171–180 of 699 posts
I think we need a beautiful, functional servers,computer, handheld and wearables with opensource desktop lithography and 3d material deposition. It would take about $20 million and the right people to get going, but it could be hw UNIX -> Linux.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A desktop does nothing more than marginally better for my work use cases; I have one that's literally strictly for video games, and I don't care in the least about making those portable. But I care about going to my client's office and being able to work. Why would a desktop be "better"? If a desktop was sufficiently "better", why would I buy a good laptop? If I have to buy a good laptop, what delta exists, for me ,…
Laptops do not make desktops redundant. You will not be able to strap on a 6" tower H/S or better to cool down the highest performance processors, let alone be able to pack a battery to run said processor and a HP GPU into any laptop form factor. It is true that not every work load needs such a capable machine and you should only spend as much as you need. That being said, I was working with a friend on a recent proj…
True, there should something to rival Apple in the laptop arena. Unfortunately there isn't. Apple just makes hardware that's so sexy and intuitive to use. Example, Apple TV. I never used one before but I demo'd one at Best Buy the other day and in 10 seconds I knew how to operate it. Apple does this best, their earnings prove that. Just buy a Macbook Air, sturdy as hell, long battery life, and great Unix-enough-y OS.
In the future, I'd like to be able to choose a design of laptop or tablet online, modify it, choose an open cpu core and so on and create an entire, beautiful computer at home. Not everyone will want to do that, but I think enough people will realize open source hw is the future especially in terms of supply-chain security and reducing or adding features. (More broadly: How cool would it be to have company-specific devices, designed and built just for them?)
Avoid the dell developers edition xps13. There's no end key, the trackpad is unusable. Even worse, avoid getting the windows version and installing Linux on that: the trackpad is even less unusable (resets to lower corner intermittently on clicks), and in order to get the wi-fi working I had to recompile the kernel driver telling it that it was FOSS.
For the most part these issues are all fixed in recent kernel versions (> 4.2). The default trackpad driver (synaptics) is indeed buggy, but the newer libinput driver (available in the Ubuntu repos since 15.10) works perfectly. The WiFi card is a bit annoying if you want to build the driver yourself but it works out of the box on stock Ubuntu 15.10. Admittedly there were some issues early on, but now that issues have…
After I bought my MBPr 2014 I started looking around at similar machines. In my mind, the only competition is with the Surface Book, but even that's debatable given the screen size.
The convertible tablet aspect seems like a gimmick, but other than that it looks v nice. The part where it will actually have a clean Windows installation with no crapware is pretty excellent.
Post didn't address - buy apple hardware, run something other than OS X on it. Seems simple. Sure you are locked to apple hardware issues/resolutions, but Apple today is what the Thinkpad was for years (pre-Lenovo), hardware mostly just works. Insert arguments of customization, configurability, etc... Most people don't care. Lenovo doesn't deliver as well as IBM did on the Thinkpad line. What's the alternative beside…
Personally, I use far too much mainstream software to be able to run Linux as my only OS, and I hate dual-booting. Sometimes I'll run Linux in a VM for convenience, but Linux is so broken with respect to so much hardware, I'm not interested in running it as the main OS. And running Apple's OS as the top level OS would drive me insane. So unless you're suggesting I try to run Windows 10 on Apple hardware, I agree with…
Personally I prefer using the caps-lock key as control, which can be set in the system preferences on a mac.
i have a 2014 x1 carbon. solid build, decent battery under linux(5hrs average load). probably will get an x1 next round too. dont get booged down with specs though. newest is outdated in a year, and if you don't get a new laptop every year, arguing specs is pretty moot. drawbacks - soldered on ram + it's a premium not super modular. positive - its solid and nicely designed with a great keyboard (and this is from an o…