Do Devs Need Custom Linux Laptops? Dell Thinks So

http://adtmag.com/blogs/watersworks/2012/12/custom-linux-laptops.aspx

by rhufnagel • 14 years ago

13 42 14 years ago

Karl_Rove• 14 years ago

Yes or at least VM's :)

chank• 14 years ago

No, but the Dell XPS 13 seems to be a step in the right direction as far as something that could be competitive with a MBA.

AYBABTME2• 14 years ago

The only thing is that it costs about twice the price.

drivebyacct24• 14 years ago

That's so untrue, I'm embarrassed for your comment.

saym• 14 years ago

Does MBA stand for Macbook Air?

jiggy2011• 14 years ago

Do Devs need more choice of 1366x768 laptops? No.

vhf• 14 years ago

Exactly. Lenovo was on the right track a few years ago with X200(s), providing 1440x900 on 12.3" with hardware very well supported on Linux.

fharper1961• 14 years ago

I'm suffering through the usual problems of setting up a new linux transportable laptop right now. It is an ASUS R900V, and Ubuntu 12.04 currently has problems with wifi, graphics, and sound! I would love to be able to buy a transportable (large screen 1920x1080, 8GB, fast cpu) for a reasonabl price in Europe, and that is well supported by Ubuntu.

gauravvijay• 14 years ago

Without any hardware choices !!!

kephra2• 14 years ago

where have all the Linux netbooks gone?

my requirements for a Laptop are:

- it must be cheap, $300 is fine, because a Laptop can easily be stolen, or damaged.

- it must be light, less than 2lbs, because I don't own a car, and still want to carry my laptop around

- it must boot Linux from network to boot into backup cycle.

- the hardware must be 100% supported by free drivers.

- it should not bundle a Microsoft tax.

I don't care much about the preinstalled OS. I'll replace it anyway. I see no sense in bundling a spyware Ubuntu, and even less in some cloud service crapware on a developers laptop. I don't know if other developers think similar, but I fear that the hyped Sputnik will just give Dell the excuse to abandon Linux laptops again, because of low sales.

The class of $300, 2lbs Linux laptops created fear for Intel and Microsoft instead. Thats why they are no longer sold.

hdevalence• 14 years ago

> The class of $300, 2lbs Linux laptops created fear for Intel and Microsoft instead. Thats why they are no longer sold.

No, the reason they generally aren't sold is because consumers don't want them -- most consumers would rather have a tablet, as evidenced by sales. It's not some massive conspiracy, it's just that your needs are not the needs of most consumers.

illicium• 14 years ago

Chromebook?

jdboyd• 14 years ago

The Samsung Chromebook is $249 and doesn't include MS tax. Alas, it is 2.5 pounds rather than 2. I don't know about the boot into backup cycle.

kephra2• 14 years ago

oops "boot into backup cycle" is my method of installing new systems. I create them in a chroot/lxc on a NFS server, and boot the real system or laptop by PXE, rsync it on the disk and make it bootable. The real system will also rsync itself to this master, and the master is doing incremental backup.

So every system has a backup before it even exists on its own disk, and installation is just a normal restore of a backup.

Also on Chromebook, specs tells some funny CPU, and only 2+16GB of SSD. Thats much lower than an old eeepc1000. Especially as it likely ships some funny crippleware, and not a minimal Debian, Arch or Gentoo.

drivebyacct24• 14 years ago

They put a better screen in the Dev XPS 13 and it will replace my MBA as fast as they will let me place an order.

acc013• 14 years ago

If by "custom" you mean rebranded consumer hardware coming with some Linux distribution I'm never going to use preinstalled, the answer is likely to be "no."

Clarification added later that I never anticipated to be needed: my point here is that there are more significant departures from mainstream needed to call something a "custom Linux laptop for developers": most likely, significant hardware changes.

VonGuard• 14 years ago

You've never heard of Ubuntu?

acc013• 14 years ago

You've probably misread "going to use" as "heard of."

zoowar• 14 years ago

Amazon Spyware results: skin care, shoes, day spa

drivebyacct24• 14 years ago

Yes, they should absolutely just sell the hardware with no OS installed. That makes sense. Wow, a new account for that comment?

acc013• 14 years ago

Remember we are talking about "power user" hardware, or something like that. Of course I'm going to install the O/S of my choice on my work laptop.

ErikAugust• 14 years ago

http://zareason.com/shop/UltraLap-430.html Gonna purchase this.

SiVal2• 14 years ago

It seems to me that Google, with its almost ridiculous surplus of CS PhDs and no legacy desktop OS baggage to drag around is almost perfectly suited to taking Linux and building a power user desktop OS on top of it. If they did, they could build the hardware, too, or at least spec it so that there would be a lot of hardware options that all "just worked" out of the box.

As Apple built a beautiful consumer OS on top of a *nix core, Google could build a power-user OS on top of Linux for the business / developer / smart, skilled people-with-work-to-do market that its PhDs ought to understand more than they understand consumers.

With their money, they could come up with the next gen business platform and build into it the web services orientation they live for and make the hardware / OS / drivers combo to rival Apple, but for influencers instead of the consumers. (They have enough money to buy nvidia if they can't get Linux drivers.)

Who else is better positioned to produce the next gen power-user platform as Windows fades and Apple makes it clear they are a consumer electronics company?

zmjones• 14 years ago

do want.

gvb• 14 years ago

You mean like an office suite https://drive.google.com/, laptop computers http://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/devices/, tablets and phones http://www.google.com/nexus/?

fakeer4• 14 years ago

No. He certainly meant sth analogous to Windows or OSX or Ubuntu &c as one system, not fragments/parts of an OS.

fakeer4• 14 years ago

They should first build an IDE for Android rather than keep piggybacking forever on Eclipse which is not very lightweight or suitable for a specific purpose, let's say.

jrockway2• 14 years ago

Why? Eclipse is just reusable UI widgets and a Java editor. That's basically what you want for writing an "Android IDE", whatever that might be. (I personally just use Emacs.)

gizmo6863• 14 years ago

Eclipse is a popular Java IDE (with plugins for other languages). Android programs are java with an XML file describing the UI. No need to re-invent the wheel here. If you have another IDE you want to use, see if there is an android plugin for it, or right the XML files yourself and use any java IDE, or use a plaintext editor and curse Google for making Android run Java.

dkuntz22• 14 years ago

Googlers use a slightly modified version of Ubuntu LTS releases (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goobuntu)...

Well, not exclusively, if I recall correctly, they get to choose Goobuntu, Windows, or OS X.

chimeracoder2• 14 years ago

Google is only distributed internally, not externally, correct?

Also, I believe they stopped offering Windows a couple of years ago.

w1ntermute• 14 years ago

> Canonical added the idea of connecting the laptop to the cloud, so that users could develop on LXC containers, replicate the environment on the actual client, and then jettison it to the cloud via the JuJu service deployment and orchestration framework.

This is a very nice idea (although with mobile share plans, we may see 4G support gain popularity in laptops, making this less of a factor). However, I feel that the hardware was neglected to the point that software gimmicks can't make up for it.

I wrote about my experiences with the ThinkPad X1 Carbon on HN a week back[0], and the hardware simply blows the XPS 13 out of the water. The fact that installing Xubuntu (which is much more pleasant for devs and power users than Ubuntu) on an X1 Carbon is laughably easy doesn't help Dell's case.

0: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4848375

Do Devs Need Custom Linux Laptops? Dell Thinks So

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