Hacker News Reader

Comment by veltas | Hacker News Reader

I'm using a T60 right now. Love the keyboard feel, I enjoy a 4:3 resolution too.

Can anyone recommend a newer laptop with a nice keyboard? I find all new laptops keyboards feel like a flat piece of plastic.

View on HN

The ASUS Zephyrus series (I'm on a 2022 G14) are fantastic if you can get past the mild gamer aesthetic. Great magnesium build. Lots of keyboard travel. Tons of ports (USB-A, HDMI, etc.) Touchpad works great on Linux, but wake from suspend results in mild bork on the current kernel (fans won't turn on at all, speaker amplifier stays shut off so audio is very quiet) on. Patches resolving this are available [1] and will likely be mainlined in 6.1 [2]. Performance from the AMD CPU/GPU and Micron SSD is bonkers awesome. You can get around 10 hours of use on Linux with conservative backlight settings and disabling the discrete GPU. To top it off, many components are easily replaced. I just upgraded the memory in mine from 16GB to 40GB (the is a socketed SODIMM and 8GB of soldered on memory, so I replaced the 8GB SODIMM).

The m.2 NVME drive is also upgradeable, as is the wireless card. My only real complaint is that the display suffers from backlight bleed along the edges in my unit. That said, the display is also pretty dang great: anti-glare coated, high-refresh, bright, and color accurate.

[1] https://asus-linux.org/ [2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/ASUS-ROG-More-With-Linux-6.1

Yeah, after years of stagnation, the offers for X86 laptops are finally amazing and I expect them to get even better next year with mobile Ryzen 7000 and RDNA 3 APUs moving to 5nm, and who knows, maybe mobile 13th Gen Intel and RTX 4000 could also be good.

My current 13" Ryzen 5800 laptop is no slouch but its Vega iGPU is a bit too long in the tooth for any kind of games, screen could be brighter and battery life could be better. I'm very excited for a laptop upgrade next year.

Does the gpu have a physical mux though?

I usually don’t even consider laptops with dedicated nvidia graphics because dealing with nvidia drivers is more hassle than gain (I don’t do anything gpu-intensive and the intel gpu is enough for me).

A physical mux means you can effectively shut down the dedicated graphics but still drive outputs with the intel embedded gpu. And save battery.

Can that laptop do that?

The laptop I have does have a "MUX switch" but is controlled in software. As far as I understand, the benefits of the MUX switch are primarily to graphics performance when working with the discrete GPU. At any rate, my laptop (G14 2022) is all AMD and I haven't had any trouble with the amdgpu drivers on recent Linux kernels.

The MNT Reform 2 has a mechanical keyboard with a nice feel (and it's using off-the-shelf switches so you can replace them if you'd prefer), but it has a weird layout.

The most recent laptops with an actual nice Thinkpad keyboard were X220 or T420, everything after that is chiclets.

> The most recent laptops with an actual nice Thinkpad keyboard were X220 or T420, everything after that is chiclets.

I agree that the Sandy Bridge era (2011) ThinkPads were the last to have a proper 7 row keyboard layout, but there's slightly more to it.

ThinkPad keyboards are made by a variety of OEMs. For the 2011 models, the manufacturers were NMB, Chicony and Alps. The consensus within the ThinkPad enthusiast community is that keyboards from NMB offered the best typing feel, followed Chicony and finally Alps.

You can tell if you have a NMB keyboard by carefully prising off one of the keycaps: if you see a red rubber dome, it's a NMB keyboard. (grey = Chicony; white = Alps). Each keyboard manufacturer has a unique part number (FRU - field replaceable unit in the IBM/Lenovo parlance). Online sellers often mix and match FRUs, so it can't be relied upon to get the NMB keyboard - you need to ask the seller what colour the domes are. The NMB keyboards are sadly becoming more rare and expensive by the day.

FWIW, chiclet machines often had better feel than the 7-row predecessors. E.g. T440p with non-backlit keyboard. This is due to improvements in chassis design - the T440p's magnesium alloy rollcage was solid underneath the keyboard, resulting in 0 keyboard flex.

Agreed. Of course the *40 series had a unique feature of getting security and infra architect consultants to slam them repeatedly on the office desks in clients' offices, due to their special and innovative combined top trackpad / trackpoint buttons :D

(I hear ThinkPad is trying that a abomination again, which means my t25 may have to live another 5 years)

The trackpad is horrible on the *40 series! Can be swapped by the one from the ones from the next generation though.

Your T25 will end up like mine, with a cracked case because of poor design.

Possibly; I did drop it from large height onto hard floor once, and ever so slightly cracked a corner. A little black sugru fixed it up like new. It survived 3 years of weekly travels before covid otherwise, and several years of young kids since, so I'm hopeful that case won't be a problem.

There is a structural issue with the right side hinge, it's mounted in plastic.

You can also mod an X230 or a T430 with a xx20 keyboard, which is worth it as the CPU/GPU and USB ports are all a decent upgrade. You need to flash the embedded controller though, to remap the keys - also worth it, to use a third-party battery. The process is not too difficult, you just need to compile the stuff, make a bootable flash drive, and boot from it - no soldering etc.

https://github.com/hamishcoleman/thinkpad-ec

I think some people are doing mobo swaps (a tiny chinese group called something 51) so you can keep the T60 shell and have a gen 10 core i5 or similar.

51nb is the site

The Thinkpads retain good feel until the *30 series. They are 'chiclet', but having had a T40, T60p and X230, I am confident the X230 has the best feel and same travel. The depth of travel continued to the T450 and T450s, but the feel dropped off by then.

There is a gaming laptop with mechanical keys also.

A related question: I very much enjoy the keyboard of my T550 and would like to have some similar USB or wireless Keyboard with German layout, numpad and backlight for my PC as well. Lenovo does not offer anything that matches all these criteria. Any recommendations from other brands?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com