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We Need a Better PC

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531–540 of 699 posts

Re: We Need a Better PC

#531

Post by lqdc13 »

chjohasbrouck wrote: post #285
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 have both, and I find the things that Macs have that everything else is missing just aren't articulated on a spec sheet. The display on the Macbook Pro Retina is just flawless. The colors, the anti-glare, and the picture quality from all angles, it's just really well done. The brushed aluminum chassis makes it very cool and lightweight, great to travel with and keep on your lap. Excellent battery life. It's just a…

Macbook Pro is the first laptop that I've ever owned that was so hot on the bottom that you can't rest it on your lap. If anyone is doubting this, please try to do something that involves all cores for 10 minutes. Any kind of non-trivial parallel task would do that.

Re: We Need a Better PC

#532

Post by tingol »

sjwright wrote: post #482
slgeorge wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's all just bullshit, and I don't have time to deal with bullshit like that It's bullshit to you , but it doesn't make Linux bullshit - others prioritise different aspects. You care about HiDPI - perhaps you are a designer, so it's important. But, you're not everyone. For example, I have no need for HiDPI and I personally have much more focus on the power and control Linux gives me. I wouldn't want HiDPI if I had…

He might not "be everyone" but his priorities are relevant to more people than your priorities by a factor of perhaps 100:1 or more. I haven't met a single person that didn't immediately appreciate the benefits of HiDPI when they saw it.

Well you sure convinced me with your accurate statistics. You talk of benefits as if higher dpi cures cancer, it looks better and that's it. I really don't know what the big deal is, I have a HiDPI screen, works fine under linux as most of my work is done in terminals all I've had to "configure" was turning off hinting for my emulators and that was that. But they are waay more important things I would like from my machine so there's no need to be condescending just because you and your friends were impressed by the high res screens.

Re: We Need a Better PC

#533

Post by DanBC »

conjectures wrote: post #507
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 have a similar Asus machine. Nice build quality. Lasted 3 years of fairly hard use so far. Shiny screen could be improved, that's about it. Would recommend Asus highly.

I love ASUS, and second your recommendation.

Watch out though - some of their cheaper machines are just weird. The X205ta being one example.

Re: We Need a Better PC

#534

Post by [deleted] »

lhnz wrote: post #465

Sorry in advance for taking the headline and talking about something else. What I want is a real personal computer that can fit in my pocket. A mobile device that is extremely open and very easy to hack on. I would like it to expose sensory readings in a UI and then provide a simple if-this-then-that UI that would allow me to teach daemons to respond to events that occur during the day and additionally support script…

[deleted]

Re: We Need a Better PC

#535

Post by [deleted] »

agentgt wrote: post #513

I too came to the same conclusion that the article did quite some time ago. Apple just owns on build quality. I am Longtime Lenovo + Linux user that recently switched to Mac and as much I really hate OSX UI the build quality of apple is worth it (that and skype sort of works better on mac than Linux). The thing that shocks me with my new Mac is how incredibly unstable OSX is at times (El Capitan and previous version)…

[deleted]

Re: We Need a Better PC

#536

Post by walterbell »

lhnz wrote: post #465

Sorry in advance for taking the headline and talking about something else. What I want is a real personal computer that can fit in my pocket. A mobile device that is extremely open and very easy to hack on. I would like it to expose sensory readings in a UI and then provide a simple if-this-then-that UI that would allow me to teach daemons to respond to events that occur during the day and additionally support script…

Nokia N900 or Nokia N9 running Linux?

Re: We Need a Better PC

#537

Post by polymeris »

noisy_boy wrote: post #392
symmetricsaurus wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't agree at all with the new Thinkpad keyboards being garbage. The old ones were nice (maybe even nicer than the new ones) but the new ones are still the best laptop keyboards in the market at the moment. The keyboard has no flex or mushiness. The keys have some resistance and a nice feel when depressing them. Finally the keys are slightly curved inwards so that the fingesrs easily find the centers of the keys.…

No dedicated function keys are the worst decision lenovo made. Kind of a pain in the ass when one is trying to avoid using the mouse (which most developers working for long periods tend to do).

At least on mine, you can use Fn-Esc to engage "FnLk" and use the F keys as default. Also, somewhat related you can swap Ctrl and Fn in the BIOS if you prefer your Ctrl key to be in the bottom left, like me.

Re: We Need a Better PC

#538

Post by tetheno »

AndrewUnmuted wrote: post #524
superuser2 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a developer I work with text all day, a task made thoroughly more pleasant with good font rendering and proper HiDPI support, neither of which are available on Linux. I'll take my 13 inches of Retina display over a pair of 27-inch externals any day. SSH and rsync for remote editing work just fine from an rMBP.

You should check out the Infinality[1] patch sets. Installation is extremely simple when using your distro's package manager. The improvement made on rendering text is astronomical. [1] http://www.infinality.net/blog/

Or just enabling subpixel-hinting and font-smoothing. I didn't bother with infinality after that.

Re: We Need a Better PC

#539

Post by lorenzhs »

noisy_boy wrote: post #392
symmetricsaurus wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't agree at all with the new Thinkpad keyboards being garbage. The old ones were nice (maybe even nicer than the new ones) but the new ones are still the best laptop keyboards in the market at the moment. The keyboard has no flex or mushiness. The keys have some resistance and a nice feel when depressing them. Finally the keys are slightly curved inwards so that the fingesrs easily find the centers of the keys.…

No dedicated function keys are the worst decision lenovo made. Kind of a pain in the ass when one is trying to avoid using the mouse (which most developers working for long periods tend to do).

For me the keys default to F1-F12 and multimedia functions require the Fn key. Works pretty well, I don't use the multimedia keys except for adjusting volume (this is a Desktop machine with the USB version of the keyboard, on a laptop the brightness keys would be relevant as well). Considering how often I hit F (a lot!) and how often I adjust the volume (rarely) this works very well for me.

Instead, I miss the double-height escape and delete key, and PgUp/PgDown near the top of the keyboard. They're next to the arrow keys now, which isn't as nice as the back/forward buttons that used to be there.

Re: We Need a Better PC

#540

Post by rayiner »

eosrei wrote: post #301
chjohasbrouck wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have both, and I find the things that Macs have that everything else is missing just aren't articulated on a spec sheet. The display on the Macbook Pro Retina is just flawless. The colors, the anti-glare, and the picture quality from all angles, it's just really well done. The brushed aluminum chassis makes it very cool and lightweight, great to travel with and keep on your lap. Excellent battery life. It's just a…

You seem to have only looked at the older PCs. Have you looked at the Dell XPS 13 or Microsoft Surface Book? They may dispel your complaints. You can even buy the XPS with Ubuntu.

I really want to buy a surface book. But it seems like everyone on /r/surface is having the same recurring issues: battery drain/overheating during sleep, tablet failing to undock, computer mistakenly thinking tablet is undocked, graphics driver crashes, slow SSD writes, etc.

It's also ridiculously expensive. The cheapest option with 16GB of memory costs $200 more than a 15" Retina MBP.

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