OT: Linux laptops for coding apps?

[MikeD]

Originally Posted by wpod

Running MINT on a MacBook Pro, no Mac OS. Running Mac OS with VirtualBox on older MacBook with Ubuntu and Fedora. No problem coding on any.

How old is your Mac?

[CunegoFan]

Originally Posted by thegunner

if you're going to get the new macbook, make sure you try out the keyboard before you do.

personal preference, but it feels like hot garbage to me. it's mushy and the keypress travel is awkwardly short.

if you're going to use vim a lot, skip the touchbar version altogether, hitting a fake esc key will drive you mad.

This. This. And this--especially the escape key and function keys, which are used extensively by IDEs.

Not only do you have to worry about feel of the keyboard, you have to worry about its reliability. Apple is on the third generation of its butterfly keyboard, and it still has not solved the reliability problem. I lost track of the number of people I know who have had keyboard issues with the post 2016 MBPs. I count myself lucky; I have only had intermittent problems with a few keys that have gone away with use of compressed air. Apple went from the probably best laptop keyboard other than the Thinkpad's to the absolute worst, all to save a couple of millimeters.

[MattTuck]

If at a desktop set up, won't you have external keyboard anyway? If working on the go a lot, I get the concern over keyboard... But programming is not easy to do in a crowded coffee shop. Requires more focus.

[Bostic]

At my previous company I deployed more than 30 2016 and 2017 MacBook Pros with Touch Bar’s. 17 of them went to the Apple store for keyboard issues. nn nnnn ee ee e eee bb b bbbbbb were the common keys that would multiple press.

I personally hate seeing laptops with a million stickers on the top at coffee shops but would love to see one with nothing but cycling related Logos.

If you buy Apple buy Apple Care. Can’t stress that enough. Everything is integrated and a simple key becomes top case assembly with battery attached and four other things that you would think have nothing to do with a part totaling 700 in cost.

[45K10]

Good stuff, thanks for all of the comments!

[benb]

I’m a software engineer. I’ve mostly been on a MacBook for the past 5 years or so. (Employers supplied them)

Last year I had a battery failure on work MBP and IT let me try a System 76 laptop as part of a pilot program.

I work on a distributed application that is only supported in Linux but can run on Mac under docker.

If I was only sitting at the desk always plugged into the network the Linux laptop would have been superior. If IT gave us the option of having a Linux laptop and a Mac that might be okay too although I have no desire to haul 2 machines around. If the Linux laptop is going to stay at the desk it might as well be a desktop tower and be faster and cheaper.

So as the only machine the Linux laptop sucked. I spent tons of time working around mobility related bugs. Network breaking when you switch from wired to wireless networking. Various bugs when plugging and unplugging external monitors. Non software dev apps misbehaving. Things like the fan blowing full blast in meetings when windows or Mac would be silent. Things like WebEx video not being accelerated resulting in the fan going full blast and draining the battery in 45 minutes when Mac/Windows could handle running a video meeting for 6+ hours. I gave up after a few months as I was spending 20% of my time on Linux issues instead of my work.

My biggest annoyance with the MacBook Pro not being available with more than 16GB of memory. But this year Apple addressed that.

At home I got a Surface Pro for personal use this fall. Couldn’t be happier with it at a much lower price than a MBP since I am not really using it for software dev. It does a lot of stuff that doesn’t work easily in Linux.

The best thing to do with Linux is to have it on a desktop that you primarily use to contribute to Open Source software projects. That’s what the primary developers are doing so that is the happy path. The rest of us are developing non consumer stuff on Linux so we are never bothering to fix stuff relevant to laptops.

The other great use case is you’are a college student studying computer science. That was me back in the day and it was a great tool for learning.

[Bostic]

Originally Posted by benb

I’m a software engineer. I’ve mostly been on a MacBook for the past 5 years or so. (Employers supplied them)

Last year I had a battery failure on work MBP and IT let me try a System 76 laptop as part of a pilot program.

I work on a distributed application that is only supported in Linux but can run on Mac under docker.

If I was only sitting at the desk always plugged into the network the Linux laptop would have been superior. If IT gave us the option of having a Linux laptop and a Mac that might be okay too although I have no desire to haul 2 machines around. If the Linux laptop is going to stay at the desk it might as well be a desktop tower and be faster and cheaper.

So as the only machine the Linux laptop sucked. I spent tons of time working around mobility related bugs. Network breaking when you switch from wired to wireless networking. Various bugs when plugging and unplugging external monitors. Non software dev apps misbehaving. Things like the fan blowing full blast in meetings when windows or Mac would be silent. Things like WebEx video not being accelerated resulting in the fan going full blast and draining the battery in 45 minutes when Mac/Windows could handle running a video meeting for 6+ hours. I gave up after a few months as I was spending 20% of my time on Linux issues instead of my work.

My biggest annoyance with the MacBook Pro not being available with more than 16GB of memory. But this year Apple addressed that.

At home I got a Surface Pro for personal use this fall. Couldn’t be happier with it at a much lower price than a MBP since I am not really using it for software dev. It does a lot of stuff that doesn’t work easily in Linux.

The best thing to do with Linux is to have it on a desktop that you primarily use to contribute to Open Source software projects. That’s what the primary developers are doing so that is the happy path. The rest of us are developing non consumer stuff on Linux so we are never bothering to fix stuff relevant to laptops.

The other great use case is you’are a college student studying computer science. That was me back in the day and it was a great tool for learning.

I'm the IT department at my job. Everything above is SPOT ON. When users ask me for Linux I describe the above. Ideally run Linux on a powerful desktop that sits under your desk and you ssh to. Or if it must be on a laptop, get enough memory so you could run Linux as a virtual machine under VMWare Fusion or Parallels on Mac or VMWare Workstation on a Windows laptop. VirtualBox is free but it's free for a reason.

Installing Linux on a laptop leads to exactly what benb described. It starts off great and dual booting to Windows is fantastic. Then the fan kicks in, the touchpad stops right-clicking, the onscreen keyboard on a touch screen laptop always pops up even after you install the software to specifically nix that, the bluetooth recognizes every device on the floor except your new Logictech mouse. Then the Grub 2 boot loader somehow goes south after a kernel update and you can only get to the Bios. Finally you're hunting reddit looking for that one person who has already gone through all the nightmares for the system and hopefully has some answers to at least a few of the issues.

Dell has a few systems in their lineup as part of their Linux Project Sputnik that they certify to work with certain editions of Ubuntu. At the very least those systems have had some level of due diligence applied when it comes to the drivers of the onboard hardware.

At a cursory level I have had a bit of success with using Ubuntu off a Live USB stick on older MacBook Air's.

[benb]

Just to add to what I mentioned.

I'm not particularly partial to linux vs OSX vs windows. I've been on OSX long enough I kind of see grass as greener on windows and it'd be fun to work on windows software. At home I'm a bit loathe to spend the amount of money Apple demands for what I want to do because that is money that can easily be spent on bicycling, guitar, or other things I do for fun. (E.x. saving $500 because the Surface Pro I bought was on sale vs Macbooks never going on sale.)

I am more than capable of debugging the laptop related issues I was having, not complaining about that being too hard. I've submitted patches to various projects in the past, and even submitted a driver to the kernel way back when. I first ran a laptop with 100% linux all thew way back in 1995... things were VERY painful back then, but I was a college student and had all the time in the world to hack on things, and if I was screwing up my computer I could walk across the lawn to the computer lab. I have done some other screwy things in the past like running Linux on a Playstation 3. A lot of that stuff is not actually painful when learning how to fix stuff is your goal. The laptop I ran back in 1995 actually worked better in Linux than the System 76 one. No issues with battery life, mobility, etc.. but that was eons ago, I spent TONS of time hand building the linux setup for it, and there was a lot of stuff that you can do today that didn't exist back then. I didn't really have to worry about printing. Didn't have to worry about video conferencing cause it really didn't exist. I didn't even launch a GUI on it a lot of the time.

From what I've seen from my co-workers the Dell linux installs are better than the System76 ones. Fewer issues, but they again mostly have a Macbook for the non-software-dev stuff that being part of a company requires.

My big desktop at home I built myself specifically for linux compatibility. But then I have mostly not used Linux on it as I have a "Pro" level Canon printer and thousands of dollars in DSLR gear, and what point is a lot of that if I am only running Linux and I'm getting subpar results for that use case? If I was totally married to Linux I'd sell the photo gear and get much cheaper stuff since I'm not going to access the higher performance of that gear if I'm using reverse engineered software on Linux.

[45K10]

Good stuff, I really appreciate all of the insight especially concerning Linux. I may steer clear of it and either go with a Windows or Mac laptop. I'm pretty comfortable with both. I am a little fed up with Apple though.