I'm on the same boat as you: my ideal laptop would be an x220/x230 on the outside with a 1440p display and a modern CPU on the inside. I can't understand why Thinkpads are moving away from this absolutely perfect design in the name of... slickness? Why are laptops with a minimal (or non-existing) touchpad so difficult to find? Once you start using the trackpoint your wrists feel incredibly relaxed at all times. Why d…
The X220 is nowhere near an "absolutely perfect" design, it's way too wide. I still use one as my daily driver, but come on. The screen bezels are huge, the keyboard stretched to fill its wide footprint, and the power plug juts out the back where it gets stressed against the floor in any cross-legged, or other tilted back usage setting. The X61s was far closer to an absolutely perfect design, it just needed less plas…
I honestly love overhearing you discuss your perfect computers, because it doesn't seem impossible that you might get your wish! One really interesting possibility is to recycle the X61s chassis and use modern PCBs, chips, and peripherals to get you what you want. Another possibility is the creation of a PC ecosystem similar to the "Red Camera System" where yes, your m2 module costs $5k instead of $500, but it it comes in a machined aluminum module that fits perfectly with the rest of your tricked out customized laptop.
I can't speak to the 4700u or the pangolin specifically, but I can offer this perspective on PopOS/AMD: I've been using System76's PopOS with my Asus Zephyrus G14 (4800hs) as a daily driver and I really like it. (freelance/web) The battery life is comparable to Windows (on integrated graphics mode, it has graphics switching available)at 7-10 hours with 70% brightness and balanced power settings using VScode and firef…
Would buy in a heartbeat if it had a 4k display. Hard to go back to 1080p after six years of Retina and 4K displays.
Why aren't there any bold laptop manufacturers? This is a 2021 laptop that uses USB-A primarily, a meh panel, and no particular standout design features. Why do I have to get a mac if I want actually good design? System76 should take a risk and truly make an interesting laptop. leaving the standard, boring design to the big name companies.
If you want something like a Mac there are plenty of options. Off the top of my head there's Lenovo Yoga, Dell XPS, and Microsoft Surface.
I've grown to love my Dell XPS (with Linux). It definitely has some rough edges. Dell shipped what I consider a faulty machine. The trackpad is wobbly/bouncy. I had a tech come out to replace it, but he ended up having to send it to "the depot" due to a screw being sheared. I hadn't touched the screw. The depot returned it to me with a missing/broken case LED, unplugged speakers and one WiFi antenna that won't seat. Even still, the machine is beautiful. Even the fingerprint reader works in Linux. I use the heck out of it and battery life is quite good. Also, I upgraded my RAM to 32G and my SSD to 512G. This thing also has another M.2 slot just in case I want to put another SSD into it.
I can't speak to the 4700u or the pangolin specifically, but I can offer this perspective on PopOS/AMD: I've been using System76's PopOS with my Asus Zephyrus G14 (4800hs) as a daily driver and I really like it. (freelance/web) The battery life is comparable to Windows (on integrated graphics mode, it has graphics switching available)at 7-10 hours with 70% brightness and balanced power settings using VScode and firef…
I run Pop!_OS on my T480 and it's amazing - really stable with great battery life. They've struck a nice balance between the stability of Debian and the modern-nature of Ubuntu. The only apps I miss from Windows are Office (mostly Excel) and OneDrive.
Honestly find it hard to notice much difference in the display quality between my 1080p 2018 XPS laptop and my 1800p 2019 Mac laptop. Actually the XPS is slightly preferable to me because the matte vs glossy finish outweighs the extra resolution at that size for me. I guess that could just be my sight, but the reviews for the XPS laptop vs the 4k model of the same were pretty much unanimous on the 4k variant being a…
I have an XPS 15 from around the same time and the 1080p display feels a little poor. What I notice most is the long pixel response time. I'd take a 1080p OLED over a 4K LCD anyday. I'd also take a 4K OLED over either any day as well. High refresh rate and/or backlight strobing would be nice to have as well. Battery life isn't as much of a concern to me. I know not all users have the same priority as me. It's nice th…
> 1080p OLED
Yep. What's getting lost in this whole discussion over resolution and whether >1080p is necessary is the issue of panel quality. Most laptops have always had absolute shit that is useless for photo editing or color-accurate work. Even at the high end they rarely advertise things like gamut coverage.
basically: not great I don't want to advertise, so I'll just say - you can go to a big computer/hardware seller website and search for laptops with nvidia graphics cards. You can get a laptop with a GTX 1650 for $700, which has 3x the performance.
And then we have to deal with nvidia's proprietary drivers, HDMI being electrically connected to the gpu, graphics switching, etc. AMD's APU graphics offer a good enough solution while removing the headaches many of us are trying to avoid.
Honestly, it depends on what you need, and what your platform is. Windows has its Remote Desktop, which works fine. I’m on Linux, and use mosh as a more reliable ssh client.
You can always add a usb numpad, but you can never remove one that is already there.
True. Why do they sell laptops with screen built in?
A long time ago I used to own a laptop that I bought from a friend after someone stepped on it and broke the screen. I removed the screen and installed some version of Linux on it.
It turned out to be quite fun and useful. Not a very good laptop if you want to use it where you don't have a screen, but it was kind of like a modern TRS-80. You could treat it like a keyboard and not have the laptop screen get in the way of the larger desktop monitor (back then it probably would have been a CRT) I actually wanted to use. In a sense it was actually less awkward than a normal laptop for the way I usually wanted to use it.