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

What Linux laptops do you use for development?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 53 posts

Re: What Linux laptops do you use for development?

#42

Post by Tichy »

Dell Latitude X1, but they don't sell it anymore. It is actually a Samsung notebook, and it's successor apparently is the Q40 (http://www.dynamism.com/q40/main.shtml).

Now I love this nb, actually it is the only acceptable notebook that I know of:

#1 FANLESS - no annoying noises whatsoever!!! #2 really, really lightweight, less than 2,2lb if you remove the battery (2,4lb with battery) - external dvd drive, though

I have tried a MacBook, but it was too noisy for my taste. Hoping that Apple will produce a fanless subnotebook one day...

Re: What Linux laptops do you use for development?

#44

Post by bls »

I use a Lenovo T60 running Windows XP, with Ubuntu 6.10 running in a VMWare virtual machine. VMWare Workstation is really cheap and VMWare Player is free. You can find many preconfigured Linux virtual machines on VMWare's website.

Power management and battery life in particular suck on Linux. Even if you can get it to actually work (lots of Googling + configuring) you will get at best 2/3 of the Windows battery life. Plus, I don't have a lot of faith in the quality of the suspend-to-disk functionality in any flavor of Linux.

Re: What Linux laptops do you use for development?

#46

Post by eduardoflores »

Prrometheus wrote: post #28
Ev wrote: post #26

You don't develop on laptops. This is not what they are built for: they slow, keyboards are not capable of decent typing speed and screens are tiny. Stop trying to look hip and get yourself a workstation.

How is Linux at supporting dual monitors?

For ubuntu & ati check this http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=1773544

Re: What Linux laptops do you use for development?

#47

Post by damien »

jey wrote: post #36
damien wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you haven't tried Linux recently, it's actually gotten pretty good on both of those fronts, especially if you compare it to Windows. Also, many PC manufacturers are starting to pre-install Linux, which should make it even easier for people who don't want to worry about installation.

I have no trouble installing, customizing, and maintaining a Linux machine. I simply don't want to. I'd rather spend the time coding! :) Plus the Mac OS X desktop environment is nice. This is exactly what I need: native UNIX and a good desktop environment.

I'm just saying... the whole "Linux is too hard" argument doesn't hold much water with me anymore, since both my wife and 8 year old have been using it with no problems for a while. =)

But yea, OS X does seem pretty nice, I'd probably give it a try if I didn't care about things like openness [1] and vendor lock-in [2].

[1] http://diveintomark.org/archives/2006/06/02/when-the-bough-breaks

[2] http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2005/09/18/Apple-XML

Re: What Linux laptops do you use for development?

#48

Post by damien »

Prrometheus wrote: post #28
Ev wrote: post #26

You don't develop on laptops. This is not what they are built for: they slow, keyboards are not capable of decent typing speed and screens are tiny. Stop trying to look hip and get yourself a workstation.

How is Linux at supporting dual monitors?

Having used laptops with both ATI and nVidia chips inside, nvidia support is definitely the way to go between the two, especially for multi-monitor setups. I actually returned my old laptop with ATI graphics because their Linux drivers and support was terrible.

I hear that the new Intel graphic chips are also quite nice, and the fact that they open sourced the drivers should make them the ideal Linux graphics adapters, but I don't have any experience with them.

Re: What Linux laptops do you use for development?

#49

Post by mascarenhas »

What about sleep support and battery use? That is a big selling point for the Mac, my MacBook uses more or less 1% of battery per hour and fully wakes up (wifi included) in a matter of seconds. Is there any PC notebook with similar sleep performance under Linux? This is not a troll, I actually prefer Linux for most things, and would gladly use a 12", <3lbs notebook running Linux if it had fast and reliable sleep.
Post reply on HN