I got a Dell XPS for work a couple years ago on someone's recommendation... one of my worst-ever decisions. The touchpad sucks and routinely breaks requiring restarts, constantly having driver issues (and you have to deal with the capital-N Nightmare that is SupportAssist for drivers), graphics card is busted and makes the display driver crash once a month. Power states are completely broken. Laptop will randomly tur…
Power states are completely broken. Laptop will randomly turn on when it's in my bag and rev up to ten thousand degrees. If it was in sleep - Dell themselves recommend completely switching off a laptop before putting it inside a backpack: https://www.dell.com/community/en/conversations/xps/faq-mode... For somebody who has used MacBooks the last 18 years, this is insane.
The laptops waking up in the backpack until the thermal security triggers or the battery is empty is a Microsoft Windows thing.
As someone also trying to get out of (or at least less dependent on) the Apple ecosystem, the laptop market sucks ! Everyone but Apple is making the same garbage-tier, shoddy, plastic laptops with bottom of the barrel components that I'm sure are engineered to just barely work enough to avoid immediate product returns. I'm starting to accept that if I want a development workstation class machine, I need to build a to…
Thinkpad T models (and other "professional" lines) are fine IME, Framework laptops supposedly too. These Thinkpads use a combination of fiber reinforced plastics and magnesium for their cases. Aluminum is actually not the ideal material for laptop cases.
> Aluminum is actually not the ideal material for laptop cases.
The quality you get for the money from Mac's is truly unmatched by any other laptop out there - why not use a VM on it for other OS & software?
I don't disagree with you. I really really love the hardware -- and BTW it would be a dream if I get to work with OS/Hardware people in Apple. I don't like the software, especially the OS built-ins, but I guess I can find alternatives in App store. I might eventually go down this route, if I can't find a reasonable good one. I use VMWare in Windows to access Linux on my 5550, so it's not a far stretch to switch the h…
this just sounds absolutely horrendous. I could not operate like this. Is this a general linux on laptop thing or just a specific to your situation thing?
I think it's specific to their machine? I've got an old Skylake (6600u) machine with Secure Boot disabled that will last a weekend with the lid closed.
This is a general Linux issue. Over the years patches have floated around to address it (like letting people force it to be allowed if their swap is encrypted).
I had a work-issued Dell Latitude for several years (2021 model, 11th gen Intel). Overall it was a mediocre machine, but battery life really sucked (like, max 2 hours of light browsing). Several years older Thinkpad T480s gave me way longer usage.
Older Dell models had better general build quality IMO, but also problems with expanding batteries.
For personal stuff just dual boot my old Thinkpad, at work I use Macbook.
As someone also trying to get out of (or at least less dependent on) the Apple ecosystem, the laptop market sucks ! Everyone but Apple is making the same garbage-tier, shoddy, plastic laptops with bottom of the barrel components that I'm sure are engineered to just barely work enough to avoid immediate product returns. I'm starting to accept that if I want a development workstation class machine, I need to build a to…
When you walk into a Best Buy, the small majority of non-Apple laptops seem to be made of metal, even the $300 Chromebooks. They look and feel more premium, but probably aren't. The sad thing is that plastic should be the best material to make laptops from. It's lighter, and it gives when dropped. Think about the cases everybody puts on their phones. They're not made of solid metal, for good reason. The old Thinkpads…
When I walk into those kind of shops I press a few keys of every laptop and check which keyboard flex. Usually the cheap laptops flex and the expensive ones don't. By cheap I mean 300 or 400 Euro and by expensive I mean 800 or 1000 Euro or more. Some laptops that flex are made of metal, some that do not flex are made of plastic. My HP ZBook 15 from 2014 is rock solid and does not flex even if it's mostly plastic. There is a catch: the keyboard is built with a sheet of metal on the bottom, so it's very rigid. The laptop itself has a frame of metal and a shell of plastic. It's definitely not light, one of those laptops in the 3 kg category (6 lbs?) and definitely not cheap. It's also built for total repairability: it opens with no screws and I can replace everything even the CPU and the GPU l. I replaced the HDD and the DVD with 2 SSDs, maxed out the RAM to 32 GB and replaced the keyboard many times, when keys eventually wear and start to fail. I'd buy it again, with modern components (NVME bus, DDR5 RAM) and without the number pad so I can center the space bar and the touchpad.
Thinkpad T models (and other "professional" lines) are fine IME, Framework laptops supposedly too. These Thinkpads use a combination of fiber reinforced plastics and magnesium for their cases. Aluminum is actually not the ideal material for laptop cases.
> Aluminum is actually not the ideal material for laptop cases. Why? It works and it is very lightweight.
It dents and it's heavier than magnesium or fiber-reinforced plastic. You might have heard of some related changes in airplane technology.
Thinkpad T models (and other "professional" lines) are fine IME, Framework laptops supposedly too. These Thinkpads use a combination of fiber reinforced plastics and magnesium for their cases. Aluminum is actually not the ideal material for laptop cases.
> Aluminum is actually not the ideal material for laptop cases. Why? It works and it is very lightweight.