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We Need a Better PC

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671–680 of 699 posts

Re: We Need a Better PC

#671

Post by jgeerts »

> "they sell things that are locked down, both physically and in software"

Well, I can understand the physically part, but fortunately you can solve it with money, you just have to pay for your hardware upfront, it is expensive, but I work on my MacBook Pro > 9hrs a day. It's four years old now and doesn't need replacement yet, it's doing fine, the battery is doing fine.

Most people only look at how much an item costs at the time of purchase, but a fairer comparison would include the span of time that your device is sufficient and you don't need replacement.

I use my laptop for my job, the amount of money I make with a laptop outweighs the cost of a laptop by far. Most professionals in their job invest in good material, why would it be different in IT?

As for the software part, the software that Apple provides is astonishing to me. For example wiping a HD multiple times is just a setting, in windows you can start looking for freeware for doing the same thing. It comes with so many possibilities out of the box, I can't think of anything that I would want to do that I can't do now.

Just yesterday I sat next to a guy running Ubuntu and I couldn't believe what I saw, when he tried to search his hard drive he typed in his search parameters.. but then the first thing that popped up were shopping items, faster than the items present on his hard drive... Really?!?

A MacBook pro isn't perfect and it is costly but it's simply the best option for me now.

Re: We Need a Better PC

#672

Post by someone_welsh »

coldtea wrote: post #660
oblio wrote: post #589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Well, anyone that wears shorts and sandals and is over 20, deserves it. He only said "shorts". You know, adults can wear shorts as well.

Yes, if they have juvenile clothing sense. They can also wear baseball hats and other things -- after all it's a free country.

Sorry, I felt the need to respond to this. Why are shorts juvenile? They are a perfectly rational and sane climatic adaptation of clothing, allowing decent airflow over a human body.

To decry shorts as juvenile is sympotmatic of simple minded attitudes that lead to people in warm climates spending the hottest part of the day wearing full suits in fully glazed boxes which need to be energy intensively air conditioned so that they don't die.

This is not a sensible path for society to take

Re: We Need a Better PC

#673

Post by smasty »

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 good experience with Asus as well. Until recently I was still using my early 2011 Asus U36JC. It was probably one of the first ultrabook-like laptops, even though it wasn't branded as one, since it had a second discrete GPU. Reasonably thin at 19 mm and 1.4 kg, with stellar battery life (10h+ under Debian) and great performance. Even though it had 1st generation Core i5, it was still snappier then most of my classmate's laptops with latest i5s. It even had a USB 3.0 port, which was something for a ~700€ 13" laptop at that time. Over the time I upgraded to 8GB RAM and swapped the disk for SSD. Only downside was a pretty crappy glossy screen, but I mostly had it hooked up to an external monitor so I didn't mind so much.

I finally decided to go for a new laptop last December because the battery life was degrading after the years. I was consideing just buying a replacement battery, but I wasn't able to find one under $200 including shipping and I got a really good deal on a top of the line refurbished X220 together with a docking station for 380€.

My sister, a teacher, is now using the Asus laptop and not considering the battery life it still runs smoothly.

Re: We Need a Better PC

#674

Post by smasty »

ekianjo wrote: post #462
hsitz wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)…

I actually have a Lenovo x220 as one of my machines, and with 70-80% brightness I get about 4 hours of battery life (wifi included) on a 9 cells battery. Does it sound reasonable or am I not getting what I should?

I have the x220 with a used 9-cell battery (last full charge was 75%) and I'm easily able to get just under 6 hours of standard use (browsing, WiFi, watching movies, coding) and screen brightness at around 60%.

Re: We Need a Better PC

#675

Post by [deleted] »

nhumrich wrote: post #639
user42734892 wrote: post #580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm posting from a Razer Blade Stealth QHD/256 right now on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. The USB 3.1 ports function fine, the USB-C charger functions fine. Not attempted to attach a Thunderbolt over USB-C peripheral yet, but it would not be the end of the world if it wasn't functioning since everything but suspend and the camera behave fine. The real downer is Intel's appalling OpenGL support in their Skylake drivers. Games and…

Ubuntu 16.04 isn't even in beta yet, how could you have the LTS version?

[deleted]

Re: We Need a Better PC

#676

Post by thescriptkiddie »

agentultra wrote: post #571
lmm wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Macbooks are great, and I wish I could find something as good to install Linux on. You can install Linux on a Macbook if that's what you want. Despite the marketing a Macbook these days is just an expensive, well-designed PC with particular software. > Most of the PC options are steel and plastic, so they're hot and heavy. They'll burn your legs, they have comparably poor battery life. The screen looks terrible if…

You'll need an older Mac Pro then. There is quite a bit of proprietary hardware in the new ones that I'm pretty sure have no open source drivers (ie: SMC controller, force touch pad, etc). Not that the community couldn't find a way to reverse-engineer and build an open source version... but a straight up Ubuntu install on a current-generation Mac Pro is probably the fastest way to kill a battery, processor, flash dri…

On the latest Macbook Pro everything works under Linux except for the webcam and maybe the brightness sensor (it's hard to tell because it doesn't seem to do anything under OSX either).

Re: We Need a Better PC

#677

Post by mbrock »

sjwright wrote: post #662
mbrock wrote: post #641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since when is this a forum for normal human beings?

It's certainly not a forum for one single particular type of computer enthusiast.

Right... which makes it kind of ridiculous to claim that any mention of configuring Linux to work with HiDPI is "bullshit." Because there are a lot of Linux enthusiasts here.

Re: We Need a Better PC

#679

Post by oblio »

coldtea wrote: post #660
oblio wrote: post #589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Well, anyone that wears shorts and sandals and is over 20, deserves it. He only said "shorts". You know, adults can wear shorts as well.

Yes, if they have juvenile clothing sense. They can also wear baseball hats and other things -- after all it's a free country.

I don't live in the "free country" (I'm guessing you mean the US).

There's more to shorts than this:

http://www.sandalandsoxer.co.uk/linus+andrew.jpg

I'm from Europe and especially during the summer you can see people dressed like this:

http://www.menfashionhub.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/men-...

Some of them even go to work like this, especially if they don't work directly with customers and their companies don't have business attire requirements.

Re: We Need a Better PC

#680

Post by slantyyz »

spronkey wrote: post #648
slantyyz wrote: post #617

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run mostly dev tools, text editor, etc. But I have a bad habit of having more than 50 Chrome tabs open, and Chrome is a notorious pig on just about every OS. My Macbook Pro (2011, quad core i7) is famous for heating issues, but that aside, any app that forces use of the discrete GPU (at one point, even Coda did) would cause the fans to spin. I don't want to sound like a snob, but the 13" MBPs aren't comparable with…

Those 2011 quad cores are powerful machines, especially for their size (thickness, mainly). I've used HP Elitebooks with similar CPUs, that are close to twice as thick, yet still have worse heat issues. You've gotta work them pretty hard to start reaching thermal issues - as you are doing with lots of Chrome tabs :P

Yes, they are. In raw CPU benchmarks, it will still blow away just about any latest rev mac laptop that isn't a 15" Macbook Pro.

edit - as for the thermal issues, you don't have to work it hard, that model year had all sorts of issues in general, hence the Apple repair order that was issued last year. My MBP bricked itself a couple of months before that repair order was issued. That was the first laptop I ever had (Windows or Mac) that just up and died.

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