Ask HN: Feasible Alternative to the MacBook Pro?

Post by house9-2 » Sun, Oct 20, 2019, 2:47 PM UTC

awalton wrote: post #254

drevil-v2 wrote: post #5

Slightly OT however for what it’s worth the new 16inch MBP with a redesigned non-butterfly keyboard is supposed to be available soon. I would suggest you hold off any laptop decision until then.

Err, have you ever bought a first-gen Apple product? Not something you walk into lightly... Apple has a tendency to let customers find their flaws rather than actually test for them and shake them out. I'd rather not volunteer $3000 to be a guinea pig for Apple's keyboard design gremlins. If they went back to the 2016 model and just slapped a new motherboard inside and made the battery larger, then yeah, it'd be a no…

Post by jen_h » Sun, Oct 20, 2019, 2:49 PM UTC

nabusman wrote: post #260

jen_h wrote: post #241

Surprised not to see more mentions of the Asus Zenbook here — I switched from a MBP to a Zenbook running Ubuntu four years ago, and haven’t looked back...sleek, light, fast, beefy specs AND it’s endured my abuse pretty well. It’s starting to finally show its age, I switched to a Dell for a week after my adapter died, but went straight back to it once I was able. 13” screen and I still preferred it over the Dell (spee…

I bought a Zenbook a year ago but the trackpad was pretty much unusable. Though Ubuntu 16.04 worked with minor tweaks.

Post by stephen » Sun, Oct 20, 2019, 2:59 PM UTC

amcrouch wrote: post #68

ThinkPads every day of the week. I have a T430 that I have owned for about 6 years and a new P52 which is my daily work machine. Both running Linux with zero issues. I liked the comment below describing Hotels (Mac) Vs home (ThinkPads). It's true that if you can be bothered to tweak and install some stuff then you end up with something of your own. Your way. Never used Macs as old enough to remember the "no one got s…

Post by mdtusz » Sun, Oct 20, 2019, 3:01 PM UTC

faizshah wrote: post #180

disposedtrolley wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently purchased a T490 and it works reasonably well with Linux. My model has the base 1080p display rated at 250 nits, and while resolution and colour are no match for an MBP, the display surprisingly gets bright enough for some outdoor use. Build quality is solid and keyboard is great. Speakers sound pretty rough but get decently loud. I got maybe 7-8 hours of use with the screen at 60%, and alternating between…

Same, I bought a t480 but I went with POP OS. I bought it to see if I could switch to linux. On the plus side its a solid and stable dev machine, iterm seems slower than the linux terminal. Rubymine, pycharm etc are stable. Google cloud shell freezes in browser sometimes but firefox quantum and chromium work pretty well otherwise. It also works great with my uhd monitor even tho it doesn’t have a dedicated graphics c…

Post by robert_foss » Sun, Oct 20, 2019, 3:01 PM UTC

cytzol wrote: post #253

mherrmann wrote: post #48

I switched from MBP to a Dell XPS 13 with Ubuntu. I compare the experience to living in a hotel vs. living at home [1]. In a hotel (=on Mac), everything is stylish and cared for, but you have very little freedom to change things. At home (=on Linux), you need to do the dishes yourself but there's no external agenda. It's simply yours. I'm very happy with the switch. Though I'm on (Debian+) Xfce now instead of Ubuntu…

> In a hotel (=on Mac), everything is stylish and cared for, but you have very little freedom to change things. I've heard this over and over — that Macs are locked-down, uncustomisable machines — and I don't agree with it at all. I use replacements for almost all the built-in apps. I use a custom launcher. My editor config Git repo is approaching ten years old, and my shell config Git repo is almost eight. There are…