171–180 of 245 posts
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> It lacks 802.11ac. Why in the world would it lack support for one of the most ubiquitous, not to mention fastest, wireless standards? I mean, it’s been out since 2013.
Speaking from memory as it's a little difficult to search for but there's no fully FOSS ac driver available for Linux which might be why the BSDs have none, Linux has open source ac drivers of course but they still require proprietary firmware blobs and the performance is terrible compared to the proprietary drivers (think 350Mb/s with OpenWrt compared to 800Mb/s on stock router firmware). Atheros released fully open…
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>FWIW, suspend/resume is probably the worst, fiddliest thing about free OSs on a laptop. Sadly I agree. My requirements for a laptop are: 1. Working suspend resume 2. Good touch pad with working palm rejection 3. Good battery life Sadly the only laptop that meets these requirements to my satisfaction is my macbook.
XPS 13 Developer edition meets these requirements. The touch pad isn't as good as a MacBook (none are) but it's plenty sufficient for working when not at a desk and if you do Docker based development having a Linux OS is actually much more performant.
I also have a t480, mines running Ubuntu but unfortunately I’m giving it up for a new MacBook Air. The touchpads on the thinkpads are beyond horrible after using macs for many years, it’s finally too annoying for me to keep going :(
If we don't count the keyboard issues, no laptop on the market is as nice to use as an MBP. If I had one with a physical escape key, I could probably make the statement without even that reservation. But if you prefer Ubuntu to macOS for whatever reason, I've found the Dell XPS line to be good enough to be tolerable.
This is why I bought a Macbook Air, they still have a physical escape key and my vim muscle movements will not allow me to remap that key anywhere else.
BTW The 16inch Macbook Pros also have a physical escape key now, to the left of the touchbar.
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If we don't count the keyboard issues, no laptop on the market is as nice to use as an MBP. If I had one with a physical escape key, I could probably make the statement without even that reservation. But if you prefer Ubuntu to macOS for whatever reason, I've found the Dell XPS line to be good enough to be tolerable.
It's possible to map the Caps Lock key to Escape as long as you don't need Caps Lock functionality.
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Try disabling the trackpad and then just use the trackpoint.
I have this exact model and have attempted to use trackpoint under Ubuntu and it is just slow and I'm constantly overshooting my target. I'm so much better with the trackpad that I really wonder how people that use trackpoint swear by it. I must be missing something.
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XPS 13 Developer edition meets these requirements. The touch pad isn't as good as a MacBook (none are) but it's plenty sufficient for working when not at a desk and if you do Docker based development having a Linux OS is actually much more performant.
Going from a MacBook trackpad to literally any other laptop is an exercise in extreme frustration. Even going from Mac OS X to Windows in Boot Camp makes one want to pull their hair out.
For you.
I don't mind TrackPoint on thinkpads at all. In fact I would probably prefer that usually.
Everybody's got different tastes. It's not a problem.
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While not for most people, it is realtively easy to replace the screen with a higher quality panel. I have a T495, and replaced the panel with a higher quality one. No screws, just sticky stuff, I was concerned about this at first, as I didn't know of the sticky substance would remain viable after swaping thescreen, but it is working great. Since I am not changing panels everyday, it isn't an issue.
Yes, I've seen the DIY videos of it, but I never felt confident enough to do it myself. And what would you do with the old panel? Ebay?
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Linux desktop is great in 2020, especially if you buy the right hardware with solid support, the experience is totally smooth and super-high performance with stuff like ArchLinux. Boots up immediatley, no annoying MacOS updates or having to install XCode while having multiple versions of core unix packages, because it pre-installs a bunch of out-of-date ones you replace immediately with brew. This causes problems, es…
So I used to be a Linux mint/ubuntu/fedora user (I distro hopped a bit), but I really like how homebrew on macs is per user account rather than system wide, and I can just delete the folder to reset it for the most part (minus running programs, some GUI casks, and shortcuts). AFAIK, apt-get and most if not all linux package managers only work system wide, and I can't install something just for a specific user. Maybe…
The way I see it, a system is a stack: that is you put a number of layers on top of each other.
The kernel is a layer at the very bottom, on top of which you stack a distribution. This distribution is managed through a package manager. On top of this distribution you could stack a user package manager.
In this view, you cannot compare apt or yum to home brew, they don’t belong to the same layer.
If you think about it, that makes sense. User package managers have to rely on the underlying layer to provide tools for e.g. compiling user packages.
Now I agree that in real life, the limit between layers can be more blurry:
- system package managers distribute end users softwares. Because most desktops are single user so having an extra layer is often not necessary.
- some system package managers are re-purposed to be stacked as user package managers. E.g. you can use gentoo prefix.
Still, to have a clear picture in mind the layers should be considered.
That being said, there are a bunch of user package managers you can also use on Linux. Have a look at spack for instance. I think the nix package manager can be used like that also.
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Can't speak for TFA's hardware but suspend/resume works fine on my lenovo x1 6th gen running freebsd, with the only caveat being that I had to load some drivers that were not loaded by default. (I think it was called acpi_ibm. Manpage says that's for the Fn key combos, maybe it was something else.) FWIW, suspend/resume is probably the worst, fiddliest thing about free OSs on a laptop.
>FWIW, suspend/resume is probably the worst, fiddliest thing about free OSs on a laptop. Sadly I agree. My requirements for a laptop are: 1. Working suspend resume 2. Good touch pad with working palm rejection 3. Good battery life Sadly the only laptop that meets these requirements to my satisfaction is my macbook.