Best ultrabook for linux? [April 2013 edition]
What would you recommend? What do you use? Do you know of something interesting about to be released?
Please, do not recommend me to use Windows or Mac OS, we are not discussing this right now. I am specifically interested to find a nice ultrabook to use for programming on linux.
Yes, I am aware of the most popular things like the Dell Linux Ultrabook and the Chromebook Pixel (and I might choose one of them). But yet, someone might know of something better.
So here are the rules:
1. It's OK if it comes with another OS, as long as it's not very hard to install linux. The hardware must work well with linux. Some minor exceptions are acceptable (eg - not working fingerprint reader)
2. Full HD or better.
3. SSD
4. Keyboard of great quality.
5. Good battery life.
105 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 151 ms ] threadIt's full HD 1080p IPS screen, switchable intel HD/ nvidia graphics, expandable RAM and HD. I've had one since November and find the keyboard and build quality to be excellent.
Since I bought it I've upgraded the HD to a SSD and add a additional 8gb for ram to bring it up to 10gb total.
Linux compatibility seems good http://www.linlap.com/asus_ux32vd
On the other hand, I found a UX32VD with 2x256 GB SSDs. This is a little too much. Also I don't need the nVidia graphics card.
But in general, the Zenbook is probably my current favourite.
You have to run a bit of cutting-edge software, but there's lots of good documentation on the Ubuntu wiki about how to support this laptop. The discrete video chipset does work, and it does work well. I enjoy playing games like X-Plane 10 and Kerbal Space Program on it, as well as having access to a growing selection of additional Linux games via Steam.
I replaced a MacBook Air with this machine, and I am very happy with the selection. It is the best laptop I've ever owned.
EDIT: One additional required upgrade: a combo Gigabit Ethernet and USB 3.0 hub (http://ca.startech.com/Networking-IO/Adapter-Cards/USB-3-to-...). The included 100 Mbit USB Ethernet adapter did not satisfy me. :-)
Different marketing people mean different things by "full HD", so I'm not sure if it meets your specs, but 1600×900 is decent enough for me on that size; and it really, really is a gorgeous display.
Battery-wise, when I was travelling and had wifi/bluetooth off, low screen backlight, etc, it was pushing 9 hours.
Ubuntu installed just fine on the S9. Everything seemed to work OOTB. But ended up reverting to Win7 for a contract I was working on while travelling.
The new 1080P Series 9 would be okay, but I'd be sorely tempted on a Chromebook Pixel.
http://www.dell.com/Learn/us/en/555/campaigns/xps-linux-lapt...
1080p screen and you can assume the hardware works with linux.
Personally, I wouldn't buy an ultrabook for the graphics performance, cooling is just too problematic to do anything overly shiny in my view, but I can't imagine you'd have issues running a shiny window manager or decoding 1080p video, which is the two most graphics intensive tasks I do.
That said, I'm not sure that I'd choose it over the pixel either.
The $250 Samsung ARM Chromebook has USB3 (~100MB/s) and a fast (~50MB/s) SD card controller. The $1300 Pixel only has USB2 and a slow (USB2) SD card controller and no real PCIe slots, which means that you can never get more than ~17MB/s when trying to increase the tiny internal storage.
Do you happen to know if it is integrated into the motherboard or if they are simply using a mini pci express card internally?
(I wouldn't be annoyed if it were possible to swap it out for larger storage somehow.)
After going home and doing some research,[1] it became obvious that the screens were mis-calibrated out of the factory.
If you do go with the X1c, make sure you either get a color calibrator or find the color profile ahead of time.
[1]: http://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Update-Lenovo-ThinkPad-X... (check the display section)
You can read about my experiences with the X1 Carbon here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4848375
I'm typing on that same laptop right now and loving it.
- Installing Linux is really easy
- Macbook Air isnt' full hd, but the retina is obviously better than full hd
- they've all got SSDs
- Macbook keyboards are amazing
- my air will last for about 8-9 hours of light use (vim etc) between charges
At the moment I use a debian VM inside OS X when I need to.
Most hardware is Intel (except wireless card, which is a b43, also supported).
With a few simple tweaks I can achieve equal or better battery consumption than OS X.
But in any case, I honestly don't see many reasons why would I install Linux on it in favour of Mac OS. I can see why would I swap Windows for Linux,but I find myself able to do 99% of linux stuff on MacOS just fine. It's got the terminal, it's got mostly the same tools, so why?
Sorry if my previous comment was rude. Didn't mean to.
As for battery life, Linux can very greatly depending on settings and distro. Don't expect to beat Mac OS without any configuration/tweaking, but if you go far enough you can get match it or do better.
There are some instructions for installing Ubuntu on a Mac here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MactelSupportTeam/AppleInt...
It involves installing a bootloader (rEFIt, which starts GRUB), partitioning in OSX, partitioning in Linux and variants for different possible desired outcomes. After this, one should consider model-specific instructions for getting more details right (See https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MacBookPro)
Finally, in my experience, it will be a little off. The trackpad won't act just right, the backlight of the screen will have full brightness when starting X, etc. ("Thunderbolt Support Still Has Problems On Linux", December 2012 http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTI1M...)
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Is this what you consider "really easy"? Does it fulfill the requirement "The hardware must work well with linux"?
As far as I can tell it isn't, and it doesn't, but please enlighten me if you disagree :)
[1] - http://lifehacker.com/5531037/how-to-triple+boot-your-mac-wi...
A lot of the responses here are along the lines of "I think you should look at this laptop", not "I have personally run this laptop and it works great."
I bring this up because my experience with the Dell which is otherwise the best laptop I have ever used and technically meets all the right specs has been dreadful.
My advice is to seek out answers from people who have actually done what you are trying to do and get some real world feedback. Also, if all else fails, I believe the shear volume of technically inclined people who own an Apple laptop compared to products from other companies should be taken into consideration.
Good luck and make sure whatever you get has a solid return policy!
Same observations about Dell, except for the cheap class (which I don't want) which is extremely good for its price.
Compared to my girlfriend's Mcbook Air I have to charge the battery much more often, but I'm not sure if that's the hardware or the OS. Another minor nitpick is the rather high fan speeds it prefers, even with low temperatures. This makes a noticeable noise in a quiet environment (I don't hear the Air).
Keyboard is not great but ok (better than that of the older Zenbook), I love the screen (this resolution is new for me) and wrt size/weight/form factor/price it's pretty much equivalent to a Macbook Air.
As I said, I'm happy with it, and would probably buy it again. The only other model that made me just a tiny bit jealous is my colleague's Lenovo X1 Carbon, but it's quite expensive and wasn't available half a year ago.
HTH.
I've heard people mention the fan noise but I honestly don't notice it. The one thing I'll say isn't that great is battery life. Due to the discrete GPU, I get about 3 hours of battery life. There are some things you can do to turn off the GPU, such as installing Bumblebee.
Check this out: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AsusZenbookPrime
I really didn't like the keyboard. Shift-insert, normally a right-hand-only operation, became a both-hands operation (I had to hit Fn with my left hand). There were other keyboard layout problems, and I just didn't like the feel. My typos went way up.
I ended up selling it and getting a ThinkPad X1 Carbon.
Other options include Thinkpad x230 (newer than the x220) but worse keyboard, x1 Carbon, Dell XPS, Chromebook Pixel, Asus and Samsung.
I ended up buying both an Air 11 (my own money) and a x220 (my employer). Both machines are really well supported under Linux (most hardware is Intel). The only drawback is their low resolution screen, which IMHO is not a dealbreaker given how small they are.
I manage to achieve 5-6W in both, which leads to stunning battery peformance. This requires some powertop monitoring and some simple tweaks.
x220 is great because it is serviceable, has an IPS screen, a full keyboard, a non-ULV processor, better connectivity, and a more sturdy design.
The Air has a much better touchpad, is more silent, and comes with a blazing fast SSD from Toshiba (64 or 128 versions).
- Install powertop and enable all suggested tweaks
- Depending on your kernel you should downclock your i915 graphics card and force pcie_aspm
- Later kernels (>3.6?) have a power regression which leads to higher consumption in Sandy Intel architectures
echo 5 > /proc/sys/vm/laptop_mode echo 1500 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_writeback_centisecs echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/nmi_watchdog
echo 1 > /sys/module/snd_hda_intel/parameters/power_save for i in /sys/bus//devices//power/control; do echo auto > $i; done for i in /sys/class/scsi_host//link_power_management_policy; do echo min_power > $i; done
for i in /sys/class/rfkill//soft; do echo 1 > $i; done
For the kernel parameters, a simple Google search should get you going.
What's the watt consumption you achieve? I must note I run Arch Linux with Xmonad and no desktop environment.
And honestly, the design has not kept up with the times. For its weight class, it's pretty big, thick and clumsy. The trackpad is atrocious (that's not a problem if you like trackpoints, but my fingers end up hurting after an hour of using them). I also found the x220 quite slow, and the fan spends a lot of time running even with just basic browsing. Battery life is decent though, it probably won't break just by you looking at it sideways, and the keyboard is good - its a classic Thinkpad. But next to a modern Ultrabook it looks quite dated.
However, if I were to spend my own money, the Dell XPS 13 Ubuntu edition looks appealing. I haven't had a chance to try it though.
With an i7, 8GB of RAM and 256GB SSD it's nice and fast. Suspend, hibernate are quick. Sound is decent.
I tried an Asus zenbook and the Samsung series 9 in a store, and was not happy about the keyboard. I think the Dell XPS keyboard is nice. Not as nice as on my 2005 Thinkpad, but the XPS is far lighter and thinner.
Here in Denmark it was hard to find a good selection of laptops to try in store. My other alternative was the X1 carbon... but I really wanted something that worked with Ubuntu out of the box with 100% guarantee.
Overall, it feels solid and sleek yet light (1.4 kg or so). It fits into the same tiny Victorinox laptop bag that my 2009 10" netbook fit into, yet it is much more powerful (of course, also 3x the price).
I found one wifi hotspot that the Ubuntu or wifi hardware mysteriously refused to connect to, where I had to connect via my Galaxy S3 phone and share the connection via the USB port (which worked pretty well).
While the screen is nice, I've increased the font size to "Large" in Ubuntu's universal access settings, and have zoomed in on several web pages with Chrome. So I'm not yet sure about the benefit of the high resolution screen (Linus Torvalds however swears to his Pixel and its 2560x1440 or so screen).
I was genuinely impressed by the fact that this is the only ultrabook I've seen with a swappable battery. Yes!
The ultrabook in itself is fine, and the build quality is excellent. 8gb of ram, 256gb SSD, HD4000 graphics. I wasn't able to boot the latest ubuntu with EFI, but "hibrid" boot works just fine. Basically there's not a lot of hardware variation in terms of ultrabooks, so everything works more or less correctly. I was personally able to work for 5 hours on the battery (I'm a developer, so you can imagine my workload as slightly higher than average browsing).
I do have some remarks:
- The keyboard is generally good enough, but I've always found HP keyboards to be sloppy compared to ThinkPads, and this is also true for this ultrabook. - The touchpad is ok (synaptics), but the touchpad buttons are crap, like all HP I've ever used. HP doesn't seem to get buttons. When you hear the click it doesn't mean you have clicked. Wake-up HP, I've been using elitebooks since the '90 and this HAS NOT changed! - Not a fan of the "nipple" in the middle of the keyboard, wastes space for the key. - Useless fingerprint scanner, like most HPs.
Both points are moot if you are fine with HPs in general, since this is absolutely equal to any other HP elitebook.
- Some problems with the latest iwlwifi driver (some panics during network scanning in the last weeks), though hardly an HP-only problem.
Comes preloaded with Windows 8, which was easy to zap. Run-time on battery between linux/win8 was equal after for me, contrarily to what other people mention. I used windows 8 for about two weeks (to give it a spin), using Visual Studio, etc. 5 hours of work on battery is the longest I've ever had so far for a laptop. Being able to have a spare battery is a big plus.
Unless you are running a server, there is no reason to be running Linux directly on your hardware. You can, of course, but it's not a good idea.
I'm not a Mac fanboy so take that for what you will. I look at these fanboy 'bro' developers running around with overpriced hardware and laugh. You might not have the same reaction.
I run CLI Arch Linux in a VM and use samba for shared folders. Usually I just end up coding right in the SSH terminal. You also develop good habits when it comes to deploying to a production environment, plus capable of managing multiple environments and keeping them separate.
Edit: BUT, for Ultra Books, I am looking at buying an Asus Zenbook Touch UX31A with an i5. Top quality build and nice keyboard, has great reviews. The Dell XPS ultrabook looks good too, but doesn't have the same quality as the Asus.
Now I want to buy a small ultrabook, and on that, running 2 OSes sounds suboptimal. It might work of course, but I can't try it before buying, so I don't really like the of risking. I want a good machine, that is known to run linux well.
And no, I don't want a cheap 1366x768 screen and crappy keyboard. Yes, I can live with cheap CPU, RAM etc. And in fact the best machine for me would be with good screen/kbd and cheap everything else. But no one manufactures such, at least to my knowledge :(
What a bizarre statement. It works quite well if you prefer the Linux environment and don't require specific software only available on another OS. Just because some setup works well for you doesn't mean it is appropriate for everyone.
I have both Windows 7 and Linux laptops and prefer Linux from a maintenance standpoint and from a driver standpoint. Usually, if Linux drivers are supported they are supported very well. With Windows things appear to be less uniform.
My choice: Asus Ultrabooks.
In my case, I couldn't afford a Macbook Air, (I badly wanted a MAC, I couldn't buy with my budget, but just somehow managed to get an ASUS Ultrabook with EMI's)
About Asus Ultrabooks--
Compared to MAC's:
- They are much much cheaper, ( almost half the price) not compromising on the build quality, comes with Aluminium Chassis.
- Has 24GB SSD, Hybrid storage with 750GB HDD( you can configure SSD, and install important apps)
- Excellent MAC like Keyboards.
- Suggestion: Get an 8GB extra RAM, everything works smooth.
- Finally excellent battery life, 4hrs guaranteed with 4cells, if you are looking more get 8cells, but pay extra.
Good luck. :)
MAC => http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAC_address
Mac => http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh
Sorry for that typo. :)
Then installed a 2nd HDD (msata) to run linux.
Only problem is not full HD.
Although I got the Gazelle for more horse power, the Lemur seems like it would fit your needs: https://www.system76.com/laptops/model/lemu4
Avoid System76 if you need battery life, which was the main reason I chose the T430 over the Gazelle
The screen on the T430u is not full HD, but cheaper than the regular T430 though.
I believe an SSD is available as an upgrade, but I suspect doing the upgrade yourself would be easy. I upgraded the RAM to 8 GB, which was an easy upgrade following the manual. The hard drive looks to be similarly easy to upgrade.
The keyboard is acceptable and I have found that I have adapted to it quickly.
I haven't pushed the battery life, but I would estimate 4-5 hours with web browsing and the screen brightness up.
I wrote about the decision process that led me to choose that model: https://plus.google.com/106336989542410513415/posts/avV5eL1P...
And earlier, I wrote about why I gave up on getting an ASUS machine. (TLDR: Windows 8 refused to dual-boot. I felt ripped-off but too weary to fight it into working.) https://plus.google.com/106336989542410513415/posts/jfDVKGyx...
The X1 is insanely portable. The extra bit of real estate the 14 inch screen provides is great for everyday work. Ya, I loves it!
As I said, I'd go for the 8GB out of the box. This means you can only get an i5 processor (there isn't enough space for an i7 + 8GB in the machine). But all these processors are type U anyway so they're wayyy slower than i5/i7 series - so i5U vs i7U prob isn't a factor.
But ya, moar pixels is always good :)
I returned the Yoga and found the Acer S7 (It does not have home and end keys, but it has dedicated page up and page down) which I plan to remap to home and end. (The base Acer ultrabook does not have these).
I have been quite impressed with the S7, the screen is incredible, keyboard is nice. Battery life is not excellent, but that is not a show stopper since the longest of my in-person meetings are less than a few hours.
Good luck! Finding just the right "ultrathin" ultrabook for development can be a little tricky right now.
This laptop was not in any of the big-box retailers in my town, so I had to get it on Amazon. Below is the affiliate link. If you care, just copy out the asin... http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00AVYPLPY/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...
I had been running bumblebee for months, and yes, you can install it and make it work and get almost as much battery life out of linux as you get on windows. That said, bumblebee is error prone, sometimes doesn't survive kernel upgrades, etc. Several times I installed basic Ubuntu updates only to find bumblebee was disabled and my battery life gone to hell.
Sounds like an easy fix (just turn bumblebee back on), but in my experience, laptops aren't made to absorb the heat from a discrete graphics card all the time. I'm 90% sure that's why my Dell XPS 15 bit the dust after just a year, due to a shoddy implementation in powering the Nvidia card up on demand.
In my case, I just bought a new system to replace my Dell XPS15, and opted for a 13" Macbook Pro running OSX. If I wasn't running OSX, I'd probably go with an ASUS, again without the discrete card. Get a nice display, with an ultrabook, I think that's extremely important.