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Best ultrabook for linux? [April 2013 edition]

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Re: Best ultrabook for linux? [April 2013 edition]

#71

Post by davewasthere »

felixc wrote: post #3

I'm very happy with my Samsung Series 9. Different marketing people mean different things by "full HD", so I'm not sure if it meets your specs, but 1600×900 is decent enough for me on that size; and it really, really is a gorgeous display. Battery-wise, when I was travelling and had wifi/bluetooth off, low screen backlight, etc, it was pushing 9 hours.

I'd agree with that. I actually prefer the keyboard on my backup laptop (An x121e Thinkpad), but yeah, love the Samsung's screen. Battery life isn't brilliant at 5-6 hours though. I miss my old Samsung x360 which used to give me closer to 8.

Ubuntu installed just fine on the S9. Everything seemed to work OOTB. But ended up reverting to Win7 for a contract I was working on while travelling.

The new 1080P Series 9 would be okay, but I'd be sorely tempted on a Chromebook Pixel.

Re: Best ultrabook for linux? [April 2013 edition]

#72

Post by thelittlelisper »

thelittlelisper wrote: post #70
leashless wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have an x220 but I haven't been able to get the power consumption that low. I have tried quite a few things. Could you suggest a link/reference/method please?

Just 3 things: - Install powertop and enable all suggested tweaks - Depending on your kernel you should downclock your i915 graphics card and force pcie_aspm - Later kernels (>3.6?) have a power regression which leads to higher consumption in Sandy Intel architectures

These are my energy tweaks for a 2008 MacBook, I don't have my x220 here, although they are machine independent:

echo 5 > /proc/sys/vm/laptop_mode echo 1500 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_writeback_centisecs echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/nmi_watchdog

echo 1 > /sys/module/snd_hda_intel/parameters/power_save for i in /sys/bus//devices//power/control; do echo auto > $i; done for i in /sys/class/scsi_host//link_power_management_policy; do echo min_power > $i; done

for i in /sys/class/rfkill//soft; do echo 1 > $i; done

For the kernel parameters, a simple Google search should get you going.

What's the watt consumption you achieve? I must note I run Arch Linux with Xmonad and no desktop environment.

Re: Best ultrabook for linux? [April 2013 edition]

#73

Post by pyre »

pajju wrote: post #46

This decision is purely a function of cost, portability, features. And you might have to compromise on something, be prepared. My choice: Asus Ultrabooks. In my case, I couldn't afford a Macbook Air, (I badly wanted a MAC, I couldn't buy with my budget, but just somehow managed to get an ASUS Ultrabook with EMI's) About Asus Ultrabooks-- Compared to MAC's: - They are much much cheaper, ( almost half the price) not co…

(Pedant alert)

MAC => http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAC_address

Mac => http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh

Re: Best ultrabook for linux? [April 2013 edition]

#74

Post by theirishpenguin »

Would totally recommend the X1 Carbon - though it's a while since it was released so maybe there is something recent that trumps it. Build quality is top notch - AFAIK it has the only trackpad and keyboard that can compete with the MBA (Asus Zenbook - I've heard - falls down on the track pad front, despite more pixels). SSD is fast. And it charges in 30 mins to full charge, which I didn't care for when I bought it but is really really useful. I would recommend the i5/8GB RAM version. And Linux works great on it. I'm running Ubuntu.

The X1 is insanely portable. The extra bit of real estate the 14 inch screen provides is great for everyday work. Ya, I loves it!

Re: Best ultrabook for linux? [April 2013 edition]

#75

Post by cjbprime »

jonnydover wrote: post #57
cjbprime wrote: post #9

I'm considering getting the Pixel and running Linux on it, but am extremely annoyed by the lack of upgradable storage. The $250 Samsung ARM Chromebook has USB3 (~100MB/s) and a fast (~50MB/s) SD card controller. The $1300 Pixel only has USB2 and a slow (USB2) SD card controller and no real PCIe slots, which means that you can never get more than ~17MB/s when trying to increase the tiny internal storage.

Honestly, the $250 ARM Chromebook is among the very best things you could do for development (in my opinion). I can use ChromeOS for when I'm not doing anything hardcore and then just open a chroot jail (via crouton https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton ) with a full xubuntu/xmonad install when I really want to get cracking. Both open so quickly it's almost disorienting, either from start or from sleep. It's the same…

It's 1366x768, which is the worst resolution available on modern laptops. The resolution makes it unusable for development, in my opinion. (I have one too.)

Re: Best ultrabook for linux? [April 2013 edition]

#77

Post by cjbprime »

theirishpenguin wrote: post #74

Would totally recommend the X1 Carbon - though it's a while since it was released so maybe there is something recent that trumps it. Build quality is top notch - AFAIK it has the only trackpad and keyboard that can compete with the MBA (Asus Zenbook - I've heard - falls down on the track pad front, despite more pixels). SSD is fast. And it charges in 30 mins to full charge, which I didn't care for when I bought it bu…

Downsides: doesn't have full HD, and you can't upgrade the RAM from 4GB to 8GB without paying for many other additions that you don't need.

Re: Best ultrabook for linux? [April 2013 edition]

#78

Post by jhill925 »

I did quite a bit of research for a new ultrabook. I am a software consultant and needed a hardware update. One of the surprising things I found was that most of the ultrabooks do not have dedicated home and end keys which I regularly use for coding. I finally came across the Lenovo Yoga book, it was almost high-def, had all of the keyboard keys including home and end, however as soon as I got the laptop out of the box, the keyboard had different "flex" in different areas of the keyboard. When typing "0" in the upper right the whole keyboard actually moved. This was disappointing as 3 other Yogas I tried had the exact same problem.

I returned the Yoga and found the Acer S7 (It does not have home and end keys, but it has dedicated page up and page down) which I plan to remap to home and end. (The base Acer ultrabook does not have these).

I have been quite impressed with the S7, the screen is incredible, keyboard is nice. Battery life is not excellent, but that is not a show stopper since the longest of my in-person meetings are less than a few hours.

Good luck! Finding just the right "ultrathin" ultrabook for development can be a little tricky right now.

This laptop was not in any of the big-box retailers in my town, so I had to get it on Amazon. Below is the affiliate link. If you care, just copy out the asin... http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00AVYPLPY/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...

Re: Best ultrabook for linux? [April 2013 edition]

#79

Post by dustin999 »

Whatever you do, DO NOT get an ultrabook with a discrete graphics card to run Linux. As someone else said, it's a pain in the ass, and it actually ruined my Dell XPS 15 that managed to live just long enough to get out of warranty.

I had been running bumblebee for months, and yes, you can install it and make it work and get almost as much battery life out of linux as you get on windows. That said, bumblebee is error prone, sometimes doesn't survive kernel upgrades, etc. Several times I installed basic Ubuntu updates only to find bumblebee was disabled and my battery life gone to hell.

Sounds like an easy fix (just turn bumblebee back on), but in my experience, laptops aren't made to absorb the heat from a discrete graphics card all the time. I'm 90% sure that's why my Dell XPS 15 bit the dust after just a year, due to a shoddy implementation in powering the Nvidia card up on demand.

In my case, I just bought a new system to replace my Dell XPS15, and opted for a 13" Macbook Pro running OSX. If I wasn't running OSX, I'd probably go with an ASUS, again without the discrete card. Get a nice display, with an ultrabook, I think that's extremely important.

Re: Best ultrabook for linux? [April 2013 edition]

#80

Post by dustin999 »

gambiting wrote: post #19
octo_t wrote: post #14

Macbook Airs (or 13" MBP Retina) is (in my experience) the nicest choice for an ultrabook. - Installing Linux is really easy - Macbook Air isnt' full hd, but the retina is obviously better than full hd - they've all got SSDs - Macbook keyboards are amazing - my air will last for about 8-9 hours of light use (vim etc) between charges

Does it really work that long with Linux? I have the 13" Air(2012 Ivy Bridge model) and while on Mac OS and only using Eclipse/XCode for work I never get it past 6 hours mark. But in any case, I honestly don't see many reasons why would I install Linux on it in favour of Mac OS. I can see why would I swap Windows for Linux,but I find myself able to do 99% of linux stuff on MacOS just fine. It's got the terminal, it's…

Agreed with you, totally off topic, but I spend most of my days doing web development. I opted for OSX over Linux because I wanted to run Photoshop (Gimp sucks), native Word/Excel (LibreOffice sucks), etc. and got tired of constantly rebooting to Windows to export an image in Photoshop.
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