My friend have a reasonably old Thinkpad laptop, she ran out of battery during a very important meeting, and I was able to help her by plugging my powerbank
Same. I haven’t bought a charger to/from work in years. I just have a very old spare at home that I’ve been using for my work laptops, and leave the original at the office.
I also seldom carry a charger, since most places I go have a USBC charger for me anyway.
I have a 2013 Pangolin. Not a bad machine - it's still going after several Ubuntu updates, and currently powers the kid's screen time. There were some annoyances that kept it from being my main coding machine - it was bulky, battery life is nowhere near as good as a MBP, the keyboard felt like it was off-center (probably because it, unlike many other laptops, has a numpad), and the trackpad gives next to no feedback. But it's a well-made machine that's kept going.
It disappeared from System76's lineup for several years. I wonder how the new ones compare with the old.
This is actually the first place my thoughts went to when I read the headline. But reading some of the other comments it sounds like this is a model name that's been around since pre-covid (i.e. 2013 at least).
I really wish system76 would start giving options for 4k displays. I have a FHD display from them, only a few months old, and it's noticeably worse than my old macbook pro display.
Not even a 4:3 display! 1080 vertical is almost useless for coding. Seems much of their target market of Linux enthusiasts would have a lot of coders wanting better than that.
Sure it can work, but it’s certainly not for me since I believe it’s a poor choice of default screen size for anything but primarily watching movies, as the aspect ratio limits the vertical viewing area significantly.
I like the way one blogger describes a 1440p vs a 1080p: “A 1440p monitor will give you 3x code windows side by side and 76 lines of code. This is a pretty big deal. You might not realize it until you’ve tried it for a while but being able to comfortably have 3 editor files open and being able to view about 50% more vertical lines of code at a glance is huge.” ( https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/how-to-pick-a-good-monitor-fo... )
Though someone else mentioned they have 4K version, not just a 1080 version! That can work better with the right scaling. The rest of the laptop looks nice.
I also use a mac pretty regularly and a 1440p desktop. I was getting at the aspect ratio issue, which it seems like you were talking about first, before now talking about resolution (?). Yes, a higher resolution can fit more pixels. The absolute actual size in inches also matters though for how big the text ends up appearing.
There you go. 3000x2000 on a 13.9" screen with a reasonably current processor. They have a few updated variants out there. (Was shopping for a 3:2 laptop when Dell finally got around to shipping a 16:10 7" display)
Pretty much every IDE now assumes wide screen and default to a layout with a central editor and navigation/tools sidebars on the sides. And it actually works out great!
I don't think a majority of linux enthusiasts codes mainly in vim or emacs anymore.
No idea. I still use emacs because it's still the most programmable editor. I had some hopes for Atom, but after Microsoft bought GitHub... seems dead-ish.
But given that Linux still doesn't have perfect support for display scaling (compared to macOS, for example) and the fact that it's a 15" screen, I would still probably opt for the 1080p if given the option.
I use a Skylake on a 4K laptop with a 4K external monitor above it. It is plenty fast, with no tearing. Under Qubes, where app VMs don't get to use the GPU, mpv plays full-screen 1080p video using 3 cores.
(Oddly, the external monitor will do 4K only at 30 Hz. I don't know if that is a limitation of the laptop or of the monitor.)
Pop!_OS (their own Linux distro) has DPI scaling built in. I can actually turn on x2 scaling, and while it's huge on the poor 1080 display, it works perfectly.
Also a lot of the big linux distro's now have support for this. I know Manjaro and Ubuntu can do it with minimal effort.
I have a 13" HP Spectre from mid-2017 with a 4k display. It's noticeably sharper (and brighter) than the 1080p alternatives. Prior to that, I had a QHD laptop from circa 2013. No font size issues on Linux that affected my work.
Actually Linux has my favorite display scaling --- if you just have one screen.
I spend all day with Firefox, terminals, and emacs in XMonad and they all scale perfectly with no raster UI elements. (XMonad's pixel boarder I didn't bother to scale.)
On Windows and MacOS last I checked, there was a lot more resized raster bullshit.
Even with multiple displays it's not that difficult - just pass the scale you want for a given display when calling `xrandr` and things generally just work as long as you're downscaling from the "native" dpi you have X using.
I can never get it to work properly with multiple displays. I have a 4k monitor and two 1080p monitors. Using 192dpi with 2x scale (param passing to xrandr), all kind of display errors popup (wrong color, weird fonts etc).
As for me: I haven't figured it out yet, sometimes a fractional scale works, sometimes you get vague errors. In any case what I have noticed is that quality drops significantly if you use fractionals.
For my set-up at home (1080 - 4k - 1080) I have a simple script, that really was more of a `write once - use always`-experience. E.g.
So basically what I do is, I virtually up-scale my other screens up to 4k, such that system-wide zoom settings are (more or less) consistent and enjoyable.
No, with `xrandr` you can scale to any fractional amount. For example, I had 2 24" external monitors (full-hd, not 4k), and a 13" thinkpad (chromebook, booted into linux). Obviously, the respective DPI's were way off.
Just a quick calculation in a repl, then called xrandr with the right scaling number, and presto, I had them exactly the same.
Then, with precise lining up of the displays, it was basically one seamless "sheet of paper". If I had a long web page or pdf spanning the displays (the laptop was directly under the monitors), then scrolling through it was quite "trippy".
I think because this was now a unified display where the bottom 1/3 was tilted differently to the top 2/3'rds (think of a curved ultrawide, but in portrait mode)
If in Gnome, fractional scaling is possible but not enabled by default. I use 125% and it has been fine. I did it via Gnome-tweak, or you can manually enable it [1].
It's 2020, we can make rockets land on self-driven barges, and somehow we're still forced to use xrandr manually...? This is the sort of thing that keeps me from going back to the Linux desktop.
You don't have to. Ubuntu 20.04 and Gnome desktop provide a fine hidpi experience. There are a few warts, but it all generally works. If you start dabbling with other desktop environments like xmonad or i3, it gets tricky.
Yeah, I wanted to configure hidpi on linux recently, when I had to work on FHD 14" screen without external monitor for a while. I found no config options in UI, and guides involving xrandr and fifteen different steps on the internet. I thought hell no and abandoned that idea altogether, cranked font size in the terminal and worked like that. And I actually "can" work in Linux and configure easier stuff. As far as I'm concerned at least some distros/DEs have non-existent hidpi support right now.
Is there any end in sight for the pixel doubling hacks? Why do we even use them any more? Apps should have had plenty time to adapt to higher DPI displays by now, and X11 has supported per display DPI since the 90s and a scale factor on top of this seems obviously wrong.
And for the niche case where you have a big disparity in DPIs of multiple displays + apps that can't adapt to DPI on the fly, scaling up is surely the wrong solution, you should be scaling down no the smaller screen.
I've tried looking a bit into this at one point and my understanding is that it's more a toolkit issue than an app issue.
QT has an option to adapt the size of the widgets according to the reported screen resolution, which seems to kind of work. I don't use that many QT apps, so not sure how this turns out in practice.
However, GTK just doesn't care.
All this is on X11, I hear the situation is somewhat better on Wayland.
Ubuntu Unity, which I still use today, has working fractional scaling (in 12.5% steps) for ages now. In fact, I'm pretty sure it had that before even Windows did.
Gnome seems to have finally caught up as well, even with Nvidia drivers. Like it or not, 4K is the current standard and going backwards makes no sense.
The MacBook Pro display is better in many more ways than just resolution. It's also has a wide gamut, excellent factory calibration, good contrast, and an effective antireflective coating on its glossy panel. I'd prioritize each of these over increasing the resolution from 1080p.
It’s also actually higher res too! My Late 2013 13” Macbook Pro has a resolution of 2560x1600. I wish more manufacturers would remember that there are specs between 1080p and 4K.
This is true for dektop monitors as well. I had to scout around for a 2560x1440 display for my desktop Ubuntu box. You would think they would be relatively common, but as you say everything was 1080p or 4k, at least when I was shopping in-person pre-covid. I ended up with an AOC gaming monitor that I really like that I bought online.
Couldn't disagree more (writing from MacBook display). I'd take mate FHD pver Macbooks smudgy, glossy retina any time of the _day or year_. Glossy displays in laptops should never have been a thing to begin with and I'm not sure how apple managed to convinced world that this should continue.
I used to think this way too, up until this summer when I spent a lot of time at my parent's house working from the garden.
My personal pc is a 2013 MBP, so glossy screen. My work pc is a hp probook 430 g5 (~2 years old) with a matte screen.
The one that I would take out in the garden when it was sunny was the mac. Sure, I could see myself in it, I had to set the backlight to 100%, but it was possible to focus my eyes such that the text on screen was actually readable. Of course, this implies black text on white background and to sit in such a way as not to have too contrasty a background.
The matte screen of the HP was completely useless. It was just a big blotch of white, it was next to impossible to see the text. I even took out an actual external monitor once to try it out, a Dell P2415Q with a backlight that's blinding inside. Same problem.
Now sure, when there's not a high level of ambient light, the matte screen is more easy to use as there are no reflections. But as soon as there's a source of light that shines on it (and there are cases when you can't control it) it's game over.
Protip: clean the macbook screen from time to time. Even if it doesn't look dirty. I wear glasses, so I use the cleaning spray on the screen. It always amazes me how much better it is afterwards.
In general, and for working outside especially, i recommend the Solarized colorscheme. It is optimized for good readability and contrast, while being easy on the eyes. https://github.com/altercation/solarized
Pardon the choice of words, but it is the only effective way I could convey my opinion re solarized and most color schemes.
Most color schemes try too hard to differentiate everything, lack good contrast and do not aid in understanding the code. Many of them and as a good example solarized, lack good contrast. I had so many issues trying to find a good scheme, that I resorted to creating my own for Jetbrain software, and make due with some of the rainglow schemes on VSCode. The themes are mostly black text on white background and the highlights are not obtrusive so as to draw more attention that the core. In the end, I spend more effort trying to mute the loudness of the colours than reading the content.
Honest question: what is an example of a good accessible color theme? I'm assuming Solarized is not a good choice for those with color blindness? Please explain, I'm very interested in color and accessibility.
Good for you is the one you enjoy using. Good for me is the one I enjoy using. Even if I didn't have a problem with Solarized's lower contrast, I would still think that its colors are hideous.
The problem for many with low-contrast themes is that they often aren't focusing on keeping contrast high. They're mostly focused on keeping contrast low. They aim to avoid being "too contrasty" without targeting being "goodly contrasty".
> color blindness?
Color blindness is its own set of problems. To the best of my knowledge I'm not colorblind. I just can't easily read poorly differentiated text unless I really crank up my screen's brightness or make the text much larger. The problem I think is mostly one of pupil physics relating to the impact of external light on pupil dilation and how that affects both focus accuracy (pinhole cameras focus perfectly without lenses) and also the amount of light entering the eye (smaller aperture means less total light, less light means less difference between light things and and dark things). Neural color perception is another issue that is related but only sort of. Or maybe there's an analog to colorblindness that we just don't talk about that deals with sensitivity to luminosity variations. IDK.
I have a complete opposite experience. I recently switched from Thinkpad t490s to macbook pro 16". I tend to work outside in the mornings and the glare has been driving me crazy. I'd rather have slightly less bright screen but actually see the content instead of my own morning bed-hair!
Just close your lid to find out! Everytime I open my macbook I'm greeted with a lovely print of my keyboard on my screen! You could call me out on my cheetos fingers but I use an external keyboard... As if the laptop wasn't heavy enough I have to carry a whole cleaning suite to actually see something.
My MacBook Pro screen has less glare, or at least better color than my LG Ultrawide in similar conditions. Even at the worst angles, I can still read everything just fine. I'm not going to be editing photos in an airport, but it doesn't get in my way when coding.
They convinced the world by pumping up the brightness and providing better color than other matte screens.
Agreed. The displays, speakers, touch pads on Apple products are amazingly good. But the pro laptops have been in steady decline as Apple gears them to the average user more and more over the years, instead of the power user like they were originally built for. I think System76 has the right direction for power users, shiny screens and crisp sound doesn't help me hunt through gigabytes of data and millions of lines of code.
I could take or leave 4k, but at least 2k (~2560x1440)?
Having their 2020 high-end 15.6" maxing out at 1080p is just ridiculous and I'd probably have bought at least one of their laptops if they had a sub-2kg model with just one step up in resolution.
Anything above 1080p doesn't give you any more usable screen space at that physical size. It's very debatable whether just having richer blacks is worth the battery life hit.
Speaking from experience and having played around with fonts, scaling and DPI, I still feel a bit hampered switching back to my Thinkpad t470s (14" 1080p) from a long time on my t490s (14" 1440p). I do use pretty small terminal fonts.
yes it does. the market clearly wants higher res screens, that's why "Retina Display" has been a major marketing point for Apple for years, and you literally haven't been able to buy a Macbook with a 1080p screen for years. This is not even for tech enthusiasts or professional uses, it's basic tablestakes in the market now.
> you literally haven't been able to buy a Macbook with a 1080p screen for years.
You are technically right, but to be fair, it has been barely more than one year. Apple sold their 2017 model of the 13" MacBook Air, 1440x900, in July 2019:
No it doesn't. There are mostly PC laptops with 1080p precisely because of people like me who only want 1080p because more pixels are pretty useless. Have you actually shopped for one recently? Top hits on Amazon are all FHD.
> "Retina Display" has been a major marketing point for Apple for years...
Exactly. And that's all it is - marketing, particularly for egoists who want to feel like they're better however they can. The vast majority of the market, mostly those who don't use Macs, don't give a shit.
Right, because Mac users aren't generally known for carrying around this air of superiority by saying things like "everybody wants what I have with my Retina/M1/touchpad gestures/etc."
If you like the way text looks on a Retina display just say that. Instead you're here on a thread about a PC product that you'll probably never use, acting like anyone that doesn't have a 4k display must be missing out. (You're right, I must be projecting :) Personally, I like desktop rigs with 1080p, a 5 button vertical mouse and 32-64gb of RAM in a quiet private office. I don't optimize for working on planes, trains and in meetings even though I do own a PC and Mac laptop as well...
I see two on the top page with 2k. But none with >16GB RAM and they’re all Windows - guess only egotistic people want Linux and 32GB RAM?
Some people do make use of a higher res screen, just because you don’t doesn’t make it useless. I haven’t wanted or owned an Apple computer for 10 years.
> ... none with >16GB RAM and they’re all Windows - guess only egotistic people want Linux and 32GB RAM?
Huh? Hardly anybody sells Linux laptops, mostly not on Amazon either. I think you'll be hard pressed to find many laptops pre-configured with 32GB RAM on Amazon too.
> Some people do make use of a higher res screen, just because you don’t doesn’t make it useless.
Okay, but the person I was responding to said that 4k is "table stakes". It's clearly not. Point being - not everybody wants a 4k screen. I didn't say that they were useless to everybody, I said that essentially "most people don't want or need them".
I've been a professional programmer for over 20 years and I have tried many, many different screen resolutions. I have a 2015 Macbook Pro right here next to my Acer E5-575G with 15.6" Full HD (1080p) screen.
Comparing them directly - I have absolutely no clue what you are talking about. Fonts, images and the UI look just as good if not better. I'll say better since I think the Mac UI is hideous.
You're right though - it's definitely not about screen real-estate because with Retina/2k/4k the OS typically has to scale everything up so you basically lose any real-estate that would have been gained in the first place. That's ridiculous IMO.
The only place I use Retina/2k/4k is for gaming and movies and I definitely am not doing either of those activities on a lowly laptop.
Retina display are simply more dense but add nothing to the screen real estate , nobody uses them at 1x I bet many don't even know that every pixel they see is actually 4 pixels on the monitor
Better have a larger monitor than a 13 inches packed with useless and expensive pixels
I really do wonder where exactly 4K would begin if more and weirder resolutions were commercially available. Like, the fact that 3840x2160 is considered the canonical 4K resolution means you don’t actually need 4000 pixels, just a number that’s close to 4000. I wonder what would happen if someone dropped a 3800x2000 display just to mess with people.
That is just double 1980x1080, and if you shuffle it a little you get a 4000x2000 pixels, but that would mean your aspect ratio is different than what people are used to.
Yep, kind of a deal breaker for me, which is a bummer because this almost looks perfect for me. It seems this is a weakness across their product range.
AMD integrated graphics needs a bit of explaining to me is this the performance monster variety or Intel graphics is actually faster type of deal. How many external screens can I drive with this setup?
My main use case for this would be using Darktable. For the same reason I want a good HDPI screen. Otherwise, this would be a development machine (docker, misc jetbrains stuff, homebrew, some data engineering, and all the usual stuff). So looking for ram and CPU that is faster than what I have today (2018 15" MBP).
My mac book pro is literally falling apart (keyboard) at this point and I'm not eager to jump on the ARM bandwagon yet as it will mess up my tool workflow short term (Java, docker, intellij, homebrew) and cause me compatibility headaches I just don't need in my life right now. I am liking the performance though. All the software that I use runs fine on Linux. So, not a hypothetical option for me. I'd be up and running in a few hours with little to no loss of functionality.
I don't care about legacy ports; USB-C dongles are cheap and effective and I have a few in my bag. Likewise with hdmi to usb-c. What I do care about is being able to connect my Thunderbolt USB-C phone, fuji camera, hard drives, external screen, etc. I'm thinking of adding a headphone to that mix. 2 USB-3.2 ports seems like it's limited.
I just picked up a Lenovo Yoga Slim 7. The only thing I can fault it on is the screen, the brightness is a bit anemic and there is some bleed. However, the performance is fantastic. I've been using it for image processing, and the 8C16T gets through my problems at the same speed as my desktop Ryzen 2700X. Similarly the onboard GPU is sufficient for playing Witcher 3, at just a slightly lower performance than my RX580.
It has 2 legacy USB-A ports, MicroSD, HDMI and a USB-C-3.2 which I've used to run a 4K screen at 60Hz.
Price was very reasonable. I'm happy, this has stepped up my laptop CPU performance by a factor of 4, the GPU can now do all the stuff I want from a laptop, and it's compact and has good standby life.
I have one, and it's an amazing laptop. However, as Purism are focused on privacy and free (as in freedom) software, they won't put in a gpu.
System76, for me, seems to have a balance between coreboot and as much free software as possible. But also the addition of a proprietary blob full gpu.
This is MY experience. I have run 4k on my ThinkPad X1 Extreme with Linux. Its not been a good experience for me. I am getting old and having vision issues, so I decided to get the 4k screen because my old MacBookPro 2015 had the high res and worked well with my eyes, it just didn't have the 15" screen.
Display Managers:
When Linux boots in a 4k screen, the GRUB menu is impossible to read, so I have it memorized. I have tried many Display Managers, some recognize 4k and adapt with no issue, many do not. GDM and SDDM work well, XDM not so much, fonts are all over the place.
X11 (it has an NVIDIA card)
There are some apps which refuse to adapt to 4k if you are running GNOME (and yes I use the QT_SCALE_FACTOR). Then there are apps written in WXWIDGETS. Steam menus and items are unreadable to me. Some Window Managers barely support HiDPI displays (XFCE I am looking at you). It goes on and on, by the end of the day its a very frustrating experience. GNOME (and it's derivatives) do it the best so far, KDE has issues with icon sizes and the panel. XFCE has multiple issues, so much that I gave up on it quickly and can't remember them all (and it looked awful). i3 was a little tricky at first but it can be configured to work well, but you need to adapt all the apps and bars too.
Other OSes:
Even MS Windows has frequent problems with the screen magnification.
macOS just gets it right, and I never had ANY of these issues, except small fonts in the firmware screen.
For my next laptop I will go back to 1920x1080 and avoid all these problems and start using AMD GPU's so I dont have to turn off secure boot and stop using X11.
Tip: install Pop!_OS - Nvidia edition. I also have a (1st gen) Thinkpad X1 Extreme with a 4K screen. In addition to that, I have 3 external 4K screens connected to it (so 4x 4K screens in total), and it runs smoothly without having needed any additonal config/customization.
How much work does it take to get Ubuntu to a good state with Nvidia drivers. e.g. equivalent of ease of use of Pop!_OS. I have a Thinkpad X1 Extreme (Gen3) on the way, and I am researching Pop!_OS vs. Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. I am leaning Ubuntu but if you tell me there is something magical in the Nvidia Pop!_OS distribution that is hard/impossible to replicate in Ubuntu 20.04 I would consider it.
If I install Xfce instead of Gnome desktop will I break the magic?
tangent: Who the hell let them name Pop!_OS, such an engineer name.
Fwiw, my default method of managing the NVIDIA drivers on Ubuntu 18.04 is by installing the System76 driver package using the directions from their site. I found that to make it way easier than doing it manually, especially bc I needed to manage two CUDA versions on one machine.
I wouldn't guess that switching away from GNOME would break hardware compatibility drivers, but I could be wrong.
> Also, KDE is better in all regards. Ditch gnome.
Yup, did that, GNOME looks nice, but... KDE has some issues with HiDPI, like a mouse pointer that is way too small on window controls. Yes I did change the cursor size to 48, but it does not work with what I assume is a kwin issue. So the cursor hops from one size to another all over the place.
This may be a bug in an older KDE version. I'm on debian testing with running the latest stuff from https://www.preining.info/blog/2020/12/debian-kde-plasma-sta... . I'm no longer running into those HiDPI issues in gnome or kde apps (some wxwidgets stuff is still wonky). Nothing ends up the wrong scale when using Plasma Wayland, but there are still other issues that aren't worked out that keep it from being perfect either. You might quickly try the KDE Neon distro on a live usb disk to see if it behaves better and then you'll know if the bugs you're running into have been fixed. https://neon.kde.org/
Since you are of the opinion that it is a small matter of programming, and it is an open-source project that takes contributions, you should definitely go write that.
Since it has not already happened, you may assume one of the following:
- it is in the works but has not made it to the version you are using.
- nobody else thought of that, congratulations
- it turns out to be harder than just identifying the issue
Using XFCE 4.14-r2 (Gentoo) and things are okish with Intel GPU (Lenovo P71, 17' 4k panel). But I did not use the option "Window Scaling" (currently set to 1x) instead I changed in the Fonts-tab the "Custom DPI settings" setting it to 192.
The only problem that I have left is with Google Chrome & Vinagre: whenever I move the cursor inside their windows it stops being scaled up (therefore it becomes tiny). Used to work fine, changed during some recent update :(
This gets into the technical details more than I am able to, but I agree completely. I also have older eyes, and 4k was just unusable (on a Galago with a 13" screen). I could have scaled down by a factor of two, but that was too coarse.
I exchanged the Galago for a 14" Darter, and 1920x1280 is just right.
I'm in the same boat where my eyes were not as good as they used to be and I often run a scaled display rather than 1:1. I'm using Ubuntu 18.x LTS and it comes out of the box with gnome but I primarily use i3wm. I was able to scale my display to be 25% larger and every app by adding this line to my .Xresources:
Same. I use the Xresources and scale factor environment variables for my desktop with its 32 inch screen and I love it. It's great. But for a laptop, you get a little crispness on the text, but in general there's no reason to get a 4K display on a 13~15 inch screen. It's not worth all that effort.
I agree with some other posters here that I don't need it to be 4k, but 1080p is bad enough to be a deal killer for me. The only reason I don't buy System76 laptops is their terrible displays — I love PopOS (so much that I donate monthly to it) and would buy their hardware in a heartbeat otherwise.
2K is a generic term for resolutions that have a horizontal resolution of approximately 2,000 pixels. In terms of cinema the DCI standard for 2K is 2048x1080. There is also the flat cropped resolution of 1998x1080 and the cinemascope cropped resolution of 2048x858. 1080p has the same vertical resolution as DCI 2K and it's horizontal resolution is also approximately 2,000. 2560x1440 is 560 pixels more than 2,000 compared to 1920x1080 which is only 80 pixels away. That is 7x further away from exactly 2,000. Calling 2560x1440 2K is too big of a stretch. If you wanted to give it a name based upon its approximate horizontal resolution then you should call it 2.5K.
The main problem is that it is low dpi. It means you can't really connect a high external dpi monitor and then use both displays at the same time, because linux can't (or at lest couldn't within the last year) handle displays with different DPI.
I bought a Oryx Pro about 2 1/2 years ago to get a laptop with an NVidia GPU. I bought the high resolution version, but sometimes run it at the lower 1920x1080 resolution.
I just looked and they don’t seem to offer the higher resolution right now on that model.
I would prefer 2K res on a laptop. On a 15 inch screen, 4K is overkill - I have to increase desktop scaling to read text, so there's no increase in screen real estate. Higher res drains the battery faster as well.
AFAIK they just resell commodity generic laptops under their brand and they do some System76 specific things to them such as open source bios firmwares. I may be wrong but when I looked into them years back thats what I uncovered. I think if they want to differentiate themselves as a high end ubuntu/developer machine they're going to need the things people want (or don't know they want). My personal needs are high res, bright, color accurate, crisp displays (currently loving my Samsung Galaxy Chromebook) and high quality keyboards. I don't really know of a device that has both.
Well that's a good reason, it just didn't jump at me from the page. On HN topics are supposed to be about "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity". What would be some reasons how this laptop does that? I'm asking seriously, not trying to argue that it doesn't.
Yep, sometimes people use 2k to mean 1440p / QHD. But it's a particularly bad name for that resolution. 2K is an existing cinema spec that is much closer to 1920x1080 than anything else.
It's not a stretch. Reading or writing code at 1x resolution is making a huge disservice to your eyes. Minimum 160ppi, the more the better.
In 2020 1080p only makes sense on higher frequencies for gaming, until someone finally releases an affordable 4k >=120hz displays which isn't a "gamer" atrocity.
Fwiw, I have a 13" ThinkPad with a 4k display and get ~4 hours of real battery life or more while working with docker running a handful of containers, browser, vim, spotify, and a few dev tools running.
Nothing amazing by any means, but it's plenty for real world usage and if I stop the docker daemon, I probably gain another hour or two. How often are you working somewhere for more than a few hours without a plug?
My Surface Book has a very nice 13″ 3000×2000 display (28% fewer pixels than 4K). Paired with an i7-6600U CPU and 8GB of RAM, it got 10–13 hours of real battery life when it was new a few years ago—at the time, I think that was not far off being a record for any type of laptop.
I am never going back to 1920×1080. I’m sceptical even of 2560×1440 on a 13″ display. 15″, I’m certainly not going to accept anything meaningfully less than 4K.
I really like their laptops but it seems like it almost costs the same as a macbook pro if I try to match the specs. If it was cheaper I would definitely consider them for my next laptop.
I'm on a System76 Lemur Pro these days and really love it. It's light, keyboard feels good, battery life is great. Echo the desire expressed in other comments here of wanting nicer / higher res screens. But having been on Arch+xmonad/dmenu/i3 etc. before for a while then main-ing mac since then, PopOS on this laptop feels like a good convenience combo (Bluetooth setup etc. works easily) with something like Regolith. The hardware being actually supported the way System76 does it is comforting, esp. with the open source firmware code (I don't ever do anything with that but it's just comforting in some way I guess).
I would actually explicitly pick switching from an already-satisfactory i3 setup to a Regolith setup as maybe not worth it (unless you're literally just doing it for kicks, I guess?).
In my case: I've done i3 setups before and then haven't main'd Linux in a bit, then when back on it tried to see how well I could fare with minimum system setup, and Regolith gave me a good-ish i3 config out of the box (along with dark matching GTK3 theme and terminal themes etc.). I did end up tweaking the files though to change up some keybinds and indicate fan speed + thermals in the bar. So it ended up being mostly 1) just a config starter (incl. most bar widgets you'd want) that I can also maybe rebase on if they update upstream in a way that matters 2) a way to get very consistent system theming across i3 setup and GTK.
Regolith is just a software suite like gnome-desktop that attempts to make a coherent i3 system without having to find solutions for the parts of the desktop environment that i3 doesn't manage.
Advantage of using it is you get a set of sensible defaults rather than having to put together your own.
If you're an i3 veteran there is little if any advantage to switch. I was turned off by Regoliths' key bindings which deviate from vanilla i3.Regolith does have some nice features like parsing your config to display a helpful key map.
Clevo is a white-label supplier and other companies rebrand them. Dell has vertically-integrated their supply chain. That just means that Clevo competes with Dell at a specific part of the vertical integration. It doesn't mean they're not competitors.
Bought an Oryx Pro a few years ago, had to replace the LCD, keyboard twice. Terrible build quality, poor battery performance. I would not recommend these laptops.
so, one side is blind to the raw performance and experience the other party is experiencing.
the other side is blind to the morality and ethics of the corporate decisions being perpetrated with support from their own dollar by the company they support -- or worse, they recognize and support morally grey business practices knowingly.
So, in other words, yes I can imagine that comparison.
It truly is a candles versus flashlights contrast present between the M1 and the Pangolin, and it's a contrast highlighted by more than just the performance and user experience of the machines.
As a recent owner of a Lenovo Flex 5 14 with AMD4700U, I recommend verifying that USB-C alternate mode / Display Port capability is available. On the Flex 5 it isn't and it's quite annoying that docking for multiple displays, etc. is nerfed.
It's mystifying that there's pretty much no availability of competitive spec'd machines for such a great performing processor / GPU on the market. This Pangolin is slightly amazing for allowing up to 64GB of RAM -- all other options using AMD Ryzen 4XXX I've seen are limited to 8GB of soldered RAM, 1080p display, and 720p webcam. I was somehow lucky and got a 16GB version of the Flex 5 in July. Now it's completely disappeared from the market.
It just feels like dark market forces are preventing good options that people really want to buy.
How can one check what one's usb-c port supports? I have a Lenovo yoga 920 (I think that's what it is... Got it as a warranty replacement for a different device). I have a usb-c to HDMI adaptor from the first device and it doesn't work on this newer device, which is quite annoying.
I agree it's not easy many times because of all the different modalities of USB-C. And, as a shopper, it feels like many in the industry is preying upon that ambiguity.
"alternate mode" support and "display port" support are the keywords I know to look for. Or alternatively, beware of ones that say "Data and Power Distribution (PD) only"
Seeing it not mentioned in the Pangolin specs doesn't give me hope for this unit -- no mention in the expansion ports section AND no mention in the video ports section. Red flags for me and my desired way of computing.
I have also found this. it always seems to be a spec/display conflict and I think it results from us sitting between two very large markets. Consumer space prioritizes decent displays at the cost of poor quality-control/cheap components to keep costs down because that's what sells, and Enterprise space seems to drive costs down by aiming for better reliability at the expense of display options because the buyers are not the users, so the bad display kind of "doesn't matter" to the buyer and doesn't actually prevent work getting done like insufficient RAM might. The final nail in the coffin is Lenovo et. al, leaving off good display options so they don't cannibalize adjacent or higher product lines. :( Pretty massive first world problem, but annoying nonetheless.
The 4500U and 4700U are a different market segment than the 4700H and 4800H. If you buy a gaming laptop, you can get 32 or 64 GB of RAM, dual SSDs, and a GTX, RTX, or RX GPU.
I agree. But that comes at a cost of weight and bulk. The Pangolin is a 4700U. There should be a great 4700U option that competes with top-of-the-line Mac and Dell Intel SKUs.
- named "pangolin" and illustrated with a bull
- the bull is disturbingly ugly
- the introduction makes no sense to me? Is team red the Democrat party?
I agree it’s a bit weird but I think I’ve cracked it: the red is referring to AMD’s main brand color (“team red”). They are rolling out the red carpet like a matador/torero uses red cloth to bait a raging bull. They are also saying “no bull” as a play on words to say they aren’t bullshitting us by putting out this laptop with all AMD components. As for “pangolin”, I think that’s just them reusing the model name that was previously used for this form factor in their lineup.
Among CPU geeks “Team Red” means AMD. If you’re talking about their GPU competition then “Team Green” is Nvidia, and if you’re talking about their CPU competition “Team Blue” is Intel (and in American politics, Team Red generally would refer to the Republicans). I can’t speak to the aesthetics of the Bull or the odd choice of the mammal best known in the West for spreading Covid to humans as the version mascot, but hey, it’s original.
The pangolin as an intermediate host between bats and humans is a valid virologist theory, but as far as I am aware there is no physical evidence for these zoonotic jumps, is there?
As far as I've been able to tell, the evidence for pangolins as the vector for Covid is somewhat circumstantial at the moment, based largely on their presence in the Wuhan wet market that has been implicated in early spread, a history of pangolins being found to carry and transmit various coronaviruses similar to Covid-19, and some specifically suspicious test results in pangolins from the market. Nothing specifically causative that I've seen (AFAIK, the link to the wet market as the source rather than an early transmission location isn't even well-established).
I suspect that, given we're a year on from the initial transmission of the virus in humans, unless the Chinese government has more research they haven't made public, we'll likely never know the truth.
> AFAIK, the link to the wet market as the source rather than an early transmission location isn't even well-established
My understanding is that there's really no evidence for it being the source at all; it's effectively a myth. It was an early super spreader, but there's no particular reason to think it was the _source_.
I was referring to the Pangolin, which I had never heard of until 10 months ago. Mascot was probably the wrong word, but I don’t know what else to call the naming trend of “use an animal name that starts with the letter we want”.
First time I hear about a pangolin-Covid connection too. As far as the animal angle of the Covid goes the only thing that I can think of, with effort, is the mink, because of Dutch culling them in bulk in recent weeks. Nothing else.
Edit - looked it up. Ah, so that's about the Chinese market trading exotic wild animals that was the ground zero of the outbreak. Never remembered that it had pangolins in the mix and I doubt that very many people do.
Yes but if you buy one of these, install Ubuntu 12.04, and set your wallpaper to some of these lovely creatures then you can look at pangolins on Pangolin on your Pangolin. And isn't that what life's really all about in the end?
The parent was talking about pangolins, although ironically there's data to show that bovines can also contract and transmit COVID-19. What a time to be alive! (or at the very least not yet dead in a pandemic!)
I have to say I cringe a bit when I see terms like this and it's oddly off-putting to me.
It's a little like if you're shopping for a video game console or a phone and can't get a straight answer on anything due to children arguing over which brand's product they like better all over the internet.
I get that it's just terminology but it's always struck me as odd that buyers would affiliate themselves so strongly with a brand in an open, competitive marketplace.
At least between (for example) Android and iPhones there are objective differences that might matter to you in picking one or the other, but for internal components that fundamentally don't impact how the device works it seems odd to have such strong feelings about it.
Surely all I care about as the consumer is if this laptop is objectively better for my use case than my other options in its price range?
> At least between (for example) Android and iPhones there are objective differences that might matter to you in picking one or the other, but for internal components that fundamentally don't impact how the device works it seems odd to have such strong feelings about it.
The choice between AMD and Nvidia has a strong impact on how your device will work - and that is beyond just performance.
> I get that it's just terminology but it's always struck me as odd that buyers would affiliate themselves so strongly with a brand in an open, competitive marketplace.
I don't think it's necessarily that people affiliate themselves with a specific team, like some do with xBox vs Playstation for example. Team names have been more popular lately due to the comeback of AMD, where a lot of people were rooting for "team red" so that the CPU market wouldn't be as stagnant. However most people still just buy the product with the most performance per dollar, or support for their software.
>At least between (for example) Android and iPhones there are objective differences that might matter to you in picking one or the other, but for internal components that fundamentally don't impact how the device works
There are fundamental differences to AMD vs Nvidia GPUs if you're using them in a professional context. Main one being if the software you need uses CUDA acceleration you need to buy Nvidia because it's their technology and will not run on an AMD card.
> I can’t speak to the aesthetics of the Bull or the odd choice of the mammal best known in the West for spreading Covid to humans as the version mascot
IIRC the Pangolin is already on their laptop lineup since a couple of years.
"No bull" in this case being short for "no bullshit" - no misleading, exaggeration, or lies. It's an idiom, possibly an American one but I'm not sure. They're using it here as a pun.
> and in American politics, Team Red generally would refer to the Republicans
Interestingly, this is surprisingly recent. In 20th century Democrats were usually (though not always) red, and Republicans blue, which would approximate UK usage (red for Labour, blue for Tories). Some TV network switched in the 90s, and it just caught on. Apparently 2000 was the first time it was done consistently.
Poor old pangolins. Personally I'd heard of them because they're so critically endangered with extinction. They seem like quite timid little creature. Hopefully their involvement in Covid transmission will encourage people to stop eating them or using them for bullshit folk medicine.
As for the bull- bulls are associated with red for multiple reasons ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muleta in bullfighting, Red Bull caffeinated drink, color of Bulls NBA team jerseys). System76 marketing: “No bull. ...Is it charging? It's charging. Must be all the AMD red. Time to run. No, bull!”
The "democrat" party (actually Democratic, using "democrat" is a Republican party slur) in the US is conventionally blue and the Republican party is conventionally red.
Red has also been used for "workers" parties and organizations, like the UK Labour party and various socialist and communist parties.
I'm pretty sure that the choice of red by System76 has nothing to do with politics.
Also, I’d associate the bull with anger and power on the bull’s part, because of the breeding and/or natural selection to favor it. The bull is also angry at being penned and possibly maltreated, before being killed.
“During the breeding, in order to preserve their natural characteristics, the bulls rarely encounter human beings, and if ever, never on foot.
...
Some commentators trace the origins of the fighting bull to wild bulls from the Iberian Peninsula and their use for arena games in the Roman Empire. Although the actual origins are disputed, genetic studies have indicated that the breeding stock have an unusually old genetic pool.
The aggression of the bull has been maintained (or augmented, see above) by selective breeding and has come to be popular among the people of Spain and Portugal and the parts of Latin America where it took root during colonial rule, as well as parts of Southern France, where bullfighting spread during the 19th century.
In May 2010, Spanish scientists cloned the breed for the first time. The calf, named Got, meaning "glass" in Valencian, was cloned from a bull named Vasito and implanted into a Friesian host mother.”
Bull-baiting? Practically everywhere in Europe and North America at one time or another, anyway, I would think.
I'm less sure of how popular bull-torturing was elsewhere, but I would guess quite popular. Blood sports were a big deal more or less worldwide until surprisingly recently.
While many countries outlawed this for of torture-as-a-sport, Wikipedia indicates it's also still a thing in Portugal, Southern France, Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Peru.
I know other countries use to have this but banned the practice.
The Democrats are associated with the color blue, it is the Republicans that are associated with the color red. But as other has pointed out Team Red in this context has no political implication.
I agree though that the marketing is indeed weird.
You and I could decide right now to switch them around. Or even assign totally different colors. It might have a slight impact though on our ability to be understood by the the rest of the world.
PS. I haven’t verified this but I’ve heard that the current colors were assigned in the year 2000.
It's such a small thing amidst all the other political noise, but it seems so quaint that George W. Bush actually apologized for using the phrase "democrat majority".
This is exciting. I’m hoping to make my first System76 purchase this year. 1.6lbs is a lot but hopefully a lot of this is battery (I’m only used to mAh as a metric; how much is 49Wh?) I’m also interested to know the refresh rate on the display. An odd name given ground zero for the pandemic, but why not get a head start on rehabilitating the name?
49Wh is very small battery for a laptop, even a light one, which this one isn't particularly. So spec-wise not impressive. Not surprising as it's competing with some pretty big players with a lot of hardware expertise.
For reference the LG Gram 15 has a 72Whr battery at 1.1kg. The current champ in 'battery size to weight ratio'. Most ultraportables have a 50-60Whr battery at around 1.3kg.
Watt-Hours are unambiguous units of energy, Amp hours are ambiguous without knowing the voltage.
since you said mAh (milliamp-hours), I'm thinking you are talking about phone batteries which are typically in the 3.3-3.6V range depending on the chemistry, then 1000mAh would be 3.3-3.6Wh.
As a comparison the Dell XPS 13 has a 52Wh battery, so it's not a very big battery. 49Wh is what the new MacBook Air has, but the Air has a much lower power CPU.
Just to clear things up you mean 3.64 lbs (1.65kg). I saw 1.6 lbs and was like "woah that's well under 1kg for a 15" laptop!"
I think 3.64 lbs (1.65kg) is perfectly acceptable for a 15" laptop, not the lightest but also not the heaviest.
However 49Wh is on the low end for this size laptop imho. Granted it isn't having to put a HiDPI screen and hopefully the Ryzen is more energy efficient than Intel but I doubt it is going to be a show stopper in the battery life department.
AMD is colloquially referred to as "Team Red" in computer hardware circles. Intel is "Team Blue" and Nvidia is "Team Green."
The phrase "seeing red" is a fairly common idiom in my experience in American English. This refers to the matador's traditionally red sash used in bull fighting. Red is believed to draw inordinate amounts of bull attention and make them angry.
The use of "seeing red" is a bit strange, as the idiom is typically associated with anger and a pending bull charge, potentially metaphorical.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 261 ms ] thread"Expansion 1× USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A, 1 × USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C, 2× USB 2.0 Type-A, MicroSD Card Reader"
which contains a mention of a single USC type C port.
My friend have a reasonably old Thinkpad laptop, she ran out of battery during a very important meeting, and I was able to help her by plugging my powerbank
I also seldom carry a charger, since most places I go have a USBC charger for me anyway.
I have a 2013 Pangolin. Not a bad machine - it's still going after several Ubuntu updates, and currently powers the kid's screen time. There were some annoyances that kept it from being my main coding machine - it was bulky, battery life is nowhere near as good as a MBP, the keyboard felt like it was off-center (probably because it, unlike many other laptops, has a numpad), and the trackpad gives next to no feedback. But it's a well-made machine that's kept going.
It disappeared from System76's lineup for several years. I wonder how the new ones compare with the old.
https://www.lenovo.com/gb/en/laptops/thinkpad/t-series/Think...
I really wish system76 would start giving options for 4k displays. I have a FHD display from them, only a few months old, and it's noticeably worse than my old macbook pro display.
Not even a 4:3 display! 1080 vertical is almost useless for coding. Seems much of their target market of Linux enthusiasts would have a lot of coders wanting better than that.
I like the way one blogger describes a 1440p vs a 1080p: “A 1440p monitor will give you 3x code windows side by side and 76 lines of code. This is a pretty big deal. You might not realize it until you’ve tried it for a while but being able to comfortably have 3 editor files open and being able to view about 50% more vertical lines of code at a glance is huge.” ( https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/how-to-pick-a-good-monitor-fo... )
Though someone else mentioned they have 4K version, not just a 1080 version! That can work better with the right scaling. The rest of the laptop looks nice.
"The genie is out of its bottle."
"The horse has left the barn."
"You can't unring a bell."
There you go. 3000x2000 on a 13.9" screen with a reasonably current processor. They have a few updated variants out there. (Was shopping for a 3:2 laptop when Dell finally got around to shipping a 16:10 7" display)
I don't think a majority of linux enthusiasts codes mainly in vim or emacs anymore.
Both Vim & Emacs have hardcore followings and buoyant communities.
Neovim + coc.nvim is massive these days... I know a lot of people who've moved from VSCode (or other big IDEs) over to terminal-based editors...
But given that Linux still doesn't have perfect support for display scaling (compared to macOS, for example) and the fact that it's a 15" screen, I would still probably opt for the 1080p if given the option.
(Oddly, the external monitor will do 4K only at 30 Hz. I don't know if that is a limitation of the laptop or of the monitor.)
Also a lot of the big linux distro's now have support for this. I know Manjaro and Ubuntu can do it with minimal effort.
I spend all day with Firefox, terminals, and emacs in XMonad and they all scale perfectly with no raster UI elements. (XMonad's pixel boarder I didn't bother to scale.)
On Windows and MacOS last I checked, there was a lot more resized raster bullshit.
For my set-up at home (1080 - 4k - 1080) I have a simple script, that really was more of a `write once - use always`-experience. E.g.
So basically what I do is, I virtually up-scale my other screens up to 4k, such that system-wide zoom settings are (more or less) consistent and enjoyable.Just a quick calculation in a repl, then called xrandr with the right scaling number, and presto, I had them exactly the same.
Then, with precise lining up of the displays, it was basically one seamless "sheet of paper". If I had a long web page or pdf spanning the displays (the laptop was directly under the monitors), then scrolling through it was quite "trippy".
I think because this was now a unified display where the bottom 1/3 was tilted differently to the top 2/3'rds (think of a curved ultrawide, but in portrait mode)
Honestly, it really was that simple.
You'll have to relog for the scaling to take effect with custom numbers for some reason
[1] https://www.linuxuprising.com/2019/04/how-to-enable-hidpi-fr...
And for the niche case where you have a big disparity in DPIs of multiple displays + apps that can't adapt to DPI on the fly, scaling up is surely the wrong solution, you should be scaling down no the smaller screen.
I could readily see different filter profiles for different applications. Some of which render, and take input ques, at scaled resolutions.
What I hate a LOT more are games and applications that make any sort of connection between Pixel Aspect Ratio and a display resolution.
QT has an option to adapt the size of the widgets according to the reported screen resolution, which seems to kind of work. I don't use that many QT apps, so not sure how this turns out in practice.
However, GTK just doesn't care.
All this is on X11, I hear the situation is somewhat better on Wayland.
macOS only allowed me to run my 3440x1440 display at lower resolutions, but no _actual_ scaling support. The font is around 3mm tall.
Meanwhile, wayland scaling work wonders. The big issue being that xorg-only apps are blurry (it’s recently been fixed in master though).
My personal pc is a 2013 MBP, so glossy screen. My work pc is a hp probook 430 g5 (~2 years old) with a matte screen.
The one that I would take out in the garden when it was sunny was the mac. Sure, I could see myself in it, I had to set the backlight to 100%, but it was possible to focus my eyes such that the text on screen was actually readable. Of course, this implies black text on white background and to sit in such a way as not to have too contrasty a background.
The matte screen of the HP was completely useless. It was just a big blotch of white, it was next to impossible to see the text. I even took out an actual external monitor once to try it out, a Dell P2415Q with a backlight that's blinding inside. Same problem.
Now sure, when there's not a high level of ambient light, the matte screen is more easy to use as there are no reflections. But as soon as there's a source of light that shines on it (and there are cases when you can't control it) it's game over.
Protip: clean the macbook screen from time to time. Even if it doesn't look dirty. I wear glasses, so I use the cleaning spray on the screen. It always amazes me how much better it is afterwards.
Pardon the choice of words, but it is the only effective way I could convey my opinion re solarized and most color schemes.
Most color schemes try too hard to differentiate everything, lack good contrast and do not aid in understanding the code. Many of them and as a good example solarized, lack good contrast. I had so many issues trying to find a good scheme, that I resorted to creating my own for Jetbrain software, and make due with some of the rainglow schemes on VSCode. The themes are mostly black text on white background and the highlights are not obtrusive so as to draw more attention that the core. In the end, I spend more effort trying to mute the loudness of the colours than reading the content.
It most certainly is not. Solarized is a low contrast theme by design and fails accessibility standards for text contrast.
Good for you is the one you enjoy using. Good for me is the one I enjoy using. Even if I didn't have a problem with Solarized's lower contrast, I would still think that its colors are hideous.
The problem for many with low-contrast themes is that they often aren't focusing on keeping contrast high. They're mostly focused on keeping contrast low. They aim to avoid being "too contrasty" without targeting being "goodly contrasty".
> color blindness?
Color blindness is its own set of problems. To the best of my knowledge I'm not colorblind. I just can't easily read poorly differentiated text unless I really crank up my screen's brightness or make the text much larger. The problem I think is mostly one of pupil physics relating to the impact of external light on pupil dilation and how that affects both focus accuracy (pinhole cameras focus perfectly without lenses) and also the amount of light entering the eye (smaller aperture means less total light, less light means less difference between light things and and dark things). Neural color perception is another issue that is related but only sort of. Or maybe there's an analog to colorblindness that we just don't talk about that deals with sensitivity to luminosity variations. IDK.
Could you elaborate on this? Maybe you've enabled font smoothing?
They convinced the world by pumping up the brightness and providing better color than other matte screens.
I mean, that OS experience, man. It's like people are living in an abusive relationship that hasn't improved since 1998.
You are technically right, but to be fair, it has been barely more than one year. Apple sold their 2017 model of the 13" MacBook Air, 1440x900, in July 2019:
https://web.archive.org/web/20190708170222/https://www.apple...
> "Retina Display" has been a major marketing point for Apple for years...
Exactly. And that's all it is - marketing, particularly for egoists who want to feel like they're better however they can. The vast majority of the market, mostly those who don't use Macs, don't give a shit.
It’s completely simple: I enjoy reading content on a higher res screen. It’s clearer and easier on my eyes. That’s all there is to it.
If you like the way text looks on a Retina display just say that. Instead you're here on a thread about a PC product that you'll probably never use, acting like anyone that doesn't have a 4k display must be missing out. (You're right, I must be projecting :) Personally, I like desktop rigs with 1080p, a 5 button vertical mouse and 32-64gb of RAM in a quiet private office. I don't optimize for working on planes, trains and in meetings even though I do own a PC and Mac laptop as well...
Look at all the top listings here though- they're all FHD. Nobody cares about 4K on a laptop display - https://www.amazon.com/s?k=laptop&ref=nb_sb_noss
Some people do make use of a higher res screen, just because you don’t doesn’t make it useless. I haven’t wanted or owned an Apple computer for 10 years.
Huh? Hardly anybody sells Linux laptops, mostly not on Amazon either. I think you'll be hard pressed to find many laptops pre-configured with 32GB RAM on Amazon too.
> Some people do make use of a higher res screen, just because you don’t doesn’t make it useless.
Okay, but the person I was responding to said that 4k is "table stakes". It's clearly not. Point being - not everybody wants a 4k screen. I didn't say that they were useless to everybody, I said that essentially "most people don't want or need them".
If you are a professional and spend 10 hours a day at your computers, you will realize the quality of the screen matters a lot.
As seen developer with 1080p at 14" inch I cannot stand the ugly fonts you get.
It's not just about real estate. Just out side by side a 1440p/retina screen next to a 1080p and you will see the difference.
It's ok if you value battery, good for you. But saying there is no advantage is ridiculous.
Comparing them directly - I have absolutely no clue what you are talking about. Fonts, images and the UI look just as good if not better. I'll say better since I think the Mac UI is hideous.
You're right though - it's definitely not about screen real-estate because with Retina/2k/4k the OS typically has to scale everything up so you basically lose any real-estate that would have been gained in the first place. That's ridiculous IMO.
The only place I use Retina/2k/4k is for gaming and movies and I definitely am not doing either of those activities on a lowly laptop.
Retina display are simply more dense but add nothing to the screen real estate , nobody uses them at 1x I bet many don't even know that every pixel they see is actually 4 pixels on the monitor
Better have a larger monitor than a 13 inches packed with useless and expensive pixels
Actually, the lack of sharpness makes it even harder to read.
AMD integrated graphics needs a bit of explaining to me is this the performance monster variety or Intel graphics is actually faster type of deal. How many external screens can I drive with this setup? My main use case for this would be using Darktable. For the same reason I want a good HDPI screen. Otherwise, this would be a development machine (docker, misc jetbrains stuff, homebrew, some data engineering, and all the usual stuff). So looking for ram and CPU that is faster than what I have today (2018 15" MBP).
My mac book pro is literally falling apart (keyboard) at this point and I'm not eager to jump on the ARM bandwagon yet as it will mess up my tool workflow short term (Java, docker, intellij, homebrew) and cause me compatibility headaches I just don't need in my life right now. I am liking the performance though. All the software that I use runs fine on Linux. So, not a hypothetical option for me. I'd be up and running in a few hours with little to no loss of functionality.
I don't care about legacy ports; USB-C dongles are cheap and effective and I have a few in my bag. Likewise with hdmi to usb-c. What I do care about is being able to connect my Thunderbolt USB-C phone, fuji camera, hard drives, external screen, etc. I'm thinking of adding a headphone to that mix. 2 USB-3.2 ports seems like it's limited.
It has 2 legacy USB-A ports, MicroSD, HDMI and a USB-C-3.2 which I've used to run a 4K screen at 60Hz.
Price was very reasonable. I'm happy, this has stepped up my laptop CPU performance by a factor of 4, the GPU can now do all the stuff I want from a laptop, and it's compact and has good standby life.
https://puri.sm/products/librem-15
System76, for me, seems to have a balance between coreboot and as much free software as possible. But also the addition of a proprietary blob full gpu.
Also the system76 cpu specs are slightly higher.
Display Managers: When Linux boots in a 4k screen, the GRUB menu is impossible to read, so I have it memorized. I have tried many Display Managers, some recognize 4k and adapt with no issue, many do not. GDM and SDDM work well, XDM not so much, fonts are all over the place.
X11 (it has an NVIDIA card) There are some apps which refuse to adapt to 4k if you are running GNOME (and yes I use the QT_SCALE_FACTOR). Then there are apps written in WXWIDGETS. Steam menus and items are unreadable to me. Some Window Managers barely support HiDPI displays (XFCE I am looking at you). It goes on and on, by the end of the day its a very frustrating experience. GNOME (and it's derivatives) do it the best so far, KDE has issues with icon sizes and the panel. XFCE has multiple issues, so much that I gave up on it quickly and can't remember them all (and it looked awful). i3 was a little tricky at first but it can be configured to work well, but you need to adapt all the apps and bars too.
Other OSes: Even MS Windows has frequent problems with the screen magnification. macOS just gets it right, and I never had ANY of these issues, except small fonts in the firmware screen.
For my next laptop I will go back to 1920x1080 and avoid all these problems and start using AMD GPU's so I dont have to turn off secure boot and stop using X11.
weird, I have a 4k screen but the bios, grub, etc are just scaled across the screen. A bit blurry of course but definitely readable.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/HiDPI#Boot_managers
If I install Xfce instead of Gnome desktop will I break the magic?
tangent: Who the hell let them name Pop!_OS, such an engineer name.
[0]https://github.com/pop-os/system76-power
[1]https://blog.system76.com/post/174414833678/all-about-the-hi...
I wouldn't guess that switching away from GNOME would break hardware compatibility drivers, but I could be wrong.
Also, KDE is better in all regards. Ditch gnome.
Yup, did that, GNOME looks nice, but... KDE has some issues with HiDPI, like a mouse pointer that is way too small on window controls. Yes I did change the cursor size to 48, but it does not work with what I assume is a kwin issue. So the cursor hops from one size to another all over the place.
But why do you have to? Why doesn't it use a reasonably sized font by default?
Since it has not already happened, you may assume one of the following:
- it is in the works but has not made it to the version you are using.
- nobody else thought of that, congratulations
- it turns out to be harder than just identifying the issue
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/201965/setting-the-...
..or at least if you can, no one has bothered to answer my question on how for several years.
The only problem that I have left is with Google Chrome & Vinagre: whenever I move the cursor inside their windows it stops being scaled up (therefore it becomes tiny). Used to work fine, changed during some recent update :(
I exchanged the Galago for a 14" Darter, and 1920x1280 is just right.
The Pangolin looks pretty nice to me.
Add these lines to /etc/default/grub: GRUB_GFXMODE=1024x768x32 GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX=keep
And then run: sudo grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
(see https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GRUB/Tips_and_tricks#Se...)
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/HiDPI
You've never used a laptop with a decent touchpad? Or one without a loud fan? Or one with a good battery capacity?
The displays are not the only lackluster thing about System76 hardware.
For that matter, it's 1080p that's half the (linear) resolution of 4k.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2K_resolution
I just looked and they don’t seem to offer the higher resolution right now on that model.
Anyway, it is a fine laptop.
In 2020 1080p only makes sense on higher frequencies for gaming, until someone finally releases an affordable 4k >=120hz displays which isn't a "gamer" atrocity.
Nothing amazing by any means, but it's plenty for real world usage and if I stop the docker daemon, I probably gain another hour or two. How often are you working somewhere for more than a few hours without a plug?
I am never going back to 1920×1080. I’m sceptical even of 2560×1440 on a 13″ display. 15″, I’m certainly not going to accept anything meaningfully less than 4K.
you no longer see such low resolution screens on phones/tablets
Huawei Mate 40, iPhone 11 and Xiaomi A3 to name a few.
In my case: I've done i3 setups before and then haven't main'd Linux in a bit, then when back on it tried to see how well I could fare with minimum system setup, and Regolith gave me a good-ish i3 config out of the box (along with dark matching GTK3 theme and terminal themes etc.). I did end up tweaking the files though to change up some keybinds and indicate fan speed + thermals in the bar. So it ended up being mostly 1) just a config starter (incl. most bar widgets you'd want) that I can also maybe rebase on if they update upstream in a way that matters 2) a way to get very consistent system theming across i3 setup and GTK.
Advantage of using it is you get a set of sensible defaults rather than having to put together your own.
https://puri.sm/learn/intel-me/
It's arguably worse, since we have some known ways to reduce the scope of the Intel ME backdoor [3].
But realistically, if you care about security and privacy, both Intel and AMD chips are unusable.
1. https://libreboot.org/faq.html#amd-platform-security-process...
2. https://libreboot.org/faq.html#intelme
3. https://github.com/corna/me_cleaner
It's rare nowadays to have end to end ownership. Very sad.
the other side is blind to the morality and ethics of the corporate decisions being perpetrated with support from their own dollar by the company they support -- or worse, they recognize and support morally grey business practices knowingly.
So, in other words, yes I can imagine that comparison.
It truly is a candles versus flashlights contrast present between the M1 and the Pangolin, and it's a contrast highlighted by more than just the performance and user experience of the machines.
I'd lean towards the Pangolin.
It's mystifying that there's pretty much no availability of competitive spec'd machines for such a great performing processor / GPU on the market. This Pangolin is slightly amazing for allowing up to 64GB of RAM -- all other options using AMD Ryzen 4XXX I've seen are limited to 8GB of soldered RAM, 1080p display, and 720p webcam. I was somehow lucky and got a 16GB version of the Flex 5 in July. Now it's completely disappeared from the market.
It just feels like dark market forces are preventing good options that people really want to buy.
"alternate mode" support and "display port" support are the keywords I know to look for. Or alternatively, beware of ones that say "Data and Power Distribution (PD) only"
Seeing it not mentioned in the Pangolin specs doesn't give me hope for this unit -- no mention in the expansion ports section AND no mention in the video ports section. Red flags for me and my desired way of computing.
- named "pangolin" and illustrated with a bull - the bull is disturbingly ugly - the introduction makes no sense to me? Is team red the Democrat party?
red - amd green - nvidia blue - intel
I suspect that, given we're a year on from the initial transmission of the virus in humans, unless the Chinese government has more research they haven't made public, we'll likely never know the truth.
My understanding is that there's really no evidence for it being the source at all; it's effectively a myth. It was an early super spreader, but there's no particular reason to think it was the _source_.
Edit - looked it up. Ah, so that's about the Chinese market trading exotic wild animals that was the ground zero of the outbreak. Never remembered that it had pangolins in the mix and I doubt that very many people do.
South Park did it. Probably NSFW
It's a little like if you're shopping for a video game console or a phone and can't get a straight answer on anything due to children arguing over which brand's product they like better all over the internet.
I get that it's just terminology but it's always struck me as odd that buyers would affiliate themselves so strongly with a brand in an open, competitive marketplace.
At least between (for example) Android and iPhones there are objective differences that might matter to you in picking one or the other, but for internal components that fundamentally don't impact how the device works it seems odd to have such strong feelings about it.
Surely all I care about as the consumer is if this laptop is objectively better for my use case than my other options in its price range?
The choice between AMD and Nvidia has a strong impact on how your device will work - and that is beyond just performance.
I feel the same way about politics
There are fundamental differences to AMD vs Nvidia GPUs if you're using them in a professional context. Main one being if the software you need uses CUDA acceleration you need to buy Nvidia because it's their technology and will not run on an AMD card.
IIRC the Pangolin is already on their laptop lineup since a couple of years.
Interestingly, this is surprisingly recent. In 20th century Democrats were usually (though not always) red, and Republicans blue, which would approximate UK usage (red for Labour, blue for Tories). Some TV network switched in the 90s, and it just caught on. Apparently 2000 was the first time it was done consistently.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_colour
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=seeing%20red
So Team Red -> Seeing Red -> Bull?
It unintentionally may attract various political party fans, as well as other fans of the color red.
Coincidentally, China is associated with the color red, and AMD was forced out of China in 2019 for having a relationship that was too close: https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-tried-to-stop-china-acquiri... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD–Chinese_joint_venture
But, team green and team blue have China links as well. For example: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/22/technology/china-intel-nv... And also possibly relevant (x86): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhaoxin
As for the bull- bulls are associated with red for multiple reasons ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muleta in bullfighting, Red Bull caffeinated drink, color of Bulls NBA team jerseys). System76 marketing: “No bull. ...Is it charging? It's charging. Must be all the AMD red. Time to run. No, bull!”
Red has also been used for "workers" parties and organizations, like the UK Labour party and various socialist and communist parties.
I'm pretty sure that the choice of red by System76 has nothing to do with politics.
Also, I’d associate the bull with anger and power on the bull’s part, because of the breeding and/or natural selection to favor it. The bull is also angry at being penned and possibly maltreated, before being killed.
“During the breeding, in order to preserve their natural characteristics, the bulls rarely encounter human beings, and if ever, never on foot.
...
Some commentators trace the origins of the fighting bull to wild bulls from the Iberian Peninsula and their use for arena games in the Roman Empire. Although the actual origins are disputed, genetic studies have indicated that the breeding stock have an unusually old genetic pool.
The aggression of the bull has been maintained (or augmented, see above) by selective breeding and has come to be popular among the people of Spain and Portugal and the parts of Latin America where it took root during colonial rule, as well as parts of Southern France, where bullfighting spread during the 19th century.
In May 2010, Spanish scientists cloned the breed for the first time. The calf, named Got, meaning "glass" in Valencian, was cloned from a bull named Vasito and implanted into a Friesian host mother.”
and
> The bull is also angry at being penned and possibly maltreated, before being killed.
Related to the GP's point: are any of these things being associated with your brand going to be a good thing?
Is there a segment of the market that identifies with (not just sympathises with) tortured, maltreated animals that are soon to be murdered for sport?
If someone were to say,”Do you want a Red Bull?” would you get upset?
Portugal, France, Mexico and Colombia off the top of my head. I'm sure there are other countries in South America as well.
I'm less sure of how popular bull-torturing was elsewhere, but I would guess quite popular. Blood sports were a big deal more or less worldwide until surprisingly recently.
While many countries outlawed this for of torture-as-a-sport, Wikipedia indicates it's also still a thing in Portugal, Southern France, Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Peru.
I know other countries use to have this but banned the practice.
I agree though that the marketing is indeed weird.
Nothing saying you can't switch them around..
PS. I haven’t verified this but I’ve heard that the current colors were assigned in the year 2000.
> sporting components from team red. AMD Ryzen CPUs team up with AMD Radeon integrated graphics
You can find European Clevo assemblers such as LDLC in France or Multicom in Norway.
[0] https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/
[1] https://www.xmg.gg/
https://www.entroware.com/store/
I've never had to contact them for support. It's been flawless from the get-go.
For reference the LG Gram 15 has a 72Whr battery at 1.1kg. The current champ in 'battery size to weight ratio'. Most ultraportables have a 50-60Whr battery at around 1.3kg.
Watt-Hours are unambiguous units of energy, Amp hours are ambiguous without knowing the voltage.
since you said mAh (milliamp-hours), I'm thinking you are talking about phone batteries which are typically in the 3.3-3.6V range depending on the chemistry, then 1000mAh would be 3.3-3.6Wh.
As a comparison the Dell XPS 13 has a 52Wh battery, so it's not a very big battery. 49Wh is what the new MacBook Air has, but the Air has a much lower power CPU.
I think 3.64 lbs (1.65kg) is perfectly acceptable for a 15" laptop, not the lightest but also not the heaviest.
However 49Wh is on the low end for this size laptop imho. Granted it isn't having to put a HiDPI screen and hopefully the Ryzen is more energy efficient than Intel but I doubt it is going to be a show stopper in the battery life department.
Not huge; same as a MacBook Air (a much lighter laptop). For something this size you'd generally expect more.
The phrase "seeing red" is a fairly common idiom in my experience in American English. This refers to the matador's traditionally red sash used in bull fighting. Red is believed to draw inordinate amounts of bull attention and make them angry.
The use of "seeing red" is a bit strange, as the idiom is typically associated with anger and a pending bull charge, potentially metaphorical.
Thus, AMD -> Team Red -> seeing red -> bulls.