I bought a Lenovo Thinkpad T450 brand new for £400 (~$500) a year ago. Works perfectly with Linux out of the box (all the extra buttons work by default with Ubuntu) and the keyboard is great.
Main difference from the previous macbook I was using? A new Apple charging cable costs £69 in the UK (you have to buy it with the power supply). The equivalent fix costs £3 for the Thinkpad.
Hmmmm, I wouldn’t mind a Dell XPS 15. 
It’s great that it has a non-glossy screen option.
I find the Unity desktop environment in recent Ubuntus to be easy to use right from the get-go, and unlike many desktop environments that run on Linux it doesn’t seem ugly to me. Here’s a screenshot of how I tend to work:
Windows can be dragged to the left/right/top/bottom to set them to use half. (It used to work for quarters in the corners, too - that’s one thing I would like to reconfigure.) My launcher bar is on the left and is revealed when the pointer touches that edge as I find having icons visible all the time distracting, and this is a simple GUI config setting.
When was that, on what kind of hardware? I don’t think that’s a real problem these days, especially with Dells and other laptops being available which do support Linux.
I’m not into audio or video production myself, but in case you hadn’t already seen them here a few bits of software I have in my list of interesting software that runs on Linux:
http://www.darktable.org/ (a brilliant RAW processor - this one I do use)
3 posts were split to a new topic: What kind of/which window manager/desktop environment do you prefer?
Nice review
If anyone followed the advice of buying an XPS 13 and had magically appearing problems that sound wouldn’t work (although the OS thought it was working), I believe it was some kernel upgrade (if you install those)… upgrading to a 4.8 series kernel solved it for me.
Sorry, this is the most typical Linux thing I ever wrote and it makes me sad it happened to me for the first time in ~7 years of Linux usage when I use a Laptop meant to run Linux.
I think it’s about time we start taking the politics of technology seriously. Get a GNU approved laptop from minifree.
The XPS screen is beautiful, having no border makes a bigger difference than you’d think. But the biggest feature is actually owning your computer, check out the T400, it can get pretty beefy.
Edit: I forgot to mention that the XPS 2016 edition has some problems with Skylake and you need to be careful to get the developer edition which can be a bit of a pain. I recommend reading the Arch wiki entry for it.
I like the idea very much, but Core 2 Duo P8400 means also DDR2, and ssd on sata 2 at most. So It’s a slow laptop. I have a laptop with P8400 somewhere in the drawer, so i say about it being slow with confidence. Technology moved on, and as much as I like the idea of really free laptop… this one won’t cut it.
I really like the discussion happening here. My current laptop (Lenovo IdeaPad Y500) is nearly five years old now. It was and is everything I want from a laptop, but it does start to get slower, the fan louder, the battery lifetime shorter and has quite some wear-and-tear. I need to brace myself for the moment at which too much is wrong with it to use it for day-to-day work + study.
There are some great suggestions here; although I do really want to experience how the touchpad, keyboard and screen of a laptop feel (resp. look) before buying them. I’d really like a laptop that is built for Linux (instead of after buying it immediately removing Windows manually which for many companies means that you break their warranty etc.), but many of these companies do not ship to the EU.
Anyone have some suggestions for me?
On a related note: Nowadays, I see some people marvel at laptops which have (multitouch) touchscreens. Do you ever find yourself using this? It is ‘super useful’ or more of a ‘novelty’?
It can be useful, especially when you demo something to someone. But it is not “super useful”
For a Linux, Clevo do some but they are really heavy and not that portable.
XPS 13…
I was originally planning to get the XPS 13, so i went to try it at my nearest store, unfortunately i found the keyboard to be rather unpleasant to type on.
But then i went to try the Thinkpad X1, and what a surprise, incredible keyboard, light, and small. I’m now considering to get that one instead, but am gonna wait for the Kaby lake bump tho. 
A bit scared of the Lenovo’s customer support thought (should i need it one day), which seems to be a disaster, atleast in Denmark.
I have the late 2016 version (Kaby Lake) and ran a practical battery life test, meaning a 5.5 hours ride to Warsaw with the XPS 13 (4.4 Kernel on the way there, 4.8 on the way back). The way there was a lot of work on slides (including libreoffice often misbehaving and going 100% CPU for a couple of seconds on simple slide inserts, copies etc.) and on the way back video watching (youtube) and writing (on the wordpress editor). It lasted the whole 5.5 hours (had minor breaks) and was still at ~50% battery when I arrived both times. So even with problems on my scale, Battery life of the XPS 13 is GREAT!
Which linux distro were you using ? and did you use powertop/TLP ? and did you encounter any issues. I am curious about XPS 13 kaby Lake version as there was a few issues with the 2015 version on Arch linux when I tested it.
Running Linux Mint 18 (Ubuntu 16.04 base). Yes I use powertop and laptop-mode (on my desktop right now so name might be slightly off) - package that automatically turns down a bunch of energy consumption.
As for issues, I described a couple of them earlier in this thread: sound stopped working on 4.4 Kernel and some wifi, bios stuff and adapter for usb-c to monitor/projector. At Elixirlive for the first time in my live I had to present on another laptop with my PDF backup as it absolutely wouldn’t connect to the projector (it recognized it but no image showed up). Although someone who knows xrandr might have solved it, I’m a casual UI user
No idea about the Lenovo support - although I remember there were some nasty issues with some models and secure boot and support was trying to hide the issue instead of fixing it. (I have thinkpad now)
But I had (and still have) Dell Vostro with 3 years businesses warranty, around 2.5 year my touch pad was a bit broken, fan super loud and left control stopped working. After some nice chat with the support and testing some options, they sent a technician to the office were I worked. Upon arrival they replaced all buggy parts on sight with new ones within an hour, and I was back to work
BTW does Dell have some docking stations?
Best,
Leszek
I recently switched to Zorin (an Debian / Ubuntu distro) but I’ve always been using Arch Linux (and most of it’s distros) because of the stability and how easy it is to install dependencies, packages, etc.
I recommend you have a look at
They’re all very popular and stable, I never had problems with Arch Linux.
Well as a toss in for battery life, when I dev on my chromebooks, via SSH/Emacs to my servers, I still get well over 10 hours of battery life, upwards of 15 in many cases. Even with youtube going I probably still get over 10 hours. I only charge it once a week regardless, and it is usually not drained then so it is hard for me to tell.
I recommend this list for anyone looking for a new laptop for programming. I would like to buy a Dell XPS 13 (or maybe 15) but they are quite pricey, so I think I would just settle down for a Lenovo Thinkpad, as those are really well made.
Macbook Pro is actually cool, the hardware is really reliable, and the OS is not that bad. It’s so reliable, it’s just so damn boring.
However the recent Macbook Pro lineup is quite disappointing, not to mention the steep pricing overall.
My nephew’s Lenovo laptop got infected by Superfish. Not to mention lots of pre-installed bloatwares and adwares, and updating Windows 10 is the most depressing thing to experience.
Don’t even think about getting tech support on this one. You won’t get any.
Running on Ubuntu so cant say I had those issues
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