[plug] Buy Linux laptop

Wed Dec 2 07:34:01 AWST 2020

This thread is a month old and I've only just seen it, so forgive the late
reply, but I'd like to share how I've dealt with it, by not dealing with it.

My last "Linux" laptop was the last IBM Thinkpad. After years of banging my
head against a wall needing to recompile kernels and kernel modules I'd had
enough and embarked on an adventure.

I purchased a Macbook Pro in 2009. It runs (still, after adding a new SSD
and a new battery) standard MacOS and VMware. Inside VMware I run as many
different flavours of Linux as I need. When I bought an iMac in 2015, I
installed VMware, dragged the images across and continued working. I'm
about to blow away the entire drive, install a virgin copy of the latest
MacOS, the latest VMware and drag the images back and continue to work.

I have made one concession to a vanilla MacOS, the installation of
homebrew, for the specific purpose of automating the creation of a
docker-machine as a VMware guest.

>From this process I've gained the ability to "try" a new distro, without
needing to add drives or blow away my install. I've been able to test an
upgrade by creating a VMware snapshot before doing the upgrade and seeing
what happened before being stuck. I don't recall the last time I have
recompiled a kernel, nor have I come across any incompatibilities. I run
external USB devices, like RTL-SDR dongles, in-built hardware like the
webcam and the like all within Linux without any issues.

I can allocate as much or as little RAM or CPU cores to each virtual
machine as is needed. Right now my iMac has 64 Gb of RAM, it's running my
main desktop machine, my docker machine, a folding at home machine and in a
moment when I start my day I'll fire up a machine that's been created
specifically for a client project without any chance of information leaking
in either direction. When I do my GST, I'll fire up my accounting machine.
For hobby work I have several amateur radio machines, a cross-compiler, a
logging machine and several other operating systems like Windows and
Android.

I've not ever come across a situation where I needed 100% of the CPU for
100% of the time, so I'm extremely satisfied with this implementation.

I've been hearing interesting benchmark comments about Apple's new chips
and it appears that even in emulated mode they run faster than native
Intel. As a bonus I'll likely be able to run native ARM virtual machines at
the same time. This will no doubt make my cross-compilation a whole lot
easier ;-)

In my 11 year experience in using this solution, you can use VMware as your
main hosting platform within another operating system. I've not tried this
under Windows and I'm not happy about how Microsoft manages updates, so I'm
likely to stick with Apple for the foreseeable future.

If you have questions, feel free to ask.

Onno

On Sun, 1 Nov 2020 at 18:43, Byron Hammond <byronester at gmail.com> wrote:

> I also thought the Gen7 X1 Carbon was a gift price.
> Am happy with it so far.
> Fingerprint scanner works too which is a nice bonus
>
>
> from my mobile
>
> On Sun, 1 Nov 2020, 6:29 pm Gregory Orange, <home at oranges.id.au> wrote:
>
>> (got a bounce on 22/10, trying again)
>>
>> Thanks everyone for the input. I had a lot of options in the end, and
>> Star Labs were close to the top. In the end I *just* missed a ThinkPad X1
>> Carbon Gen 8 great price yesterday, but the price on a Gen 7 with almost
>> identical specs was still great for me, so I've bought it.
>>
>> I'll (try not to) see if Black Friday deals make me regret my haste!
>>
>> Greg.
>>
>>
>> On 20/10/20 4:34 pm, Gregory Orange wrote:
>> >
>> > Hi everyone,
>> > I'm looking to buy a <2kg Linux laptop. This time around, I'd like 99%
>> hardware support, particularly including lid open and close, suspend and
>> resume, because that's the killer feature of my crusty MBP. What are the
>> chances of that with LXDE, or perhaps LXQt now Lubuntu LTS ships with that?
>> >
>> > I don't mind using another distro. 1080p preferable. External
>> monitor(s) required. I don't know much about docks, but I suppose that's a
>> good idea.
>> >
>> > https://certification.ubuntu.com/desktop looks useful - I could spend
>> a bunch of time sifting through options to see what's available in AU. No
>> surprises that Dell and Lenovo feature there.
>> >
>> > Any thoughts? Where to buy?
>> >
>> > Thanks,
>> > Greg.
>> >
>> > _______________________________________________
>> > PLUG discussion list: plug at plug.org.au
>> > http://lists.plug.org.au/mailman/listinfo/plug
>> > Committee e-mail: committee at plug.org.au
>> > PLUG Membership: http://www.plug.org.au/membership
>> >
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> PLUG discussion list: plug at plug.org.au
>> http://lists.plug.org.au/mailman/listinfo/plug
>> Committee e-mail: committee at plug.org.au
>> PLUG Membership: http://www.plug.org.au/membership
>>
> _______________________________________________
> PLUG discussion list: plug at plug.org.au
> http://lists.plug.org.au/mailman/listinfo/plug
> Committee e-mail: committee at plug.org.au
> PLUG Membership: http://www.plug.org.au/membership

-- 
Onno Benschop

()/)/)()        ..ASCII for Onno..
|>>?            ..EBCDIC for Onno..
--- -. -. ---   ..Morse for Onno..

If you need to know: "What computer should I buy?" http://goo.gl/spsb66

ITmaze   -   ABN: 56 178 057 063   -  ph: 04 1219 8888   -
onno at itmaze.com.au
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