "normal PC" to plug it in?". At this point it was clear to me that I would never buy something again from Dell!

It turned out that the monitor was broken and my next monitor worked just fine with my MacBook. the monitor was not replaced by Dell but by the shop I bought from cause they swear that the fault was my Mac.

Next time I will pay the extra money and buy something from Apple again. They don't do shit like that...

Re: Dell Announces A Linux Laptop Designed For Developers

#67

Post by diminish »

glogla wrote: post #65

This is kind of sad. XPS 13 is not exactly good -- the display resolution is terrible, there's no ethernet port, and for ultrabook it is not very thin, feels real cheap in hands, and the keyboard is not very good. It's almost like someone tool everything bad from the ultrabook trend and nothing good from it. And when people won't care because the hardware is not worth it (especially when it's not that much cheaper th…

i agree, a developer ultrabook must be more modular, and more equipped.

Re: Dell Announces A Linux Laptop Designed For Developers

#68

Post by blhack »

pkmays wrote: post #15

I'm surprised they think developers would be interested in this. Having worked with Dell in IT, you couldn't pay me to use anything they put their name on. Dell have a bad reputation in both hardware and peopleware, and it's well deserved.

uhh...peopleware?

Every single interaction save for one I've had with dell has been an absolute joy. Our rep remembers me by voice, and even when I've had servers with expired support, I've had techs following up with me to make sure issues have been resolved.

I don't know who you've been dealing with, but Dell has been a complete dream to deal with for me; more companies should be like them.

Re: Dell Announces A Linux Laptop Designed For Developers

#69

Post by pm90 »

technomancy wrote: post #55
libria wrote: post #33

I fully expect it to be $140 cheaper than a comparable machine running Windows 7 Pro.

Can't tell whether this is sarcastic or not, but if you think Dell pays full price for Windows licenses you are in for a surprise.

I don't know the backstory on this....does Dell pay much less than the full price? How much less?

Re: Dell Announces A Linux Laptop Designed For Developers

#70

Post by blhack »

amackera wrote: post #30
astrodust wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment would be meaningful if it even contained a hint of an anecdote. "Well deserved" how, exactly?

I've owned 3 Dell laptops in the past 2 years. First one's screen broke. Second one's graphics card was faulty. Third one's sound was messed up, sent the PC in for repairs. Dell technicians dropped it on the ground, blamed me for doing it, then refused to further support it. I don't care one way or the other if anyone else buys Dell; but there's no chance in hell that I will ever again.

Okay, anecdotes with anecdotes. The dell laptops that I've had (from the latitude series. That ugly gray one) have been sturdier than most bricks. I've dropped them on my wood floor, they've been tossed around in my backpack, had things spilled on them, and been abused in every way you can imagine.

They still keep chugging.

*When I'm talking about multiple laptops, I'm talking about multiple laptops within my company. Not my personal laptop [although I have had one]

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