My preferences in a laptop are similar to Todd's--I'm only going to
carry my laptop a couple of times a month, so I'll optimize for power.
My employer bought me a new Dell M3800, and I spent the weekend putting
Fedora 21 on it (KDE). Everything appears to work out of the box. I was
impressed to find that even though Dell made my employer pay the Windows
tax, they have a team making sure that Linux driver support exists for
most of their laptops[1].
I had a few problems, which appear to be fundamental problems with Linux
on modern developer-class laptops:
* Linux support for the NVIDIA Optimus graphics is provided by the
Bumblebee project. It works, and wasn't hard to set up, but is not very
user friendly to use. When a user decides that a specific application
needs more power, and should therefore cut battery life, the user can
launch that application with Bumblebee.
* Linux support for high DPI screens is still poor. Especially with a
low DPI external monitor. (It works, but is ugly.)
* Linux can't do anything advanced with the touch screen (a Firefox
plugin called "Grab and Drag" can help in that app). A second monitor
messes up the touch screen recognition because it maps the touches on
one screen across both monitors.
* I miss the nice touchpad gestures of OSX. (But not enough to put up
with OSX.)
The first two appear to be resolved in Wayland. Unity/Mir appears to be
making support in all three. Gnome3 has worse high DPI support than KDE
at the moment, but better multi-touch gestures. I might be able to get
nice gestures with Touchégg, but it is written for Ubuntu and might not
compile cleanly for Fedora.
Google suggests that the last three problems also exist to some extent
in Windows 8.1. These are the areas where OSX is the leader, though OSX
couldn't handle my external low-DPI monitor either. My external monitor
is crystal clear with Linux.
If any of you have solutions for the above problems, I would appreciate
you sharing them.
Richard
[1]
http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/b/techcenter/archive/2013/11/14/ubuntu-on-the-precision-m3800
On 01/09/2015 12:54 PM, Tod Hansmann wrote:
On Fri, Jan 9, 2015 at 10:44 AM, Clint Savage <[email protected]> wrote:
Also, I would guess that the 1080p display your wife has is not on an
ultrabook or small display laptop. I'm not sure why laptop manufacturers
don't put nicer displays in those things as it would make complete sense.
Business users who travel could really use a snazzy display like that, plus
if you travel, yeah... </drool>
In the ultrabooks, the majority of the cost IS the display (largely in the
power consumption tech), so I can see that being a reason when most people
don't use the resolution for their work. That said, I refuse to ever use
anything below 1680x1050 for any serious computing, so my pickiness shows
here. I spent a premium on my Surface for that resolution.
I actually don't subscribe to the idea that ultrabooks are all that great,
really. My Surface is useful as a portable drawing machine with a
keyboard, but if I was traveling a lot, I'd probably stick with a 14-17"
laptop, likely a "desktop replacement" in power. Portable computing is a
joke beyond simple tasks (to me, mind you). For simple stuff like most
things you'd do in a word processor or email, I am fine to use my phone on
the go.
I know this is just me. I know I'm not the market. I'm just hoping
there's a laptop out there I can get a linux desktop experience on for
something close to the price of my linux desktop (and I can build a very
nice linux desktop for < $600 including monitor). Like I said, I'm picky
with my devices. I'll never be satisfied =cP
-Tod Hansmann
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