Linux Users Thread

simon · January 11, 2020, 10:28am

Eek! I never meant to turn this into a Mac vs. Linux thing.

sasajuric · January 11, 2020, 1:57pm

About 6 months ago I bought a laptop from Tuxedo computers, and so far I’m happy. There’s also System76. Both companies have desktops in their offering. Can’t say if they are good and if they fit your purposes, so you should definitely investigate this in details. The benefit of both companies (I think they are not the only ones) is that their machines are Linux friendly (at least for supported distros), so the initial setup is trivial, and I think both actually ship a preinstalled version. Past that point, you might experience some problems setting up external devices, so be prepared for that.

simon · January 11, 2020, 4:17pm

Thanks @sasajuric. I looked at Tuxedo after looking at your tweets which you lined to in this thread and they might be a good supplier. System76 seem very highly though of too (and the Thelio is beautiful!) but import duties and dealing with a company so far away if there are hardware issues is a small barrier. And the TUXEDO InfinityCube is pretty good looking too (my office is in a corner of my main living area so aesthetics as a partial consideration).

AstonJ · January 11, 2020, 7:40pm

I just looked on their site to compare specs to an equivalent 16" MBP, and this is the closest I could find:

https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/Linux-Hardware/Linux-Notebooks/Deep-Learning-AI/TUXEDO-Book-XUX509-Deep-Learning-AI-Edition.tuxedo#!#configurator (i9, 64GB ram, 2TB HD, 8GB GPU - tho they only have that model in 1080p, so no retina style screen)

…which makes me feel a lot better about Apple’s current MBP pricing

sasajuric · January 11, 2020, 8:08pm

What price difference did you observe? I just tried to quickly compare, and I got 3500 EUR vs 5000 EUR. That said, I personally feel the comparison is a bit of apples to oranges (no pun intended ).

AstonJ · January 11, 2020, 8:33pm

I spec’d it as this:

Current Configuration
Product No.: 10900084

Full-HD (1920 x 1080) 144Hz IPS-Panel non-glare G-Sync

Intel Core i9-9900K (8x 3.60-5.00 GHz Eight-Core, 16 Threads, 16 MB Cache, 95 W TDP) ( +160,00 EUR)

64 GB (4x 16GB) 2666Mhz Samsung ( +170,00 EUR)

2000 GB Samsung 970 EVO Plus (NVMe PCIe) ( +410,00 EUR)

without M.2 SSD ( -140,00 EUR)

without mass-storage ( -90,00 EUR)

without mass-storage ( -90,00 EUR)

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 | 8GB GDDR6 ( +400,00 EUR)

GERMAN (DE-DE) with backlit

Intel Dual AC 9260 & Bluetooth 5 (up to 1730Mbps)

TUXEDO_OS Deep Learning AI Edition 18.04 LTS 64Bit

without Windows

24 months / 2 years warranty

EU power cord | F C14

Assembled within 5 working days when in stock

Components in stock

4.069,00 EUR

incl. 19 % Tax excl. Shipping costs

That’s about £3,500, whereas the 64GB, 8-core i9, 8GB 5500M GPU, 2TB 16" MBP is £3,969 here. Not sure how the CPUs and GPUs compare, though the 16" MBP has had some really good reviews (for a change!)

Is your spec anything like that Saša? For linux, you probably don’t need as much RAM I expect…

simon · January 11, 2020, 9:07pm

I think that Apple’s kit has always been pretty equally priced to similar specs of computers from other manufacturers so I am not entirely surprised that the price you got was comparable. And some of Apple’s hardware elements (trackpads spring to mind) are really, really good. Keyboards may be on the way back up too if they roll out the one from the 16" MBP to other models in that range and other ranges in the future.

sasajuric · January 11, 2020, 10:50pm

Oh I think I see where the difference is. The thing is that my tuxedo account is linked to my personal business, and so VAT is removed. Still, when I tried to configure a similar machine on German Apple site, I got to 5000 EUR, so the price difference is still significant.

The machine I bought is nowhere near this configuration. I took InfinityBook Pro for 1600 EUR. It’s an ultrabook i7 with 32GB ram, a 1TB SSD, and an integrated graphics. On paper it’s less powerful than 2013 MBP I used until then, but in practice it works much better for my needs. In fact, I think I could have managed with 16GB RAM, because my memory consumption rarely goes above 8GB. As I mentioned previously, my biggest pain point with macs was docker, and this definitely works much better and snappier on Linux.

I feel this was the case around 2010-2015, but later I got the impression that macs are becoming overpriced. That said, I think that new 16" MBPs are reasonably priced. Disclaimer: I don’t really follow the hardware market, so my sentiment is not based on any detailed research.

AstonJ · January 11, 2020, 11:15pm

Did you max out the CPU as well? Most people are sticking to the 2.3 (rather than 2.4) as the difference is minimal - that would probably bring the price closer to 4K.

But yeah, for Linux you definitely don’t need anywhere near those specs, particularly for what you’re doing (i.e no graphics intensive stuff). Personally I was interested in seeing how much the Apple tax was this year, but comparing the models, it seems it’s not much atm (which is great news for Apple fans!)

That looks like a nice machine! And I bet you can probably upgrade the RAM/SSD yourself as well!

sasajuric · January 12, 2020, 11:54am

I did, to make the comparison more fair, since Tuxedo ships with a more powerful Intel Core i9-9900K.

The price diff is 220EUR. Even with 2.3GHZ version, Tux looks significantly cheaper.

This is the key insight. When I was faced with the need to buy a new machine, the top of the range MBP was close to 4k EUR, and I still wasn’t convinced that it would fit my needs, given that I need to use docker a lot.

I bought a Tuxedo which works for less than half of the price. Had I went for 16GB RAM (which in hindsight would have been enough) and dropped the extended 2 years warranty period, it would be about third of the price. That’s a lot of money saved, and still I feel that my needs are better served by this machine, even though it’s specs are weaker than top of the range MBPs.

That said, it should be clear that Tuxes are cheap laptops, inferior in quality to MBPs and other well regarded brands like Dells or Thinkpads. In addition, the UX of Linux is IMO not as good as that of macOS. So comparing just the prices and specs IMO isn’t enough.

In my particular case, I feel that I got a better fit for my own needs, and paid a fraction of the money to get it, so it seems like a good choice so far. But I need to wait for some 2-3 years to confirm this

Given what I wrote above, it still seems quite large for my own needs.

simon · January 12, 2020, 12:15pm

I think that these days the exchange rate plays a big part in pricing differentials too. Particularly since Apple are fairly quick to up prices when the Pound devalues and not so fast then it becomes stronger against the Dollar.

dimitarvp · January 12, 2020, 1:20pm

Out of curiosity, why didn’t you just buy a desktop? I personally got sick of trying to do serious work on a laptop – which often enough included importing multi-gigabyte databases – and managed to get enough savings to do one financial maneuver, and just bought a beefy workstation (Xeon CPU, ECC RAM, NVMe SSD). Didn’t regret once!

IMO having a solid Linux desktop machine – or even your own home lab, i.e. rack server(s) – at home and carrying around a MacBook with which you either do casual work or remote into your home machine, is the ideal setup. MacBooks are lightweight, work well enough for most, have beautiful (and bright!) displays, and okay-ish keyboards (at least 2015 models and below, plus the new 16" MBP).

If I was looking into getting back to Linux I’d go with that setup. Unless I am not remembering something and you couldn’t keep your old MacBook so the financial burden would be too big in buying a new MBP and a home desktop?

sasajuric · January 12, 2020, 2:31pm

The MBP was owned by my former employer. Perhaps I might have bought it, but I didn’t feel like spending money on a 2013 MBP in 2019

That said, I had (and still have) a 2015 Air which I use as a travel machine, and I might have used that one in combination with a desktop. I did consider such idea, but decided against it for a few reasons.

First, my desk is in the living room, and I want to avoid taking up more space here. I keep the laptop on a stand, so I can put stuff underneath it, so it takes up zero space. In addition, the laptop provides me with a second screen so I don’t need a second monitor, which further reduces the space clutter (and expenses!).

Secondly, I like the convenience of using a portable machine for work and personal stuff. I have this one all-rounder which works for all my needs. When I need to work outside of home (which happens fairly regularly), I just take the laptop with me, and everything works as expected.

Finally, I was considering some option of setting up a home server I could ssh into, and run stuff from there. I guess my main problem with this is the support for working outside of home. I could setup some VPN, but this would require a stable and a reasonably fast internet connection, and I’m still not sure if the lag would be acceptable. Another possible drawback are GUI apps (e.g. observer or developing gui apps with scenic), although admittedly I don’t really develop GUI apps at all, and observer could be used via distributed Erlang, so maybe that’s not a big problem.

That said, this is an interesting idea and I’ll consider it again the next time I need to upgrade.

jdumont · January 12, 2020, 8:06pm

I’ve recently had to acquire a Windows machine for C#/.NET Core development. I had been using my MacBook Pro with both the macOS tools and Bootcamp for as long as I could but just got to a point where it wasn’t practical fighting against the current any longer.

I had been considering building a desktop anyway, so knew the parts I needed to order, and despite having never built a computer before, found it was very straightforward.

I put Ubuntu and PopOS before installing Windows as it was taking an age to create a bootable USB (another story). To my surprise, absolutely everything worked straightaway, with PopOS even downloading the correct nVidia drivers for the pretty new 1660 Super I bought. Even Windows later required help finding the right drivers for GPU, WiFi and Bluetooth.

I’ll almost certainly getting a second drive to dual boot (probably Pop) as the Linux experience (for the few hours I used it) was utterly flawless and a far cry from previous attempts with Linux on Apple hardware, and even Windows and macOS on their respective native hardware. Truly impressive.

Sidenote RE: leaving Apple. I was skeptical about ever truly leaving Apple despite knowing that I’d need to build a non-Apple computer for these projects. That said, despite being heavily invested in their ecosystem (iPhone, iPad, iCloud Drive, Apple Music and friends and family using FaceTime & iMessage almost exclusively) I’m not sure I’ll ever buy another Mac again.

All the things I worried about (non-Retina screens, clunky/ugly/unpolished operating systems, ecosystem) are proven to be irrelevant and for the first time in over a decade I’m actually excited by computers again. I’m looking forward to improving the hardware in this computer, building another to act as a homeserver and start playing with all the exciting things that are very “un-Apple”. As @sasajuric said, it’s very liberating no longer being dependant on a single company for your work environment.

dimitarvp · January 12, 2020, 11:14pm

Well, building my own server is also one of the things I am excited about. (Can’t rush it though, have a lot of stuff to do at work and for my own health first. Not willing to prioritise tech over survival and job happiness.)

I am not saying Macs are bad – they definitely aren’t and my both Macs are working quite adequately. But it’s a fact that Apple has left the entropy to take its toll and not do much about a ton of reported problems.

The 5K screen on my iMac Pro though, you’ll have to fight me in a pit and kill me before I give that up.

dimitarvp · January 12, 2020, 11:14pm

Quite fair, thanks for elaborating.