71–80 of 88 posts
I haven't used Xmonad myself but with all the talking why hasn't someone ported it to OS X (Cocoa) yet?
FWIW, you can easily compile and run it on OSX, under X. But of course it can't reach out and control any of the native applications.
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The nVidia/ATI drivers on Linux aren't nearly as good, either. In what way?
First of all, they are closed. Second, they do all sorts of stupid non-standard stuff, so you can't use KMS, a framebuffer or xrandr[1]. The GUI application for managing monitors sucks balls and isn't scriptable. I happen to use some older monitors, and that gives me all sorts of pains, too. To be somewhat fair, it used to be even worse. But it's still nowhere near decent, and will never be unless they open the specs…
Personally, I think nVidia's drivers are fine, modulo the ideology issues. They perform extremely well and work. Intel's drivers also work well, though the performance is not as good. (And video tends to tear due to some vblank syncing bug that's unfixable for some reason.)
I also agree that xrandr support is important for a laptop, because you are often plugging and unplugging an external monitor. xrandr --output VGA1 --left-of LVDS1 is much easier than dealing with some GUI. xrandr seems to work on my nVidia desktop, however.
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How? Thinkpads are Intel reference designs with a plastic black case, and Macbooks are Intel reference designs with an aluminium case.
Are you kidding? Have you seen a macbook logic board?
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Are you kidding? Have you seen a macbook logic board?
No, because the cases are sealed with unobtanium screws. I'm sure the layout is very clever, but the fact of the matter is that they use the same hardware as everyone else. There's not much value they can add there.
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I've been watching Thinkpads very closely. I used to own X40 until it broke and before 600x (which never broke, but it's kind of old now). What model is preferable nowadays? There are not lots of shops to test them at least in Berlin. I want 13" and lightweight, but still powerful enough laptop. Lots of ram, i7 CPU and a SSD disk. The most important thing is an excellent keyboard and touchpad. I heard Lenovo is not u…
ThinkPad X1 Carbon (which is their answer to the MacBook Air - similar size to the 13", but 14" with more horizontal resolution), or the 12.5" X230, which is a bit heavier, but has 60WHr+ battery options and IPS display (both missing from the MacBook Air).
I haven't used XMonad but I've been a heavy ion3 user for many years. Last I checked none of the available bolt-ons (including Sizeup which the author proposes) would come anywhere near a true tiling WM. The only candidate that would even try to automatically tile windows was TylerWM - but that was buggy as hell. All the others only act on keyboard-shortcuts, which largely defeats the purpose. I'd happily pay $200+ f…
He did seem to imply that his usage of Xmonad was 1 app per workspace, which isn't really 'tiling' per se.
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I've been watching Thinkpads very closely. I used to own X40 until it broke and before 600x (which never broke, but it's kind of old now). What model is preferable nowadays? There are not lots of shops to test them at least in Berlin. I want 13" and lightweight, but still powerful enough laptop. Lots of ram, i7 CPU and a SSD disk. The most important thing is an excellent keyboard and touchpad. I heard Lenovo is not u…
Don't take the t series. Lenovo basically transformed this to pure trash. The only thinkpad series that lives up to ibms quality is the x series. Truthfully I wouldn't by thinkpads anymore. The only notebook you can by nowadays is the MBA.
So, no, the current t520 is not as well engineered as those old ones, but it's still better than the vast majority of its peers. And you get some great deals on refurbs and open boxes on outlet.lenovo.com.
Current MBA is only 4gb ram. That's a deal breaker for me.