Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We Need a Better PC

blog.dcpos.ch

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 699 posts

Re: We Need a Better PC

#271

Post by mbrock »

thirdsun wrote: post #209
gcb0 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the article misses everything. lenovo is not even relevant anymore. Their new keyboards (since 2009!) are complete garbage. his "research" was probably asking some guy at the water cooler "what's a good PC laptop" "lenovo" "thanks"

That was my impression too. I'm not an expert on Windows hardware/devices but from what I hear the Dell XPS 13 is an excellent machine if you don't want a MacBook. Not even mentioning Dell tells me this guy misses a few things.

I have the XPS 13 Developer Edition, and it's a fine laptop in many ways... But it's marketed as a Linux laptop, yet requires a proprietary WiFi driver. After I upgraded my kernel a month ago, the WiFi started kernel panicking randomly and often, so I don't bother even using the computer anymore... I just use a full screen terminal on my old MacBook and ssh to a VPS. One day I'll reinstall the driver or something, but, god damn, why must everything suck?

Re: We Need a Better PC

#272

Post by ekianjo »

microtonal wrote: post #245
ekianjo wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Homebrew is certainly not as good as a regular package manager you get in Linux. I'm not sure how you can argue otherwise.

Homebrew is certainly not as good as a regular package manager you get in Linux. It's actually better, for three reasons: - If a library is not in Homebrew (which happens frequently when you are a developer ;)), you just install it into /usr/local/Cellar/ / and you can use all the regular Homebrew tools (brew link , brew unlink ), etc. - It's much easier to build and distribute your own stuff in Homebrew, by providin…

> This means that you can update a new application without having to upgrade half of your system. In Linux, you usually have the choice of: stable OS, outdated software. Up to date software, in-flux OS.

I've never seen an application on Linux asking to update half of my system libraries or something. Please stop using hyperbole, this is not useful for the sake of conversation.

On top of that, you can install recent software in many ways (OpenSUSE has specific, updated repositories that can be triggered with one-click on their website, Ubuntu has pretty much the same thing with PPAs) or you can even build everything from source on Arch with AUR and just ensure you have updated libraries as required (which is not half of your system).

And if you don't want to update ANY of your system libraries, it's fairly straightforward symlink local versions of libraries instead of system ones.

Re: We Need a Better PC

#273

Post by hsitz »

ekianjo wrote: post #262
hsitz wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also have UX305 and I easily get at least 6 hours under moderate loads. Eight or nine with light web-browsing (avoiding javascript pages that spike cpu usage), ten or more with lighter use (text editor). I installed Ubuntu 14.x and i3 window manager. I have dual boot with original Windows install and power use is comparable between Windows and Linux. It's a pleasure to use. Only power management tweak I made in Ubu…

I have been trying TLP but I failed to notice any significant difference in battery life... is it absolutely needed to tweak its default settings?

I don't remember. I would check power usage with powertop and make sure you've got no 'bad' indicators on the 'Tunables' tab (actually I think I still have one bad). On the 'Device Stats' tab you should be able to get 'system baseline power usage' under 5 watts under light loads. I run mine with display brightness fairly low, 20% or 30%, but it's still has comparable brightness to my other main laptop's (Lenovo x220) full brightness.

Re: We Need a Better PC

#274

Post by dtech »

microtonal wrote: post #245
ekianjo wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Homebrew is certainly not as good as a regular package manager you get in Linux. I'm not sure how you can argue otherwise.

Homebrew is certainly not as good as a regular package manager you get in Linux. It's actually better, for three reasons: - If a library is not in Homebrew (which happens frequently when you are a developer ;)), you just install it into /usr/local/Cellar/ / and you can use all the regular Homebrew tools (brew link , brew unlink ), etc. - It's much easier to build and distribute your own stuff in Homebrew, by providin…

It might be for a package maintainer or if you aspire to be. As a develop I have no aspiration for that.

Homebrew frequently requires you to manually perform steps or edit files. While it might not be directly homebrews fault, that 100% disqualifies it for the label "It's actually better".

Re: We Need a Better PC

#275

Post by redthrow »

habosa wrote: post #113

Not disagreeing with the premise, but just want to plug a machine I am very happy with. I was a lifetime mac owner (since OS 9) and my 2010 Macbook Pro finally broke down this year. It made it that long because I doubled the RAM, replaced the battery, and replaced the HDD with a hybrid drive. Finally the battery puffed up and exploded. I brought it to the Apple Store and they were beyond useless. The new MBPs are not…

I was thinking about buying this exact machine. Does Bluetooth work well on Ubuntu out of the box?

Re: We Need a Better PC

#277

Post by hans0l074 »

I purchased a System76 Galago UltraPro (this model does not seem to be available anymore) at the end of 2014. I have been observing System76 for a year or more before I caved in and purchased this. I live in Finland - and they shipped it across. I really love this laptop. I'm also a Mac user (Air, Pro etc) and I expected the build quality to be lower, but it was surprisingly solid. Perhaps their build quality has improved? Also, one of the most common complaints was about their keyboard and it seems they have fixed this - I have had no problems. I love having a Ubuntu portable for my day-to-day devops work over VPN and with everything set up (all my tools, IDE's etc), it's been a pleasure. Their new line up looks impressive (I'm tempted to get another one). But yes, the battery life is really bad - 2-3 hour max or even less if you have IntelliJ or a VM running. So I have placed a power adapter at all my usual work locations :) Edit : spelling

Re: We Need a Better PC

#278

Post by merb »

knights123 wrote: post #90

It seems like you should really just buy a MacBook Pro. Sure the software isn't perfect, but it's an order of magnitude closer to perfect than Windows has been lately. You buy it, boot it up, and it works wonderfully. Of course the one day out of the year that it doesn't you go rage comment on how it sucks and it scares Windows users away from Mac, but the rest of the time you'd never consider going back to a typical…

Actually I thought that, however in my company we bought 2 MacBook Pro's (Late 2013), we used two different distributors. Actually one (mine) works totally fine, except that the AC Power Adapter is totally shitty (damnit Apple MagSafe cable sucks). However his laptop had some really aweful bugs even that we are running the complete same version of Apple Mac OS X we even installed the image from my computer. At the last month his OS X gave up totally (currently he used Bootcamp so not a big deal), but at the moment he can't even boot os x

Re: We Need a Better PC

#279

Post by manyxcxi »

barrkel wrote: post #265
manyxcxi wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BULLSHIT I live in the command line and use a modern toolchain. Package management has no bearing on my development. mvn, npm, composer, gem, and pip all work just fine. Home brew gets you the OS packages and I've yet to run into an even remotely popular package not in a Homebrew repo somewhere. On top of all that- with Vagrant and (or even just) Virtualbox you have whatever flavor of Linux you want running on your d…

We've just given up on OS X for developers at my workplace. There are just too many little incompatibilities. Especially around clang replacing gcc messing with our C++ code, but also different revisions of various gems - especially browser testing - that cause hiccups. And then there's setting up all the ancillary services like databases etc. - not just once, but repeatedly, and reconfiguration when the arrangement…

We use Vagrant and Chef to provision everything, and where possible, I like to keep my OS relatively clean- so I don't have any databases or anything installed in OS X anymore. We have a number of Vagrant and Chef scripts that will take developers from zero to fully running development environment with a simple vagrant init command followed by a few steps for hooking up whatever must be hooked up in the IDE for remote debugging where necessary. It's been fantastic, but we're mostly JVM based.

I could definitely see how clang would screw things up. I don't have experience as a C/C++ developer in OS X for anything other than personal electronics projects.

My personal and professional experience with significant development time in Java, PHP, Python, and Node has been that only Linux could do it as well, but the trade offs for daily desktop use simply aren't worth it. Being able to pump my development environments into a VM of the same flavor as the target environment has given me the best of all worlds. But I've genuinely never run into anything that just refused to work on OSX. I will say that Python and Python env are sometimes a PITA, but not any constant issues.

Re: We Need a Better PC

#280

Post by touristtam »

rmm wrote: post #235

Microsoft Surface Book. Easily the best device i have used in a very long time. Expensive (especially the i7 dGPU option) but i am amazed at how good this machine is. Huge battery life, powerful when it needs to be. Connect to a dock and you have a powerful desktop. Currently use it when im working in the office doing design work (plugged into a couple of Dell U2715H) then when i am out on mine sites use it as a port…

But then you are using Microsoft OS.
Post reply on HN