What's your dream laptop for running *nix?
What's your dream laptop for running *nix?
I'm currently using a Lenovo Thinkpad T410s, and it's getting ready to die. I think it's a great machine, but every computer eventually dies. It runs Debian 8 (Jessie), but it can't handle 9 (Stretch) without overheating. On top of that, I need to use the proprietary drivers! My computer got dropped on the floor today (not my fault!), and it got me thinking that maybe it's time to start shopping for a new laptop.
What are your ideas about what a good laptop for *nix OS's? Any recommendations? What should I look for? What should I avoid?
I love having a SSD HDD, and playing with different distros, but I'd like to avoid the headache I've had with the propitiatory Intel drivers. I like to have control of my hardware, but still use the latest software. If a Raspberry Pi or BeagleBone could match the performance of a laptop then I'd seriously consider using one.
if i could spend $4200 on a computer for shits and giggles i would shit giggles. I am looking at buying a new desktop and the price is to damn high >_<
What kind of specs are you looking for for your new desktop? Depending on the price range and specs you want, there's a decent chance that building it yourself could be a solid choice, if you're inclined to do so.
Well, as good as it can be using last years tech for both longevity and power for a good price(i always buy last years tech), where i can upgrade the GPU in the future to make it live even longer. The price range i am looking at to achieve this is 1500-1600£ or so. I don't feel like doing my own build this time, and i am considering one of these. It's like having someone else build your perfect gaming pc for you without any extra costs.
My current pc is a webhallen config, and i am sooo pleased with it. i plussed together the prices of the parts of my current pc before buying it, and i basically got the case and water cooling for free + them putting it together and a windows copy to go with.
That's definitely a solid deal for a built-to-order ish PC. Happy you've found something that works well for you!
I'd second this. My very first laptop was a Thinkpad and after years of dicking about with other brands I went back a few years ago and I doubt I'll use anything else again. Nobody else comes close in terms of build quality (apart from the special ultra-tough Panasonics but they have other issues) and those keyboards are just dreamy.
Plus I like being able to replace things if they break - my T440s is on it's second keyboard, but still going strong with Debian 10 (testing), still fast enough for my needs, still usable even for Blender and Kdenlive stuff.
I'd love an X1 Carbon. I still have a dream of a super modded x220 -- but there's not really much of a point for me.
It's been years since I had a Thinkpad. I love trackpoint, I love the keyboards (at least the older ones), and I love the overall feel of them. Most models are simply well made.
This is a great suggestion (both the first and the tricked out second one.)
Here is a link for a super modded x201. Pretty close to the x220.
Yesss!!! That would be so much fun. The Thinkpad community is amazing.
The new Pi 4 model with 4GB of RAM might finally be a replacement for a "real" computer. I'd wait and see what the reviews say.
Price not considered, I'd probably prefer the Librem 13 since it has a heavy focus on user freedoms. Given the low volumes they ship (and all of their R&D reverse-engineering Intel's ME) the cost is high relative to similarly spec'd laptops, so it's hard to recommend to anyone except hardcore FOSS zealots.
I second support behind Librem's line of products. [Though I think it's a tad unfair to label their customers as 'zealots :p... ]
That said, if you're going down the path off said FOSS "zealots" it might be hard to recommend a raspi. I love their hardware, but the lack of mainline support really irks me and just seems strange for a product with such a large user base [they are without question the largest SBC provider in the world].
Aren't the graphics drivers all BLOBs as well?
Up until now, yes, though it appears they have moved to an internally developed driver for the rpi4, which is open source and in mesa. So that's a plus :-)
One good thing about librem series of laptop is their excellent compatibility for QubeOS, but there is a good amount of choice nonetheless: https://www.qubes-os.org/hcl/
While I didn't have the chance to test it, I think this might be the most secure and privacy focused OS out there
Please justify this.
Can't really understand this mindset. Normally when people say this they mean "Linux is not like Windows, so it's not good".
As a desktop OS what do you need? Manage your files, browse the internet, listen to music, watch movies (netflix), use social media, google drive, e-mail, use thumb drives, plug your smartphone and other simple things. Everything works.
Any newbie friendly distro do this out of the box and without the resource hog.
Somehow if they buy a Mac, which is totally different than Windows and not everything is compatible, they take the time to adapt. When it comes to Linux people just brush aside.
You can even use 10 years old pcs as desktop with Linux without needing to upgrade to 8 or 16gb ram. I'm there.
I think when it comes to a Mac, it might be the value people attribute to it because of the amount of money they paid. Whereas Linux is free so it must not be that great, right?
Desktop Environments on Linux have come such a long way! I still remember trying to configure fvwm on Slackware 3.5, the first time I installed linux and I spent several days getting it to even work.
Nowadays, there is so much variety, there are DEs like KDE and GTK which come packed with everything under the sun and on the other end of the spectrum WMs like ratpoison, dwm, etc; Installing and configuring them have also become so much easier.
I used to use
fluxboxfor the longest time and loved it before switching toi3wm. Now, I can't understand how or why someone will not use a tiling window manager (more so on a laptop with limited screen real-estate); but that's a totally different discussion!I disagree. I generally have lots of workspaces and have applications assigned to them. When I open a specific application, it would automatically open in its workspace, and use all the screen space available to it.
I seldom have multiple windows on the same screen as well.
The wm makes it easy for me to move between workspaces, keep track of which workspace to open an application in, and overall reduces my mental load to manage windows at all, it essentially gets out of the way and lets me interact with my apps and dont have to fiddle with resizing windows, moving windows around, etc.
(for some apps like gimp or pidgin which spawn multiple windows, I also have layouts which sizes windows exactly the same everytime)
However, to each their own. Use the tools that work for you! But when it comes to tiling window managers, I am often surprised how many people I meet who aren't even aware of their existence.
Forget justifying what you quoted, I'd like a justification for this part:
I don't know of any OS that runs on SPARC, other than Linux these days. Or PowerPC. Or the myriad architectures listed here:
https://wiki.debian.org/SupportedArchitectures
I mean, it pretty much supports any silicon made...
Debian is well supported on all of those architectures...
Now, if Steam is supported, that's another question. It's proprietary, and as such, the onus is on Valve to port over the code.
But, everything in the debian repos builds on those architectures.
Does Windows run, at all, on PowerPC?
Your answer here makes is seem like you've not used Linux in the last 15 years or so.
Really. It feels like i'm reading the answer from back in time when i was using Mandrake Linux.
Then I am hardpressed to see which arch "things don't run well" on?
I hate to be that guy, but if this is the way you see *nix world why would you want a Linux laptop/desktop then? It seems you would be served better by another OS.
I am in the middle of getting a Linux laptop myself, I am hunting for Dell XPS 13 because of the form factor and screen.
In the world I live in am a better served by Linux then by Windows or Mac.
I feel like I am talking to someone who is in a bad relationship but still doesn't wants to breakup with their significant other. At a certain point you have to realize what you want out of an OS and maximize for that feature set and live w/ limitations that come w/ that OS. Nothing is perfect.
You already know the work-arounds to Linux development in a not *nix environment. (like connecting to an Cloud/AWS instance or, or running a VM instance on ur laptop)
to be glib
"Shit or get off the pot" Or realize you are not that into her (*nix)
A lot of Linux users just want a development environment and a web browser. If a machine can run those well I consider it a replacement (although viable alternative would be a better description).
I'd love to try the pi4 someday.
All my apps, except the browser and X11, are TUIs. It should work really well for me.
But i'll probably have a Ryzen too.
That said, my desktop PC is 7 years old and rock solid still (3rd gen intel i5, unfortunately). Been using Linux exclusively as desktop for more than 15 years
That's almost where I'm at, but I still want to have enough power under the hood to play some interesting games.
I wonder if the Pi 4 can run Minecraft well (Java Edition, not Pi Edition). That, combined with emulation, gives you a good set of high quality games.
Honestly? A macbook.
I'm no Apple fan but the battery life and build quality is pretty undeniably good. For what I do (mostly school, web browsing, and hobbyist programming) running linux on a mac would be pretty great.
Not an Apple fan boy, either (Linux is on my primary workstation, and I use Linux on DeX a whole heck of a lot)...
But yes, you nailed the points there.
Also, given it's a UNIX under the hood, I can step into Mac-land, and be mosty rocking and rolling once I get iterm2 installed.
Not a fan of no-user-freedom, but that seems to be inherent to both Apple since they were, well, Apple. And, inherent to using UNIX.
I've seen people swap Arch and Ubuntu onto certain macbook models, I'd never really want to use a stock macbook (though on some models it does break some of the usability).
Buying a mac to put linux is just plain stupidity.
The battery life is good because the software is made for the hardware and same for performance. The extra that you pay to apple is because of the software, if you are going to put linux don't expect it to behave like a macbook in terms of everything.
Don't tell people to do this, that's a wast of money.
Gawd no! I want a real laptop.
Intel...doesn't have proprietary drivers, though...what?
See: https://01.org
Yes, but as far as I'm aware, every single T410s is too modern for that.
It depends on the OS you're using. With Debian Jessie the Intel drivers are distributed with the non-free repositories. Major pain in the neck for me to get installed.
I think it's important to support vendors that ship computers with Linux pre-installed, so the last two laptops I bought were a Dell XPS 13 and a Dell G5 15. I use the former when I'm travelling, and the latter as my daily driver, and I'm quite happy with both.
As a gamer, the G5 comes close to being a dream laptop. It's powerful and cheap, and seems to have effective cooling. Drawbacks include loud fans, thick bezels, and a measly 8 GB of RAM (upgradeable).
Sadly Dell seems to be the only vendor selling Linux pre-installed here in Norway. If you live in the EU or North America, you'll probably have more choices. Also the Ubuntu version of the G5 seems to be gone from Dell's website now.
a lenovo, preferably without a backdoored CPU and with a hard switch for the microphone, camera and wifi.
Here's a similar topic that was posted recently that seems to align with your question.
As others have said, ThinkPads are pretty good (I still have my X230, and my old T400s is still alive and kicking as well).
But if we’re talking about my dream laptop, what I’d really love is to have a slim, light, low-power laptop with matte screen and good keyboard, paired up with a beefy machine that the laptop would call when it needed more resources, that monster would power up, do its job, which would be immediately and seamlessly present on the laptop, and then go back to hibernate until it is needed for a new job. An important part of that would be that data (apart from encrypted backups) would primarily stay on my laptop.
I guess, effectively I’m describing a modern interpretation of (just enough powerful for everday jobs) client + (on demand) mainframe time-sharing. It’s odd to me how we went from that to a situation where the PC has to be beefy as hell to run games, but all our private and important data, documents and files are in this massive opaque nebula of servers scattered around the globe.
I'm running a Thinkpad X250 on Debian 9 Stable which works great!
I am actually running Arch on a Samsung Ativ Book 9 from 2014 and it performs surprisingly well. I have no complaints and no plans to upgrade for the foreseeable future (here’s hoping!), which for a 4 year old laptop isn’t half bad. I don’t see Samsungs a lot in the wild or on arch forums so I wasn’t expecting a great experience, but it really has been seamless. Can’t really complain, so in that sense it’s a ‘dream’ system.
I don’t have advanced requirements. Being able to hibernate and resume while retaining my audio and video settings would be nice. I don’t care about battery life, since my laptops are plugged anyway.
But I don’t know how much of it is a hardware issue.
I'm aware of those possibilities, but if I where to buy a laptop to run Linux I would like to avoid "hacking" if possible. These custom solutions are not an issue in isolation, but when your personal configuration is maintained by more than 300 scripts things start to get messy :P
I could use some plug-and-play.
I wouldn't need that many scripts if I used a DE, but when I got used to tiling windows there was no turning back...
New Thinkpad X1E Gen2 with i7-9750H. Insanely expensive though, but maybe I can convince my workplace to get one :thinking:
I have Arch running on a Lenovo S340 and I like it a lot. It has an SSD and boots into Gnome in around 15 seconds. On the other hand, the majority of my usage is simply to ssh into remote servers, so I don't really push this one much.
Contrary to some of the other responses, I would recommend trying a rpi 4 if you don't need a high-powered machine. But I do agree with another responder that you might want to wait until the first wave of reviews comes in. The only reason I don't go with an rpi myself is that I don't want to be tethered to an electrical outlet.
Anything with either display port out or multiple HDMI outputs (if that exists). I'm currently on a Dell Inspiron for work and it's a great little laptop, but all I've got is a single HDMI port so I'm stuck using the laptop's screen and a secondary monitor. I'd much rather treat the laptop like a desktop (I didn't choose it, work did) and have dual monitors coming out of it.
I've tried several USB options including a few that "totally work for linux", but none of them do. Regardless of my Distro or kernel version.
My dream is one with macOS-level touchpad and display quality. I'm so spoiled by those two things it's hard to get away from apple for laptops, even as their lineup gets worse and worse. (typing this from my 2015 MPB)
I built my mid-step dream laptop (the goal is to justify the price for a System76 or something similar, but I want AMD graphics). It would have to be Windows and Linux compatible with two hard drives, though, and have displayport or hdmi output.
I have an X220 with custom BIOS I downloaded from a bios-customization forum that removes the wifi whitelist, and dropped a much improved intel chip in it, that also has bluetooth (but requires proprietary firmware). I also upgraded the stock bluetooth on it, before, but that firmware is non-free. I could run a libre distro in it now with no problems. I also did this for my g570. It has two hard drives, a 250GB msata running Windows, and a 1tb running Debian Buster. I like this setup because the two operating systems don't even see each other, and will never clash, which is good for if I need dev tools for college.
I just picked up an X230 on eBay and I plan to upgrade it. I think I’m mostly just searching for a project to work on in my free time, so I plan add more RAM, add an SSD, coreboot the computer, maybe swap out the Bluetooth/WiFi card(s), get a nice Arch Linux setup going, and maybe do a keyboard swap/nitrocaster mod. Eventually I want to do some more development in my free time, but just fixing up a machine on which to do that work is a reward in itself.
A somewhat large tablet with battery life for all day that can run a browser and a terminal. I'd pair that with an ergodox for input and be happy.
Last time I looked around, I had a tough time finding something that was well supported by linux though.