Ask HN: The state of non-mac laptops?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3547130

by CJefferson • 14 years ago

8 19 14 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I am considering a new laptop, to replace my ageing MacBook, and would like to move to Linux.

Does anyone have any recommendations for quality developer machines? I am suprised in particular it seems hard to get a machine with a small (up to 64GB?) SSD and also tradition HD. I would like an SSD, but can't imagine living in 128GB of space (which seems where SSDs start to get unreasonably priced).

manuscreationis2• 14 years ago

I would also like to know this.

Sadly, the only advice I have is: Anything but Lenovo.

I've had a few over the years from different jobs, and they typically always seem to have exceptionally poor performance.

revorad4• 14 years ago

I'm surprised to hear about your bad experience with Lenovo. Most people seem to really like them. What went wrong for you?

manuscreationis2• 14 years ago

Replying to both questions about my bad experiences:

One of my first work laptops was a handed-down lenovo, so that may or may not have been lenovos fault... However the person doing the handing down was certain not buying a new lenovo. It performed ok, but never anything stellar.

It had a lot of weird quirks - it would suddenly flip it's CapsLock state, so i'd need to turn it on to shut it off. It would stay like that till I rebooted.

Eventually, the red button died... but it didn't just die, it forcibly dragged my mouse to the bottom of the screen. I had to fight with the thing to find the option to disable the button in the control panel before I could regain control of the computer. Plugging in an external mouse didn't help, the red button overrode all mouse commands.

Finally ,the thing all but gave out on me. I got a 2nd hand me down laptop, a Dell, before finally getting a real PC to work from.

That was my old job...

This current job, I have a T410, and I hate the thing. Everyone here has the same laptop (one guy has a slightly better model, but he hates his as well). They lock up, they have poor performance, they come with worthless bloatware, things fail for no reason... it goes on and on. Here are some examples:

Performance: It came with 4GBs of RAM. My old Dell had 4GBs, and I could keep 2-3 Visual Studios open at a time, no problem. This thing struggled to keep a single instance open. Keeping 2 open, damn near unusable. It would routinely take me 40-50 seconds to switch applications around (this is not an exaggeration. It would lock up and become unresponsive for a number of reasons, mainly switching between applications). For a developer, this is killer.

Sometimes while typing, the USB port my keyboard is attached to will die. Sometimes redocking fixes this. Sometimes I need to reboot.

Same thing for my bluetooth mouse. Sometimes I can pull the nub out and re-insert it and fix the problem, other times I have to reboot. Unlike the keyboard, the bluetooth nub stays with the laptop itself, so it isn't just that the dock has issues (Although it could... it was made by Lenovo)

Speaking of undocking, sometimes the screen goes dark, and never comes back. Other times, when I redock it, it's forgotten the video settings. Occasionally, it will only partially forget them, and turn on one of the 2 external monitors. I'd say I need to fix the monitor setup atleast 2-3 times per week.

Sometimes when it goes to sleep, it can't wake up.

When it isn't docked, and I'm using the built in screen, the color pallet gets off-kilter, and there is massive dithering over wide portions of the screen. Whole swaths of things get dithered, with green and red dots filling in the blanks. The severity of this seems to change day to day - sometimes it's fine, sometimes it's the entire screen, sometimes it's just a portion...

This isn't just my issue, mind you - Every single person in our team has these laptops, and experiences these issues.

ThinkPads used to be great, when IBM owned the brand. They were rock solid tanks.

Lenovo destroyed the name and the quality.

If I never use another Lenovo for as long as I live, I could die a happy man

quangv2• 14 years ago

I think low-end Lenovo's (especially older models they did right after acquisition of IBM thinkpad division), are not as refine and of the same quality as their Thinkpads T-Series...

I bought an R series Lenovo for my sister, a few years ago thinking that the only difference would be added size and weight... boy was I wrong!

But now I have a newer Lenovo L512, and they redeemed themselves...

polyfractal3• 14 years ago

I find this surprising as well - I love my Lenovos. Six years ago I had a Thinkpad T60 and loved it to death. It is still going strong after six years (although it did need a fan replacement after five).

I'm currently on an Edge 420 and it is a pretty nice machine. Not as nice as their business lines (T series, W series) but a killer bargain for the price - especially because I got a refurb from their outlet.

Basically, I'm going to buy Lenovo for the rest of my life if I can.

revorad4• 14 years ago

Plug: I'm working on this exact problem. Are you based in the US? I only have UK laptops at the moment, and the data needs updating, but have a look at http://giniji.com. Sign up to get notified when I add more laptops - http://giniji.com/newsletter

Meanwhile, I can help you find a laptop manually. What's your budget and size preference? Do you have any other specific requirements?

Would you be interested in buying a pre-installed Linux laptop?

CJefferson• 14 years ago

Your site is quite interesting, and I am in the UK. I find it quite useful.

On an iPad 1, I found editing the 'lower' value for the price seemed to drive the iPad browser mad, making it slow and then crash.

revorad4• 14 years ago

Hey, thanks for trying it out. I'm glad you like it.

The slider acts a bit funny on touch devices, so yeah I need to fix that. For now, you can get around that by editing the price fields directly by typing into them.

I'm updating the laptops dataset now, so if you check back on Monday, it will have many more new options. If you don't mind, I'd like to get a bit more feedback from you. Please email me at hrishi@giniji.com or let me know your email.

ImprovedSilence2• 14 years ago

I was in the market for a laptop this fall. I looked at the system 76 ones pretty heavily: http://www.system76.com/ They seem to be pretty good, come with Ubuntu, are very customizable, and one option is the hybrid harddrive, both ssd and HD.

Disclaimer, I went with the Macbook Air. Worth every penny if you ask me. Comes with tons of developer tools (yeah yeah, gotta get their developer app) Except that I've been jaded by Mac Ports in some cases, but I guess I should try fink or the likes. But that's more the tools like Ocatve and gimp I've had trouble with, not the predominant developer tools.

bartonfink• 14 years ago

As someone who's been looking at system76 for a while, what made you pull the Apple trigger?

ImprovedSilence2• 14 years ago

Nicer, more polished complete package. The MBA is small, thus more portable, battery lasts long (just look at the brick of an adapter to the system76 laptops, those batteries suck power). Plus Imma sucker for shiny things, and that backlit keyboard is NICE.

My desktop runs Ubuntu, and I don't have any other of Apple's products (sans an iPod, that I haven't synced in over 2 years...) I was basically looking for something Unix based, that is rock solid.

People say Macs are underpowered for their price, but I really didn't see anything from the PC side that could compete with the Air's complete package. (fromfactor, hardware integeration, 10second boot time.) Plus I really didn't want a windows machine, and go through the painstaking process of making sure Ubuntu supports all its hardware, so I wanted something with a pre-loaded OS I was going to use (my decision came down to system76, or Apple). Plus when you get xTools, or whatever Apples dev suite is, you get more pre-packaged developer tools than you do on Ubuntu, (all the python, perl, php, c, Ruby, etc you could want) Also, being completely new to Mac, I have zero gripes with Lion, unlike lots of other people, I love the way they use gestures, I love the fullscreen views (especially for browsing in chrome), I rely on several desktops, and I find myself using the launchpad often for applications that don't run in the terminal.

The only thing I regret is not getting the 256 GB SSD for an extra $400...

[edit]: I realize the original question about non-mac laptops. What I liked about system76 was it came pre-packaged with a Linux distro, so I wasn't going to have to fuss about with hardware integration. Their website is clean, easy to navigate and understand options, unlike every PC company out there (just looking at Dells and Lenovos websites gave me headaches and I found it impossible to sort through the rubbish to find any computer I would like.) I also emailed support at system76 when I had a question, I got back a very helpful and friendly answer, and they even invited me to stop by their shop if I was in Colorado. I'll defiately look at them when I in the market for a power desktop next.

quangv2• 14 years ago

I'm currently using a Lenovo Thinkpad L512, running Linux-Mint.

There's some little bugs, not as refine as a MacBook, but it has a trackpoint!

---

Any higher-end thinkpads you'd still be in good shape. My research (a month ago) lead me to these models:

-Lenovo Thinkpad

-Dell Latitude or Precision

-HP EliteBook

-Toshiba Tecra

why these models? You'll notice that the higher end laptops that aren't Macs have trackpoints... I think I'm bias btw...

polyfractal3• 14 years ago

It's true, once you go trackpoint you can never go back...

corydominguez• 14 years ago

Trackpoints are awesome simply because the state of non mac touch pads is so terrible.

blcArmadillo• 14 years ago

Like other's I'd definitely recommend a Thinkpad. I've had my current Thinkpad (an x61) for almost four years now. I'm in college ATM so as you can imagine it gets dragged around everywhere. Haven't had any issues with it other than having to replace the battery but that's standard. I'd recommend staying away from the Thinkpad Edge though; not a huge fan of them personally.

Ask HN: The state of non-mac laptops?

Related Stories