It is getting increasingly awkward that my only daily drivers are a Win10 machine and a laptop based on antiquated MacOS. I should get a simple Linux laptop.
Last time I tried to do this though it turned out any laptops that run Linux with full hardware support out of the box are pretty expensive.
@mcc about the price: I've used like 250€ (or $250) laptops in the past with essentially full Linux support. Nowadays everything should work, unless you have really specific needs.
@lambdageek I've been doing it on my desktop PC with an NVidia card! Also remember "targeting the Rust wgpu package" works in many configurations "running in Firefox" does not, bafflingly enough since they're literally the same code
@lambdageek With Chrome on Linux, "running vulkan+webgpu" is a reality and "correctly supporting the Compose key and/or your input method framework" is the fantasy
@mcc huh. I guess i need to try again. I got lost somewhere in chrome://flags and gave up.
My compose key works, but I no longer remember if I had to do some gnome-tweaks thing or some /etc/default/keyboard thing to make it so. but i can do things like [Compose Key][`][a] and get à
or [Compose Key][.][.] and get …
@mcc if you end up looking at dell's xps line, I use a 9550 for general purpose (3-400 on eBay). Solid device, but be aware that their windows machines came with a different wlan card than their Ubuntu versions. And those drivers are shoddy on ubuntu. Because dell.
For graphical work I'm afraid I just RDP (or sunshine/moonlight these days) into my windows.
@oblomov I dunno. I think at this point as long as it can run ssh and is powerful enough to play a youtube video fullscreen, I'm satisfied for these purposes and I just want to optimize on the "simplicity" of "getting hold of one in Toronto, Canada" and "i don't have to spend a week on 'wait, why is wifi not working'".
a vulkan compatible video card would be a nice stretch goal.
@mcc I had a good experience with two Dell machines (don't remember if latitude or Inspiron) and a "gamer" laptop from dell (everything worked OOB except GPU switching, but managed to make it work).
AFAIK ThinkPads are a similar experience.
Intel HW works OOB (there are some exceptions, like when Intel integrated PoweVR GPUs on a few Atom processors) and AMD GPUs have decent drivers (using nvidia propietary drivers is painful during updates)
@mcc how old is the Mac? If it’s unusably slow that is one thing, but if it’s just old OS stuff I have had astonishing success running macOS Ventura (the latest up until last week) on a base-model 2012 MacBook Air using OpenCore Legacy Patcher. Looks like Sonoma support is even coming very soon. It is fairly easy to get set up and from my experience everything works without any weirdness. https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/
@mcc I’m sure you thought of it and there’s a reason not to, but what about the laptop with the antiquated macOS? Linux usually loves to run on slightly older mac hardware and wouldn’t need to be antiquated.
@mcc I buy almost all of my computers from dellrefurbished.com (edit, fixed url)
I also only buy latitudes, optiplex's, or precisions.
Mostly because they are business class. This means, to me, the hardware inside doesn't change for the life of the line. Generally much more user serviceable because orgs generally service their own devices. At least my org does
Decent prices if you wait for a bit sometimes.
I'll agree Lenovo doesn't suck but I swore of when they get sold
@mcc Not sure what counts as pretty expensive -- my everyday machine which I am typing on right now is a Dell XPS 13 that came with Ubuntu, and I haven't had any complaints. A current version of this sells for $1.4K USD, I think when I bought this some years ago it was like $1K.
@mcc I've been looking into HP Prodesks and the like. They can be had for very little and the specs look decent. You can always stick it in a corner and SSH into it.
@mcc ah. I love my refurbished X270, but if I wasn't running graphics apps I'd never have given up my X220. Bit heavy though if you're going to be lugging it around.
@mcc Chromebooks are pretty reasonable for this nowadays given the Linux virtualization support. I'd have to check whether you can get direct access to USB devices in Linux before recommending it for your needs, though.
@mcc
In the last 3 years I've bought 4 refurbished business Thinkpads for different family members (from different specialised dealers for refurbished hardware) . All laptops are running Linux, all family members are happy.
@mcc Framework are doing good things with their laptops. there’s a few other brands that have good marks from all i’ve seen but i’ve never taken the Linux plunge so this is all outsider perspective
@mcc 🙃 I was about to say my partner is liking her System76 Pangolin, but, yeah, isn't cheap (1200 USD), and their cheaper ones aren't that much cheaper
@mcc Framework's laptops look like a decent deal at the high end because you can add RAM and SSD without a big OEM markup, but not as competitive at the low end (and "low" is 1k)
I was like, it's ok to have just an old laptop! Anything I need to do I can ssh to the Windows 10 machine or the [virtually useless] mac mini! And then I started doing things that require interacting with USB devices connected to a machine I am physically in the same room as at the moment
I hate to be That Guy, but every time I've bought a laptop, I've managed to get it to sufficient usefulness within a couple of weeks of tinkering. Which is a pain but I typically then get 3-5 years of (mostly) trouble-free operation out of it, so it seems like a worthwhile deal.
That being said, NVIDIA GPUs are a huge headache and my Linux experience is a lot better with AMD or Intel. Since I don't do GPU intensive stuff, YMMV.
I get that. I'm long past the days where I want to run an OS for its own sake instead of as a means to doing the actual stuff I care about.
I view the tweaking/fixing stage as part of the initial cost of the new machine. IMO, the productivity benefits of Linux make up for that in the long term, but YMMV.
@mcc I've been using various Thinkpads running Linux as my primary personal machine for, I guess, more than 15 years now (recently and X1 Carbon, and currently an X13 AMD), and the experience has been basically flawless. There are a few things to keep in mind though:
@jesusmargar I had a very bad experience, specifically with Linux, with a Yoga in 2015. It's probable this was the specific model I bought, but this at least makes me nervous about buying a model I haven't gotten a personal rec for.
I spent far too much time tracking down their previous devices, and the costs in buying a new updated main board unit. It quickly became clear the extra expense up front goes away after one upgrade.
But I will have to actually do that for it to work out financially.
In the meantime, Fedora runs fairly well on my 2013 MacBook Air.
@mcc I got a Dell XPS after my last Lenovo and I kind of hate it. Although I got the Windows version because there was ONE program I needed that I couldn't get to work in Wine. Maybe the Linux-only version would have been better
@mcc the power management is particularly bad using Linux. The hibernate/suspend/etc is awful, in large part because of the stupid power button that gives zero feedback so you don't know how long to hold it
@mcc@ebooksyearn this is the opposite of my experience dual booting Ubuntu and windows 10/11 on a Dell XPS. The Linux side manages to hibernate on its own, and windows can't seem to figure it out, always draining the battery. 🤔 mines the 9380 from 2019.
Even so, I have found the T450s to be reliable, durable, snappy, and easily usable with Linux installed [my preference is Void Linux musl, but anything works]. I went with the Core i7 variant off https://www.backmarket.com/en-us [a refurbisher I learned of a year or two ago]. Hope this helps!
@mcc I know nothing about IdeaPads, and overall wouldn't recommend them as the build is cheap and the keyboard is terrible.
I do have a ThinkPad X390 Yoga, which has the same kind of 360-degree hinge setup. All that stuff works out of the box with GNOME on Debian 12. GNOME in particular has put a lot of effort into making this kind of touchscreen/tablet/convertible stuff Just Work -- I don't know about other DEs/WMs.
I'm leaning to the second because AMD + cheaper, but I don't understand what "s" means, and I'm worried about the presence of the eraser mouse (I won't use it, plus someone said that the eraser mouse comes with screwy palm detection on the trackpad, not sure how to tell if that's a problem on a particular model)
@mcc ThinkBook is a slightly gussied-up IdeaPad. The "s" suffix usually means "slim," and they tend to be slightly thinner / more premium build than the non-s counterpart.
T14 Gen 3 is a solid machine, the T14 line is their bread and butter business laptop model. My daily driver is essentially the same as the T14 Gen 2, I use both TrackPoint and trackpad, and haven't had any palm rejection issues. Lenovo mostly solves this problem by not making unnecessarily gigantic trackpads that you can't avoid touching with your palm.
The one thing that might be an annoyance on that laptop is the WiFi. Intel refuses to let Lenovo sell AMD machines with Intel WiFi, so you're going to get either Qualcomm or MediaTek wireless, neither of which are as good as Intel's stuff. And I believe it's soldered on this model, so you can't swap it out.
@nev From where would you recommend purchasing refurb thinkpads, if I am physically in Ontario?
(Best of all possible scenarios would be if I could go into a room somewhere and touch the touchpad to see if I hate it before I buy, but I think this is probably no longer a thing in the world)
Is it 100% the case that the machines they have on their website with photos are the machines they have in at the moment or is the website just a sample?
@mcc (answering a question not asked of me) I’m in Nova Scotia but I order my refurb thinkpads from Bauer Systems in Burlington ON https://www.bauersystems.com
@mcc for whatever it is worth, I've been really happy with the ease of upgrading my AMD Lenovo Flex 2-in-1. RAM, m.2 SSD, and battery can be easily swapped. Currently running Windows 11 (better pen input support), but whatever Debian flavor I was running worked well. Battery life was a bit crap until I adjusted the power profile in the bios.👍👍👍
I always buy a Windows laptop, boot Ubuntu in it (no install), test everything, and if something doesn't work as-is, i return the laptop. After a decade doing it, no support issues. Except for energy management, which has always been terrible, if any. But that's not easy to test, and, from what I hear, it doesn't seem to be any good in Linux anywhere.
Incidentally, my current laptop is a 600€ Lenovo. You can imagine what I think of frame.work prices.
The cheapest laptop I found that carried an SSD out of the box 5 years ago: Lenovo Ideapad 320.
The display is terrible, no proper graphic card, and I seriously think I should have upgraded the 8GB of RAM the first day, but it still works like the first day. RAM aside, I don't need anything more.
I totally get it. Each time I have to renew a gadget I hate the process more.
So last time I was extremely cheap an lazy and went for the cheapest minimal option.
If you go for the minimum, and it goes well, you know you got it right. If you go for the expensive option, and it goes well, you will never know: maybe the cheap option would have been enough.
But who I am to say. I am planning to buy a Fairphone soon, anyway. Out of ethical reasons, of course, but out of sheer lazyness, too: not having to choose another phone in a DECADE? I want three!!
But really, I wouldn't pay much attention to Linux compatibility lists. I never look at them, and I have only found one laptop in which something didn't work.
YMMV, but if you don't go too fancy, Ubuntu is very good handling hardware.
My laptop has the very first 8th gen i5, bought just out of the oven, so I seriously doubt anybody at Canonical had tested it when I installed Ubuntu on it. And here we are.
@mcc also, Puri.sm? I purchased a #Librem 13 which worked well. Not stellar, but good enough build quality.
#Purism has done some world-changing things, and their #PureOS PureOS.net is ‘purer’ than #Debian. They upstream everything which can be. (The #convergent focus means you are almost certainly already using some of their #code.)
But unit price is how they pay to improve the #Linux community software. Also, the #L13 does not survive saltwater immersion test.
LOL, you didn't! I did! I've made 3 Purism purchases, including an L5. All arrived, all were as advertised, none exceeded my expectations. All except the Librem Key were well above market equivalent prices. Everything except the L5 was decent build - the L5 is a bit more rough, and there have been some hardware changes since.
But the service was consistently sterling.
So who ya gonna believe, someone whingeing on youtube to get clicks, or someone who has vendor history?
Someone trying to make money off someone else's hard work. The usual utbr grift.
There is a batch of people who paid into Purism's phone pre-sale/experimental hardware and ended up canceling their orders because of the long wait time. As I understand it, a couple went ballistic and attacked the company in Matrix. <shrug> At least, that's the rumours; Purism doesn't talk about it.
@faassen Okay so here's a weird question: How is palm-detection, in Linux, on the t14s? Like does it ever either register false mouse movement when you're typing, or (the reverse) refuse to let you use the touchpad because it thinks you're palming it?
This is something I've heard people complain about with Lenovos, and once had a problem with myself with a Lenovo
@mcc
Hm, I am not sure. I got into the habit of using the trackpoint so don't use it a lot. I am not aware of false mouse movements when typing though, but I need to monitor myself to see what my palms are up to.
Okay. After staring blankly at many pages, I think these are the models I'm considering. They're all Windows but I'll be immediately wiping for Linux. Note these prices are in CAD. Shippers: Amazon, Canada Computers, Canada Computers, Lenovo.
Do any of these jump out at you as unusually good deals or unusually bad deals? How do I even tell the difference? I think I'm leaning to #2 or #3 (advantage: touchscreen, plus they're Canada Computers so I can do returns/exchanges in person)
@mcc Dunno if the deals are good or bad, but we have a ThinkPad T14 (no idea what generation) in the house and it's pretty good for Linux. (personally I like T14s better - the T14 feels bulky. But there's a price premium).
I seem to recall I had to mess with Debian images with additional non-free firmware to get it going (for the wifi, I believe), though
I'm not sure if ThinkBooks are good - I stay away from anything Lenovo innovated after they bought the line from IBM.
The history of ThinkPads is that they tend to be boring business machines with boring business features like the ability to open them up and upgrade the ram or replace the SSD (they also used to have easy to replace batteries but I think they're all glued on now - at least in the lighter-weight models).
@mcc I thought the "10 core" Intels were a bit goofy-sounding - it's 2 big proper cores (2 threads each), plus 8 little ones (single-threaded, max out about 1.8GHz?). I mean how useful could those little cores be?
But actually they're REALLY FAST. What happens is if you do have multithreaded workloads, you get limited by memory bandwidth, not clock speed, so the small cores are surprisingly useful.
@TomF The thing that worries me is how does the OS decide which processes to run on the big cores and which to run on the small cores. A review of this technology suggested that on Windows, the answer to this question is "incorrectly"
A lotta people recommended I buy refurbished and I'm open to that but when I started looking refurbished the choices were even more scanty and erratic than buying normal. My head is swimming, I do not understand the difference between a ThinkPad 14, a ThinkPad 14s, a ThinkPad 14 with Touchscreen and a ThinkPad 14 Yoga (or, sometimes, a 14s with Touchscreen, or possibly a 14s Yoga I lost track)
What I want: The touchpad works real good and it feels good
What the online store pages can tell me about: Here are a series of numbers that you must have memorized the Intel and AMD product catalogues of the last 8 years to mean anything
WAIT. I ONLY JUST REALIZED "THINKPAD" AND "THINKBOOK" ARE TWO DIFFERENT THINGS. MY BRAIN WAS NORMALIZING THOSE TWO WORDS INTO THE SAME WORD. OH NO. OH NO
@mcc ThinkPAD is for sure a regular laptop - I had one for my company laptop. I liked it! I rarely used the touchpad, so I'm not a connoisseur, but it certainly didn't annoy me the way some do.
Not sure what a Thinkbook is (or even if it's different!).
How much of the advice I've gotten over the last several hours was useless because I was mentally collapsing statements about thinkpads and thinkbooks into the same thing. Also do both thinkpads and thinkbooks come in both 14 and 14s variants?!
@mcc I'm rocking a 6 year old Surface Book 2 that arguably did the whole "rip off the keyboard" thing best since it doesn't require a kickstand and the keyboard also has a huge battery and a GPU in it.
Sadly the Surface Book line was discontinued years ago and the machines out there are a bit old now.
@j3rn What made me excited about this as opposed to the SUrface Book is it's just a normal ThinkPad keyboard whereas the Surface rip-off keyboards looked a little flimsy. Like practically a screen protector
@mcc from what I understand about boxes, I think you might need one of these to get it open and collect what is inside. It's an older tool, but should still work. Good luck!
I went to the store and was like "I'm thinking of buying this thing from the website. Do you have anything similar I could try the touchpad?" and they're like "we have that laptop. that exact laptop. here" and I was like oh could you open it and let me try the touchpad and they're like no. But you can buy it and return it in 15 days no-fault if you don't like it. And I was like OK??? And now I have a thinkpad
@TomF Thinkpad T14 G3 with touchscreen. And I do not know if it is good. Because it is still in a box. Because I am in an actual forest, in a friend's cabin, sitting in front of a fireplace, reading an ebook about some people disturbing an ancient horror at the bottom of the ocean.
And I realized that attempting to install and configure Linux on a cell connection with roughly 9600 baud of bandwidth prooobbbbably would not be enjoyable
@TomF the intent was to ORDER the Thinkpad before I left on the trip so it would be there when I got back but I messed up and it turned out they had exactly the one I wanted in stock at the store a 5 minute walk from my house lol
@mcc Oh you think you can escape that easily? Can you hear that faint whirring noise? That occasional faint Windows startup noise? Track it down to the woodshed, where you will find it lurking behind the false wall, linked to an eldritch WiFi connection, updating... FOREVER!
@TomF we actually did have an incident on a prior trip where the solar battery ran low on power in the middle of the night in a way that caused the speakers by the wall to start making a perfect and incredibly loud kick-drum knocking noise exactly every 2.5 seconds at about 4 AM. We were in total darkness and had no idea what was happening I am not sure I have ever experienced any waking thing I so struggled to believe was not a dream
@TomF@mcc My thinkpad had an incredibly annoying feature that it would randomly dim the screen after ~20 seconds of idle time (but not always). I only just recently figured out how to disable that (it's a hidden service that came pre-installed).
I've also had no end of trouble with sleep mode. It will wake up randomly and not go back to sleep, draining the battery. It will sometimes shut itself down for no reason even when plugged in. It will sometimes refuse to sleep when I close the lid.
@reedbeta@mcc The thing is I hear this stuff about literally every single sort of laptop, including Macs.
I once got off a plane, reached for my bag and almost scalded myself because the MacBook inside had apparently been running its fans at full speed the whole way. Literally too hot to touch.
So I think it's just a tradition or an old charter or something?
@TomF@reedbeta my experience is not anyone else's. But my experience is that MacBooks work great for exactly 2.5 years and then suddenly overnight develop multiple horrible, unfixable power/battery problems and oh well!!! Guess it's time to buy a new MacBook!!?
@TomF@mcc@reedbeta reading those stories makes me believe I‘m haunted by reverse gremlins… I‘m on an iPhone SE (2020) that works fine, and a mid-2015 15“ MBP, which is also okay.
Well, except for the fact that Apple really doesn’t like you running third-party SSDs in macbooks these days, which means any OS update bricks the macbook 🙃.
But with the stock SSD it would just soldier on, I‘m certain.
@T045T@TomF@reedbeta I think my MacBook would start acting normal again if I just replaced the battery, but Apple discontinued the battery shockingly quickly so no official service center will do this for me
@reedbeta@TomF normally I assume installing Linux would break half of everything but it's possible in my case it's gonna improve everything by killing Lenovo's crapware
@aeva Maybe they were lying but the thing is, it's a physical store, and it appears to be elective on individual salespeople whether to accept a return, and they have let me return shit they ABSOLUTELY should not have let me return in the past
The really funny part is I'm driving up into the woods all weekend so the reason I was laptop shopping today was so I could order today and then have it next week when I get back. But now I just have the laptop. But also I can't possibly set it up in the woods without Internet so I guess I'm just… leaving it in the box until I get back. I guess this means I've got all weekend to decide what I'm going to name it.
@mcc I can't recommend that ThinkBook (I have a Gen3 AMD 15") because I found the clickpad agonizing to use, but it does work pretty much 100% on Linux, fingerprint reader aside.
@mcc You can, but it breaks down when you need a click-and-drag motion with RMB/MMB. LTSpice comes to mind, but there's other apps that require that mode of interaction. The alternate method - emulating button zones - does kinda work, but the pad is even worse at handling drag motions. I ended up just carrying a trackball everywhere I took it. It's a mix of Linux not handling clickpads well and PC clickpads having poor multitouch support in general.
@mcc “Gen 1” isn’t necessarily a problem. Looks like that was the first version of that particular model of computer, but it’s not like it’s using a first-generation i5 processor.
What are your priorities? Processor performance, GPU performance, portability, “niceness” (high-quality screen, high-end materials), connectivity, price, etc?
Excluding Macs, I’m partial to Toughbooks and Getacs when portability isn’t a concern, or the Thinkpad X1 line when it is a concern. Lots of businesses lease the X1 and they hit eBay a few years later. You can get an X1 “gen 8” with a Core i_-10___ for under $400 US. M.2 2280 drive, but soldered RAM.
@mcc If and I stress if the benchmark comparisons I can make are right, then "ThinkPad T14 Ryzen 5 Pro 6650U" seems to have the most actual processing power of the set. And it's touchscreen and it's 16GB RAM.
BUT comparisons are difficult, because this Ryzen is a pain in the ass and I'm having to do shit like finding comparisons that say "this Ryzen has about the same performance as these two Intel CPUs" and then using those two processors as proxies in comparison tables at UserBenchmark. :/
I also found a review stating that the integrated graphics on the heavily-discounted "Thunder Black" model were found to have wildly varying graphics performance so if there are issues like that, maybe that's why it's so heavily discounted.
@mcc I'm wondering of #2 have 16G of soldered ram + 16G of removable ram. Which would be really nice, I don't think my work computer ever go north of 24G of peak RAM usage with firefox, chrome and vs code open on linux
@mcc I was in the same situation then I discovered that refurbished X1 carbon work like magic with Pop OS! and can be found for a few hundreds off ebay
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