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Comment by massysett | Hacker News Reader

Linux is not bad. But nobody is making decent Linux hardware, and the instant you slap Linux onto a Windows machine, battery life plummets. My days buying Windows machines and struggling to get Linux on them are over. I'd rather buy a Mac and get a Unix I can use without having to install it.

Is anyone actually selling a decent preinstalled Linux laptop? If I really wanted to use Linux I would rather buy a Windows laptop and run Linux in a VM.

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> Is anyone actually selling a decent preinstalled Linux laptop?

I have heard good things about the Ubuntu line of Dell: http://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/555/campaigns/xps-linux-lapt... The Precision 5510 with a Quadro GPU and 32 Gb of RAM seems gorgeous.

They are OK, but to be honest you might as well get the Windows version from the Microsoft store and slap Linux on it. For the same price you are getting a copy of Windows and a somewhat better customer experience.

How is the customer experience better, when you have to change the OS yourself, and presumably can only get support for an OS you no longer use?

    > the instant you slap Linux onto a Windows machine, 
    > battery life plummets

Yep. I ran Arch on my MBA for a while, thought I might have more luck than Windows machines (since it's easier to find people doing the same thing) but driver support is meh.

I'm perfectly happy to configure things - it's why I don't really want to be on macOS, and oh boy do I miss i3wm - but as soon as I was looking up recommendations for configuring my CPU fan and power management on obscure blog posts, I gave up on it.

I think there's definitely a market for a Linux developer laptop that's a single awesome machine, that then makes a great single target for the kind of app support seen on macOS.

ThinkPads have always run Linux well. Dell makes laptops with Linux pre-installed, some explicitly for developers, even going so far as to make the manufacturer of some components (touchpad, IIRC) build and upstream Linux drivers.

My last try was Fedora and Mint on last years Dell XPS 13. Battery life was fine (comparable to my MBP) but the experience when plugging in my low-DPI destkop monitor was terrible. Supposedly the new Wayland-based distros provide a better story for that.

Other than that Gnome3 finally behaves nicely across the board. Still a lot of inconsistencies between applications (QT-based programs look like crap on Gnome and vice-versa, and TK programs look like crap everywhere) but all in all the experience was way better than in 2011 which was the last year I used Linux as my base OS.

Unless you're doing something that absolutely needs to use the Linux kernel, I've found the new Linux Subsystem on Windows really good for Unix-like tooling. It even runs Tensorflow!

> and the instant you slap Linux onto a Windows machine, battery life plummets.

So admittedly the last time I did this was in 2003, but back then, slapping linux on my Thinkpad tripled the battery life.

Has Windows power management gotten so good and Linux so bad that it's swapped now?

In linux I could do things like turn off disk syncing so the hard drive didn't spin up. I know with SSD that's not a thing now, but I always assumed there were things you could control with Linux that you couldn't control with Windows.

The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon is actually among the strongest MacBook competitors. It has a really strong i7 provessor, 512GB SSD and 8 GB of ram. All of this in a light carbon unibody enclosure, and at 1499 (without OS- saves Windows 10 licensing costs) its even pretty cheap for the specs you get.

It's only a competitor against the 13" version of the MacBook Pro though.

How about Ubuntu on an Asus Zenbook? Asus seems to make solid hardware year-over-year without a lot of "surprises"

I have a 2012 Zenbook UX31A on Arch Linux and I'm very happy with it, especially how it seemingly hasn't aged at all (except that I have to tighten the screws every once in a while).

The only thing that might prompt me to replace it someday is the 4 GB of RAM, which is frequently a problem with larger Minecraft modpacks.

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