OT: Time for a Linux laptop

[Edward K. Ream]

My Windows laptop is showing its age.  I'd like to have a Linux laptop for the Ashland sprint.

Any suggestions for a relatively powerful quiet Ubuntu laptop?

Edward

[Mike Hodson]

Hi Edward I would recommend a system76 laptop they've got lots of different ones to meet your price point as well as your requirements for quietness I could even put you in touch with someone who worked on them specifically like actually worked for the company so he could attest to their quietness or loudness.

Otherwise you have pretty much a crapshoot of whether or not it's loud.  you could always go to the store to verify; but whether or not Linux works on it properly, is another good question, some of them I found are okay, others not so much.

My current daily driver laptop is a Toshiba 12.5 inch foldable touchscreen 4k laptop but it has the most horrible vacuum cleaner of a fan ; it works well though with Linux as many of the Skylake ones recently seem to.

Finally there's always the Lenovo ThinkPad models the t460s specifically is actually a very nice one, I've been using it for work and it is actually extremely quiet extremely lightweight 14.1 inch full HD no touch screen but the laptop is really solid.

Hope this helps and if any weird spelling errors exist that's because I'm trying Google Voice typing I was I take a walk around Virginia Beach.

Have a nice day Edward!

Mike

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[Chris George]

I recently bought a lease return Lenovo T430 Thinkpad. Everything "just works" and the price was right. ($399 CDN) Very quiet.

Chris

[Miles Fidelman]

Well, personally, I recommend Mac laptops - tremendous hardware, and they're BSD unix underneath.  And it's easy enough to run pretty much any Linux or BSD distro under a hypervisor - at near native speed. 

I typically have Parallels running, with a Windows VM running (for Quicken and Visio), keep a couple of terminal windows open running BSD stuff, and when I'm doing development, I might have a couple of Linux or BSD, or even MacOS VMs running (who wants to risk polluting one's primary computer with experimental code).  Meanwhile, I'm typically running Office, a browser, and email under MacOS.

A fully loaded MacBook costs a little more - but they last a long time and provide the best of all worlds.  (And AppleCare support is great, particularly when you need to replace a hard drive.  My new box has a 1TB SSD - so I don't expect to need a drive replacement anytime soon - and it just screems.)

On Apr 1, 2017 2:41 PM, "Edward K. Ream" <edre...@gmail.com> wrote:

My Windows laptop is showing its age.  I'd like to have a Linux laptop for the Ashland sprint.

Any suggestions for a relatively powerful quiet Ubuntu laptop?

Edward

-- 
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.  .... Yogi Berra

[Edward K. Ream]

​

On Sat, Apr 1, 2017 at 1:50 PM, Mike Hodson <mys...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Edward I would recommend a system76 laptop they've got lots of different ones to meet your price point as well as your requirements for quietness I could even put you in touch with someone who worked on them specifically like actually worked for the company so he could attest to their quietness or loudness.

​A quiet 15" model would be just right.  The Gazelle is listed as not available on their web site.  Could you ask you friend what would be good?  Thanks.

Edward

[Mike Hodson]

Hi Edward,

I've got word back from my friend that the Gazelle is most likely presently being updated to the 7th Generation Core processors; its a Clevo-oem'd system, and the present KabyLake upstream model is out, so its probably another month or 2 of driver work for Ubuntu on it.  If you need something _now_ the 14.1 model, or one of the Thinkpad range are still my recommendations. 

Mike

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[Edward K. Ream]

On Sat, Apr 1, 2017 at 10:25 PM, Mike Hodson <mys...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Edward,

I've got word back from my friend that the Gazelle is most likely presently being updated to the 7th Generation Core processors; its a Clevo-oem'd system, and the present KabyLake upstream model is out, so its probably another month or 2 of driver work for Ubuntu on it.  If you need something _now_ the 14.1 model, or one of the Thinkpad range are still my recommendations. 

​I've heard, perhaps incorrectly, that it's difficult to install Linux on recent Windows laptops. Do you have Linux installed on your ThinkPad t460s?​

Edward

[Mike Hodson]

Indeed, it runs Sabayon right now. 

But a lot of others in the office, with similar hardware, are using Ubuntu, Mint, and Fedora and others to great success. 

The place I'm working now (InMotion Hosting) is almost all Linux from Tier 2 onward; a few Macs. Only the Tier 1 group uses Windows for domain access and locking down the systems... 

As long as the boot media isn't stupid (Sabayon Daily I'm looking at you) it should work fine. I went with last-month's Sabayon install media and it worked perfectly first-try. 

Hope this gives you some more assurance :)

Mike

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[Edward K. Ream]

On Sun, Apr 2, 2017 at 2:07 AM, Mike Hodson <mys...@gmail.com> wrote:

Indeed, it runs Sabayon right now. 

​Hehe.  I see you have the essential "software": pizza, chips and pop.  It's a great recipe for hypertension, as I have found out.

Alright then.  I'll order the ThinkPad t460s. Thanks for your advice.

Edward

[Mike Hodson]

On Sun, Apr 2, 2017 at 5:07 AM, Edward K. Ream <edre...@gmail.com> wrote:

​Hehe.  I see you have the essential "software": pizza, chips and pop.  It's a great recipe for hypertension, as I have found out.

Alright then.  I'll order the ThinkPad t460s. Thanks for your advice.

You're welcome!  I hope you like it as much as I do. The very nice key backlighting is one of the main selling points IMHO - I hate using my Asus laptop without such when I don't want to use the Thinkpad; Trying to totally separate work/play. 

And, when the food is provided free from the office, I tend to eat it..especially when I am out of Colorado, in Virginia, training for this new position, and have to afford food/ubering for 3 weeks until a paycheck (after which a good chunk is reimbursed...but not pre-imbursed..) i take all the free food I can get.

Mike

[Terry Brown]

On Sun, 2 Apr 2017 05:46:28 -0400
Mike Hodson <mys...@gmail.com> wrote:

> And, when the food is provided free from the office, I tend to eat
> it.

For optimum performance you should really be drinking beer or something
and aiming for the Ballmer Peak:

https://xkcd.com/323/

Cheers -Terry

[Chris George]

https://www.slant.co/topics/1184/~laptops-for-linux

I have heard good things about the Dell.

Chris

[Edward K. Ream]

On Sun, Apr 2, 2017 at 4:50 PM, Chris George <techn...@gmail.com> wrote:

https://www.slant.co/topics/1184/~laptops-for-linux

I have heard good things about the Dell.

​Thanks.  It does look good.

Edward

[Edward K. Ream]

On Sun, Apr 2, 2017 at 4:46 AM, Mike Hodson <mys...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sun, Apr 2, 2017 at 5:07 AM, Edward K. Ream <edre...@gmail.com> wrote:

​Hehe.  I see you have the essential "software": pizza, chips and pop.  It's a great recipe for hypertension, as I have found out.

Alright then.  I'll order the ThinkPad t460s. Thanks for your advice.

You're welcome!  I hope you like it as much as I do. The very nice key backlighting is one of the main selling points IMHO - I hate using my Asus laptop without such when I don't want to use the Thinkpad; Trying to totally separate work/play. 

​Just ordered a t460s with backlit keyboard. The video review I watched raved about the keyboard, which apparently is better than the dell keyboard.

Edward

[jkn]

That's interesting. All my laptops for the last 15 years have been Thinkpads, basically because (a) they have always been good to dual boot with Linux, and (b) the keyboards were miles ahead of any others. I am very fussy about keyboards and the Thinkpads are about the only ones I can get one with.

But the more recent thinkpads have moved to the 'chicklet' style of keyboard, and some of the reviews I saw of the T460s characterised the keyboard feel as 'stiff', which concerned me a bit. Perhaps the feel has changed less that I feared, and they are comparing it with the somewhat squishy (to me) feel of Dell keyboards.

I'm not particularly in the market at the moment but seems like I should try something like a T460 when the time comes.

Let us know how you get on with it.

    Jon N

[Mike Hodson]

On Mon, Apr 3, 2017 at 11:58 AM, Edward K. Ream <edre...@gmail.com> wrote:

​Just ordered a t460s with backlit keyboard. The video review I watched raved about the keyboard, which apparently is better than the dell keyboard.

Cool beans :)  I've had a good experience with this keyboard myself, being one who even on nice Alps Sliders (1996 Alps MGL-Series) at home, still smashes keys down to the point you hear the non-buckling-spring keys still clack bottoming out.  If one complaint exists, its that the touchpad is too far off-center to the left, and that my palm sometimes bumps it.. although I think I've gotten through the touchpad settings well enough to enable palm detection properly.  If you disable the clickpad and use just the buttons / red nub, itd be a non-issue.  Maybe you also lift your palms more than I do. *shrug*

Furthermore, I have found the 1920x1080 IPS non-touchscreen panel (matte display) in my laptop to have a bit of a strange gamma curve; It is spot-on with mid-tones, but the low/high ends are washed out.

I just found the "BroadcastRGB" property in xrandr, and I must say this 100% fixes the ~15 or so black levels that are indistinguishable and the ~5-6 white levels also indistinguishable from eachother in the lagom.nl/lcd/ test pages

 xrandr --output eDP1 --set "Broadcast RGB" "Limited 16:235"

This works like a charm, and the difference in low-brightness color visibility is marked.  I highly suggest this tweak in a constantly applied-at-boot display script in your favorite window manager/desktop environment. 

Setting the gamma level itself caused mid-tones to become too bright. This limited range is far more useful :)

Hope you enjoy the T460s as much as I have the past 2+ weeks training and working at my new job.

Mike

 

[Edward K. Ream]

On Tue, Apr 4, 2017 at 11:26 AM, Mike Hodson <mys...@gmail.com> wrote:

Furthermore, I have found the 1920x1080 IPS non-touchscreen panel (matte display) in my laptop to have a bit of a strange gamma curve; It is spot-on with mid-tones, but the low/high ends are washed out.

I just found the "BroadcastRGB" property in xrandr, and I must say this 100% fixes the ~15 or so black levels that are indistinguishable and the ~5-6 white levels also indistinguishable from eachother in the lagom.nl/lcd/ test pages

 

​​

xrandr --output eDP1 --set "Broadcast RGB" "Limited 16:235"

This works like a charm, and the difference in low-brightness color visibility is marked.  I highly suggest this tweak in a constantly applied-at-boot display script in your favorite window manager/desktop environment. 

​Thanks for this tip. I've made a note of it.

Edward

[Edward K. Ream]

On Monday, April 3, 2017 at 10:58:41 AM UTC-5, Edward K. Ream wrote:

> Just ordered a t460s with backlit keyboard.

Alas, I won't have it with me at the sprint.  The hardware has failed. It's going to Atlanta for repairs.

Edward

[Mike Hodson]

Oh for the love of...

What died?!  I'm surprised as anything at this revelation 

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[Edward K. Ream]

On Fri, Apr 14, 2017 at 12:19 PM, Mike Hodson <mys...@gmail.com> wrote:

Oh for the love of...

What died?!  I'm surprised as anything at this revelation 

​It was a cascading series of failures.  Imo, the machine was never right.  It ran very slowly out of the box.  Then the battery indicator got stuck at "28%, plugged in, not charging".  Recovering from the Windows 10 recovery disk failed, making it impossible to boot.

And oh yes, booting from a Ubuntu image failed with a USB 3 disk failed, although booting from a USB 2 drive ​did work.

It's no big deal.  I'll have my old Windows 10 laptop with me in Ashland, and Terry and Kent are sure to have Linux laptops with them.

Edward

[Mike Hodson]

USB3 I find has strange troubles booting .. This is often a BIOS issue. USB2 is how I installed my T460s and my previous usb3 capable computers.. 

The battery issue..thats new to me.. 

I've never booted up Windows 10 for more than one time, just to see if it _did_ boot..

That said, I've got the 256GB SSD :

        *-disk
            description: ATA Disk
            product: TOSHIBA THNSFJ25
            vendor: Toshiba
            physical id: 0.0.0
            bus info: scsi@1:0.0.0
            logical name: /dev/sda
            version: 1102
            serial: 76CS11GZTJ4V
            size: 238GiB (256GB)

Left the windows EFI partition only on it, and then put LVM for the rest of the space on the disk..

I'm really sorry this didn't work out well for you.. Can you give me the exact link to the download url you used for the Ubuntu image? 

I'm curious if I experience the exact same issue with my own.. 

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[Edward K. Ream]

On Fri, Apr 14, 2017 at 6:48 PM, Mike Hodson <mys...@gmail.com> wrote:

 

Can you give me the exact link to the download url you used for the Ubuntu image? 

​Probably releases.ubuntu.com/16.04/ubuntu-16.04.2-desktop-amd64.iso

EKR

[Edward K. Ream]

On Friday, April 14, 2017 at 11:22:23 AM UTC-5, Edward K. Ream wrote:

> Alas, I won't have it with me at the sprint.

Wow. I just got it back, two days after sending it to Atlanta.  I'll test it for a few days before changing anything.  I'm not convinced they actually fixed anything.  We shall see what the battery indicator says tomorrow.

Edward

[john lunzer]

 I'm not convinced they actually fixed anything.

Funny, I say the same thing every time I get my car back from the shop.

[Edward K. Ream]

On Wednesday, April 19, 2017 at 10:20:11 AM UTC-5, Edward K. Ream wrote:

My Lenovo T460s now runs both Windows 10 and Ubuntu. I bought Windows 10 on a stick, hehe, to ensure it would always be available.  Worth the price, imo.  It was actually easier to install Ubuntu than reinstall Windows 10.  I had to download the Windows 10 networking drivers from another machine after installation.

Note to Kent: The trick to getting any Linux distro to display properly on high-res machines is to set the magnification in the display settings to 1.5 or above. I was being unfair to the other distro, whose name I can't remember.  Otoh, the unnamed other distro did hose Windows, whereas Ubuntu did not.

Edward

[Kent Tenney]

Interesting, the other distro was reinventing install, poorly.

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