I wish a person could order one of these without the numeric keypad. I deeply hate being off-center to the screen when typing on these larger portables.
I have no idea who thought this was a good idea. The trackpad is even off to the left to accommodate it.
I'm not a fan of symmetry for symmetry's sake, but I do think some affordances for the human body might be a good idea. How do southpaws enjoy this keyboard setup?
The ergonomics of laptops are bad enough without stuff like this.
Southpaw here! I'd never buy a laptop without a number pad. The track pad being off-center is also good.
Gaming? 78462 make for the best movement, and the number pad also has seven non-numerical buttons to bind things to. It also puts your index finger right next to lENTER, which is so useful for games that make use of it.
Programming? Bind the buttons to commonly-used UNIX programs to make for a better IDE than an IDE.
Calculating? So nice to have an ergonomic numerical input.
Why skip 5 to use 2 instead? And you also have extra keys around WASD to bind to. What makes numpad keys any different?
For lefties who use mouse with left hand you can have same keys on the right hand side but hat varies (for me equal keys would be plöä)
>programming
Are all of your function keys already populated? And if you are going to move your hand to numpad why skip over insert, home, page up/down, and end?
>calculating
Well there you have me. 20 years ago when I was manually inserting PSU serial numbers into excel numpad was real nice, but I can't remember last time I had to input numbers like that.
My current keyboard has numpad, but only thing I've used it in years was as abort button for some bots.
Walking backwards usually is slower in video games, so you can bind 5 to something you use more commonly. 7 is autorun. 5 makes a great button to set for fishing or your most-critical spell.
> And you also have extra keys around WASD to bind to. What makes numpad keys any different? For lefties who use mouse with left hand you can have same keys on the right hand side but hat varies (for me equal keys would be plöä)
The left side of the keyboard has more buttons, and you use those for complex combinations in video games, which leaves the number pad in a unique spot of being a "quick access" bar.
> Are all of your function keys already populated? And if you are going to move your hand to numpad why skip over insert, home, page up/down, and end?
On a good laptop keyboard, insert, home, end, pgup and pgdn are all directly above the number pad. This gives you extra buttons that are just a little out-of-the-way, but it doesn't make it so you have to reach your hands over them to reach the number pad. On the best laptop keyboard I've ever used, literally every button was just in a grid, with a few smaller (but still grid-fitting) buttons mixed in, like the arrow keys and function keys.
But yes, my function keys are already populated.
> Well there you have me. 20 years ago when I was manually inserting PSU serial numbers into excel numpad was real nice, but I can't remember last time I had to input numbers like that.
Anecdotally, I use calculators of various sorts as a way of verification while programming; a lot of the problems I find myself drawn to are close to abstracted math (as are most things when you aren't a web programmer), and it's really useful to be able to jot down an equation and verify you've handled the problem right before you commit to it.
> My current keyboard has numpad, but only thing I've used it in years was as abort button for some bots.
You should bind the buttons to be useful to you! It's very nice once you've done so.
Yup, I did this and it's great. I also ended up assigning the thumb key to 0, since I've noticed it's used more often than other digits (and also you have to fit it somewhere, since the other ones are in a 3x3 grid).
Yeah, that was the last time I used a keypad. I really hate mine. I don't have a use case for it and because of it I have to slide the laptop to the right, to align the keyboard with my vertical axis of symmetry.
I understand that many people need it and many others don't. I wish manufacturers had an option for keyboards without the number pad. I'd pay an extra for it.
My favorite (and the one I find myself getting the most joy from using) is /, which I have bound to tangle and weave my currently-open project (dbus, yay) into /tmp, apply a stylesheet to the output of it, determine languages used within, embed Emscripten-compiled interpreters for the languages being used into the generated pages (its file system API is incredible, "I Can't Believe It's Not UNIX!"-worthy), and launch a Mozilla instance so I can interactively play with/debug my programs while reading their documentation in the same window.
If this sounds like a convoluted REPL with fancier in-line documentation, you're kind of right. It's basically just interactive and automated literate programming, though.
The rest of my bindings range from pretty simple (running an open project's tests, displaying results from the last 10 commits, etc.) to significantly more complex. I have a few different xkb layouts depending on what I'm doing, and a few different languages get dedicated ones, but for the ones I most-commonly use, they all share one.
No, the conclusion is that more buttons are always better. You can always customize a keyboard with minimal effort, unless you're on a really bad operating system, like any of the proprietary ones.
> No, the conclusion is that more buttons are always better.
Not really. There was a time where laptops, especially 15", had front speakers. If the choice is that or numpad, I pick front speakers. Its a bummer smartphones don't have them anymore these days. More keys might seem like a no-brainer, but its always also less is more and keys you don't use are useless keys. As power user, it seems (re)binding of keys is in order anyway.
1080p and numpad is a downgrade from my MBP 2015. It also doesn't specify much about the AMD graphics card. I'd rather get a modular laptop instead, but with 1440p minimum.
The thing with a trackpad centered to left (let alone its gonna be as good as a Magic Trackpad 2 by Apple from 2015 and onward), is that if you use your right hand your arm can get hurt if you let it rest. And, you should let your arms rest. Also, the arm is in the way. Apple had a neat solution to it: large(r) trackpad (though I prefer the previous one, centered).
But I was never in the market for this because if I order something like this from USA I get to pay a large amount of taxes on top of it cause the price never includes tax. Let me know if its available in Europe and I'll have a look, but the above remain serious concerns so I doubt it.
The iphone has a front speaker. The top one is a loudspeaker and a normal phone one. And they tune it so when in landscape I don't really notice the difference between the front and outwards speaker.
Phone speakers have come a long way since samsung was putting them on the back of the phones..
I got a 14 inch laptop with front speakers, and a 6 row keyboard. Since I came from a laptop with a 7 row, I actually would prefer to have one of those extra columns of keys that hp makes.
More buttons isn't always better because there's a limited range of motion that is reasonable for someone to type with. Having a number pad on a laptop keyboard reinforces bad ergonomics because you either need to shift your entire body to the left and have your screen off center or you have a constant and pretty severe lateral deviation in your right hand.
As for customizing a keyboard with minimal effort... it's actually easier to do that with MacOS and Windows than it is in linux, in my experience. Sure, you can do basic key remapping really easily in linux with xmodmap but if you want to do anything complicated with the built in keyboard, MacOS has Karabiner Elements which is far better than any of the built in or custom keyboard software like xcape or xkeysnail. Similarly on Windows, AutoHotKey is much easier to do complex customizations as well. I haven't really tried Kmonad but that is cross-platform so it wouldn't really be considered an advantage to linux.
Hard disagree. I dont need more keys, I need better keys. More keys just means more reaching and more strain. I use the Preonic and would love to see layer keys on a laptop instead of a stupidly big spacebar nobody ever uses wasting so much real estate.
I think the Framework laptop is our best shot at it though.
I'd actually be into that. I come from the split keyboards world. Put your god damned numpad in the middle and give me ortholinear keys on each side. I will throw money at you today.
Generally, hobbyist mechanical keyboards that you assemble by buying or fabricating a PCB, and doing a bit of soldering. Most designs have relatively easy soldering.
Some hobbyist shops may offer assembly services. If you don't want to solder, ZSA labs have a "moonlander" keyboard that looks quite nice, for a premium price.
If you're not put off by soldering, then some popular split keyboards would be the Corne (also known as "crkbd"), Kyria, lily58, Sofle.
There are also designs which are closer to a normal keyboard, like the ultimate hacking keyboard. (But, personally, I don't understand why you'd spend so much money on a keyboard and have it be asymmetric).
Split keyboards have been around for quite a while. You can even see the Kinesis Advantage keyboard featured in films like Flubber and Men in Black and plenty of companies have made ergonomic keyboards.
I think there's a sort of hobbyist renaissance going on right now, though. Plenty of new keyboards are being designed and built because it's more accessible than ever to design your own pcb or if not that to get someone else's design printed, which along with the general mechanical keyboard enthusiast market, has given people a wealth of options to choose from.
I love numeric keypads. I don't have to type in big chunks of numbers very often (OCR and GPIB go a long way) but when I do, numeric pads make me hate life a lot less.
I have a custom keyboard I designed, and I configured it so that the tilde key turns the right-hand side into a numpad (ie the yuiohjkl etc keys). It's great, no need for extra unused buttons and very convenient to use (as the left hand is typically not used when typing on the num pad).
I used to have a Sony laptop like this, where NumLock turned the uiojkl keys into 456123, so you could use them (along with 789 above them) as a number pad. It was a clever design and I wish more laptops offered it.
I've never been able to get comparable ergonomics out of these. Maybe I just haven't been forced to use them enough -- or maybe the increased travel distance really does matter. I could see it going either way.
As this thread is highlighting, in my experience there are two kinds of keyboard users. Those that love their numberpad, and those that never use it. There seems to rarely be people in the middle. On desktops it mostly doesn't matter because you can shift the keyboard over relative to the screen. On laptops this translates into people completely loathing or loving the laptop entirely :)
Personally in the never use it camp, and hate these offset laptops. Sometimes its because people do a lot of number data entry spreadsheet style, I can understand that case a little more, however even people that mostly type text I've seen for example will like to enter IP addresses on the number pad for no obvious reason. God speed IPv6 adoption :)
On the other hand laptops are terrible for ergonomics and daily usage anyway, it's unfortunately we've moved so far into laptops from desktops and it doesn't seem so common to dock them and use an external keyboard.. to my feeling mostly because the screen ends up being too small once you push it back to use an external keyboard so then you need an external monitor and the cost and complexity goes up.
> On desktops it mostly doesn't matter because you can shift the keyboard over relative to the screen.
It does matter. The arrow key cluster and numpad take a lot of space, which means the left side of the keyboard (where asdf / your left hand are) and your mouse have to be very far from each other. This leads to either putting the keyboard's letter key section in the center, making your mouse be uncomfortably far to the right, or having your mouse in a natural position for your right hand, leaving your left hand way out to the left. Over time this can (and did, to me) cause posture / muscle balance issues.
Currently I'm using the Microsoft Sculpt Wireless keyboard. https://www.microsoft.com/en-ww/accessories/products/keyboar.... The main keyboard with letters and two extra columns just to the right of the letters (with no gap) means everything can be positioned perfectly. The wireless numpad is there for when you need to use it. It's a very overpriced product at $100 but works wonderfully.
Also, in college I had a tiny desk with a cabinet underneath its left side, so my chair was offset to 60/40% of the way to the right. With a full size desktop keyboard with numpad, there literally wasn't enough space for my mouse, unless I moved the keyboard very far to the left. Thus causing the issues I mentioned above. That's what got me into tiny mechanical keyboards :) I'll admit it's a somewhat niche case, but there are probably still many millions of people in the world with a similar desk setup to that for whom a full size desktop keyboard is an unhealthy option.
You are totally right. I forgot about this. I went from the sculpt wireless to the sculpt ergonomic and the non detachable keypad was really annoying for that exact reason.
I really don't see how it is "too wide for good ergonomics" as you imply if a keyboard has a number pad. I think you exaggerate the amount of difference it makes to try to make a point based on your anecdotal experience which was also based on a poor desk design rather than the KB/mouse layout alone.
> On the other hand laptops are terrible for ergonomics and daily usage anyway, it's unfortunately we've moved so far into laptops from desktops and it doesn't seem so common to dock them and use an external keyboard..
Especially considering that nowadays "docking" is pluggin in an USB-C cable from a monitor that:
- is used as a large external display
- powers and recharges the laptop
- acts as an USB hub, with external keyboard, mouse and webcam.
If I want I can go outside to have a meeting and when I want to code, I go back to my home office. And when I commute to the work office, I can work on the train. And when I get there, I plug it in the same setup as home.
Next step would be having all of this wireless but it's already near perfect IME.
I think a lot of people just haven't learned to touch-type the top number row. It was required for me to graduate to the 6th grade in 2002 to get at least 35 WPM / 90% accuracy on the typing test, and there were a bunch of numbers in there so using the type row naturally was an important part of this. I suspect people who have had similar experiences would never use the numpad. The context switch alone causes huge amounts of downtime.
For me it's the other way. I have no issues embedding nubers in the touch typing when typing normal text, but if there are only numbers, accuracy will go down, unless I bring my center down to the asdf line, which slows me down a lot.
I also did practice my musscle memory for the numpad in a similar way to touch as part of typing scientific data (back in the 90s). After a couple of weeks of that, my speed on the numpad would be at least twice as high as when typing numbers on the main keyboard. Also, accuracy was high enough that I could reliably trust the output even when not looking at the result (very close to 100%), which is critical for many use cases that involve numbers.
Even if I spend 99% of my time on the regular keyboard now, if I have to spend more than 5mins typing only numbers, I will feel really frustrated without a numpad.
Then again, I tend to use the laptop keyboards quite little anyway, mostly only while travelling or when in a meeting room. In the office, there is a dock and at home I use a desktop.
I’d expect that the ergo costs of using a laptop at all (short key travel, screen down from eye level) would swamp the additional cost of having the keyboard off center. After all, you can just crane your neck down and sideways instead of just down :).
Seriously, anyone using a laptop full time for work (who cares about ergo) should invest in an external keyboard and monitor.
> Seriously, anyone using a laptop full time for work (who cares about ergo) should invest in an external keyboard and monitor.
FWIW, I’ve been using a 15” MBP as my primary dev/work machine for over a decade and I’ve just become used to it. Tried external monitor, keyboard a few times, but it just doesn’t work for me anymore. I mostly run in high res mode, as opposed to the scaled default mode and it works well. This is also why the 13” laptops are not an option for me, am eagerly waiting for the 16” MBP fingers crossed.
It sounds like you're advocating for a desktop system. I usually dock my laptop, but I do like the flexibility of detaching and sitting on the couch. When I'm using my laptop, as a laptop, I like to feel comfortable. To me numpads on laptops have negative value.
You and many others probably know this, but figure it's helpful context for others who might stumble through this thread: it's not necessarily all on System76 as to why that shell is used, since the shells themselves are (IIRC) rebranded Clevo shells still.
i.e I would suspect they're making use of what they can reasonably acquire to sell.
Might just be a personal preference, I have two laptops (one of them a system 76) with numpads because I highly prefer having them. Macbook keyboards without them really annoy me. Obviously peoples mileage will vary.
The usual story is that is is about pitchers, but the timeline is wrong. The first official baseball game is cited as in 1846, with "southpaw" occurring in 1848 already referring to boxing.
It's oh so terrible isn't it? I feel like this is one of those flexible majority things that Nassim Taleb talks about [1]. The vast majority of people don't care one way or the other. There is a small minority who wants the numeric keypad and an even smaller minority that despises the numeric keypad and will never buy a laptop that includes one. For me, it's always been yet another selling point for the Macbook.
The trackpad is not centered. I'm the small minority that won't touch a laptop with an off centered trackpad. It's very uncomfortable for me as I use my right hand. Ideally manufacturers should make a large touch screen/surface that covers the entire area below the keyboard. We have the technology, it can be done.
Some programs like blender treat the top row numbers as totally different things (actually numbers vs camera movements) and for people typing a lot of numbers, the num pad is faster apparently.
Useless? Did you never learn how to touch type the numbers? Unless you do data entry the top row numbers are vastly quicker to get to than the number pad. You just reach a finger out and tap instead of moving your whole hand to the number pad.
I am not in a full time development role anymore, but even when I was I never felt the need to drive my WPM numbers to the extreme.. So the fractions of a second it may save was not a consideration.
I find the 10-key to be more accurate and faster for me. My muscle memory is numbers are entered with my right hand...
You interact with a computer only through the screen, speakers, microphone, and keyboard.
So of course, the advertisement for every laptop emphasises internal component metrics that don't actually matter that much. "Now with X8-7820Z SUPER!" or whatever.
Instead they have terrible screens, tinny speakers, noisy microphones, and non-customisable keyboard layouts. The latter of which are always cramped, and I mean always, even on 17" laptops.
Do you have any idea how cheap it would be for these manufacturers to allow you to choose your keyboard layout? It's a removable tray already! They can be swapped out in seconds! There are multiple keyboard layouts available from the parts manufacturers!
I believe the Framework Laptop offers that, though it's very new and the non US keyboard options are available yet. They're aiming for a pretty decent list by end of year including UK, French, Chinese, Korean, German and blank (both ANSI and ISO).
I'm in no way affiliated with Framework either. Just saw it mentioned few times in tech press recently. Finally watched some video reviews today and have to say I'm very impressed. Definitely eyeing them as a replacement when my ThinkPad turns four years old next year.
i deeply hate being without a numpad. I understand it's duplicated space, but typing numbers on a numpad is just a million times faster than going above the alphabet keys.
In my limited beginner experience (rarely use numpads, mostly in Blender, or virtual numpads), it's awkward to turn virtual numpads on and off, I keep forgetting which state the keyboard is in, and it's hard to read the grayed-out key labels to figure out which normal key maps to the numpad key I want.
If you work in a bank, entering deposits and withdrawals all day. Or a shop that doesn't have a barcode reader. Or if you're an accountant. I suppose you could also argue for a special programmer's pad too. I mean, I play the odd FPS and I'm still happy with WASD so I'm definitely not gonna understand.
The "5" key on most numpads has a bump so I can reach it without even looking at a keyboard I'm familiar with. Any 4-digit security pin I use is entered from numpads.
I always buy a laptop with a numpad. Its my preferred method of typing numbers. There are also a whole slew of video game applications, as well as Blender movement (camera angles, camera movement, etc. etc.) that's highly intuitively mapped to the numpad.
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I should note that when I was practicing for the video-game community "Blazblue", all movements were discussed in terms of numpad. 236 is quarter-circle forward. 69874123 is "360-degree circle, counterclockwise, starting with right".
Needless to say, typing a combo such as 5b 5c 2d 28d 28 b c b 8 b c 236c 2d was much easier with a numpad.
Anyone who wants to "decode" the button pushes only needs to look at their numpad to see how their left-hand should move, with "b, c, d" being the keywords for the right-hand buttons in Blazblue. Street Fighter players use lp, mp, hp (light punch, medium punch, heavy punch) instead. So those bits get game specific, but the numpad approach to discussion is basically considered superior.
The bump on the j-key on the keyboard, and the 5-key on the numpad is very much clear to high-speed typing.
On keyboards without bumps, I find myself off-aligned. Instead of typing "jumping jellyfish", I type "hynoubg hekktfusg", and have to realign my hands.
Could I do it without the bump? Probably. But having the bump there (both the j-bump and the 5 bump) is very useful at preventing this mistake.
I did data entry for a job. In my experience, the numpad was considerably faster and accurate. It has been a long time, but I recall it cutting down entry time by ~5-6x (yes, I finished my daily quota in about an hour or two, instead of all day). The advantage was being able to use multiple fingers comfortably, without looking (there is a nice nub on most numpads) and leaving a hand free for letters/tabs. But like anything, I'm sure there are people that would have a different experience.
You'd be amazed how much cheaper it is to have a human do it than pay for automation. But also, law/contract required the data to be accurate (so there were 3 people, at minimum, entering the exact same data and records would be flagged if any of the 3 did not match). OCR, at the time (and even now), is highly unreliable with human handwriting. Not that I disagree with your statement, automation would have been nice. And though I like to think we want humans doing higher-level things, a lot of the people there were happy to get decent pay and not have to think for their day job.
I haven't had a full keyboard with a numpad in years, but if you ever worked in any data entry job in your career and learned to properly touch type on the numpad it is wildly faster than touch typing with the regular keyboard and needing to use two hands to reach all of the numbers.
I suspect the utility of a numpad is increased while the off center problems are decreased for touchtypers which is why there is such a divide.
> I suspect the utility of a numpad is increased while the off center problems are decreased for touchtypers which is why there is such a divide.
Ah? I would have thought the opposite. I cannot touch-type at all (and you could promise me a million dollars reward, I still wouldn't manage), nevertheless there is one part of the keyboard I can use without looking, and it is the numpad. Possibly because it is a limited area with a limited number of keys, and the numbers are placed in a "logical" order (compared to letters on the main part of a keyboard).
I am bad at entering numbers on the top row, a I am forced to do on most laptops (and unfortunately, I personally find the pseudo-numpad, which requires using the Fn key or similar, utterly unusable; I never could get used to it).
actually i use the numpad for arrows (and virtually dont need a mouse in a decent IDE, once I reprogram the shortcuts). I don't recall having a numpad lacking keyboard and a laptop in the last 15y+.
I use a tenkeyless on my desktop for exactly this reason. I could always shift a normal keyboard over to center it, but then my mouse is way off to the side.
I have a 2013 Pangolin and the keypad & touchpad are the worst parts. They're decent machines otherwise, but the off-center keyboard and touchpad with no tactile feedback make it very hard to navigate around the interface. Looks like they might've fixed the touchpad at least in this reboot.
Only the external standard layout will really do for look-free pressing of all the useful keys.
So I stopped expecting anything beyond a couple minutes out of laptop keyboards and always carry a standard-enough 104-key.
I first began this practice when I had a laptop with a few missing keys, but soon I realized how much better an external keyboard is, and how little extra weight it adds to my bag.
I will never buy another laptop with a "short" right-shift key and the up-arrow next to it. For coding, it SUCKS to miss hit that and I never got use to it on the one laptop I've had with a keyboard like that.
I must admit that I've never used such a keyboard before, but it seems better to me than half-height arrow keys, or heaven forbid, half-height Up and Down arrows but full-height Left and Right arrows, what an abomination!
What I don't understand, if they're going to include a numeric keypad on the right, is why they didn't make the bottom of the numeric keypad the arrow keys. Looking at [1], 2 should be Up, 0 should be Down, Right should be Left, . should be Right. So Num Lock should be Insert, 7 should be Delete, / should be Home, 8 should be End, * should be PageUp, 9 should be PageDown.
I'd imagine that most techies use the arrow keys and Home/End/PageUp/PageDown keys a lot more than the numeric keys, why not make that the primary layout, and be numeric keys only when Num Lock is on?
Am I crazy? Or does nobody give keyboards one ounce of thought ever?
I have had both the short right shift and the half-height arrow keys on different laptops, and the half-height arrow keys are by FAR preferable for me. Much less mistyping that way. Granted, I don't do much gaming on a laptop (although I doubt I'd use the arrow keys that much for that anyways, probably ASDW).
But I totally agree that the people putting keyboards together don't seem to actually spend much thought and definitely don't user test it with representative users, including keyboard-centric users like coders.
Why on earth should they make the numpad keys double as arrow keys?!? Then you couldn't navigate and enter numbers in, say, a spreadsheet without futzing around with NumLock all the time! Utterly ridiculous idea. That keyboard in your pic looks pretty perfect as it is.
I hate to break it to you, but the numeric keys already double as arrow keys on that "perfect" keyboard.
Besides, this is a laptop running Linux, what do you think is the more likely target audience? People entering numbers in a spreadsheet, or people doing software development?
Most of the comments here are people complaining that the numeric keypad is there at all.
> I hate to break it to you, but the numeric keys already double as arrow keys on that "perfect" keyboard.
I hate to break it to you, but they can't be both simultaneously. They only "double" if you have a mind-reading genie hovering above your shoulder and pressing NumLock for you whenever you need to switch from arrow-mode to number-mode and vice versa. I don't have one of those; do you?
> Besides, this is a laptop running Linux, what do you think is the more likely target audience? People entering numbers in a spreadsheet, or people doing software development?
A) This Clevo-clone keyboard is exactly the same as on Clevo-clone Windows boxes. Windows spreadsheet users outnumber Linux software developers substantially, so that's who the market produces hardware for.
A) Personally, I kind of do both; I often (well OK... But not exactly rarely) use a spreadsheet full of numbers to generate code.
C) One gets the feeling that the main driver behind this particular comment was contempt for the ordinary spreadsheet-using "sheeple". At least, condescension seems to come naturally to you, Mr. I-hate-to-break-it-to-you.
> Most of the comments here are people complaining that the numeric keypad is there at all.
Sure. And they are (quite rightfully) clamouring for keyboards without one... But what does that have to do with this? Not wanting a numpad at all is a very different (and far less misguided) idea than severely crippling the usability of both the separate arrow keys and numpad on keyboards that have one, which is what your suggestion boils down to.
I used to use keypad all the time so when I got first laptop for work having one was my preference. I regretted that decision as the keyboard was more narrow than it otherwise needed to be.
On a side note, I love the CM Storm Quick Fire TK keyboard I have with brown switches. It has no arrow/home vertical area, instead when you turn the numpad off the keys act like that slice. I wish more keyboards were like it. Not sure why they aren't.
The digits in my email are "741852963", which is much easier to type on a numpad compared to top row. IIRC, I used a numpad to type those digits when I registered my email.
Agreed. The least they could do, if a numpad really is necessary, is put something of equal size on the left side. A macro pad would be novel, or even just a left numpad so that right-hand mouse users could enter numbers at the same time.
They could do what Apple did 20 years ago: Make them modular.
You used to be able to pop the trackball out from the right side of the keyboard area, slide the keys to the right, and then re-insert the trackball into the left side.
Do the same with a num pad, instead of a trackball. And for people who don't want the num pad, make available half-width blank inserts to occupy the space on both sides.
IIRC that original Macintosh Portable even had a numpad as an alternative to the trackball, to go on whichever side you wanted (and presumably you'd connect a mouse to use in stead of the trackball).
i wonder if splitting the alphabet portion of the keyboard down the middle and putting the numpad in between would work. It would look like some unholy abomination but may be more ergonmoic
Absolutely agree, to a point that I don't even know which laptop to buy - almost all 15 inch have no centred keyboard. I don't understand how touch typers can work with these. I tried for a few days. What a nightmare.
Ya same here. Made my decision to purchase a System76 Lemur Pro pretty easy though, as that was the only model at the time with a centered keyboard and trackpad.
My wish for a laptop is one with the trackpad above the keyboard instead of below and the keyboard at the bottom edge of the case. I really don't like wrist-wrests on keyboards, but with a laptop, I have no choice.
The only laptops I know with the keyboard at the front of the base are a couple of Asus models, the Zephyrus and the Zenbook. Both have the touchpad to the right of the keyboard and a second screen above.
Definitely an acquired taste and not the most portable of devices.
I'm curious do you touch type, and, if so do you also touch type on the numpad?
I suspect the divide here is between people that are touch typists w/ experience in numeric data entry and people who still need to look at the physical keyboard to type.
As a touch typist I've never particularly cared where the keyboard is, and while I haven't used a numeric keypad in years, I still miss having one.
As someone who just ordered a 60% and found themself amazed at how usable it was - even missing classic keys like the arrow keys - I also can't believe they would go for numpad. Very oldschool for such a modern product.
Uhh I understand that good Linux support is valuable, but the price premium for that is just too high.
For the base variant(5500u, 8gb, 240gb):
Pangolin - 1200$
Lenovo Ideapad 3 15 - 430$[1]
For a higher-end variant(5700u, 16gb, 500gb):
Pangolin - 1542$
HP 15z - 640$[2]
I admit these are the absolute cheapest ones I could find(using noteb.com), but even the more premium laptops like Thinkpads are way cheaper(and AFAIK they also provide very good Linux support).
> Thinkpads are way cheaper(and AFAIK they also provide very good Linux support)
My own experience with thinkpads has been one of non-stop frustration with battery life. The T495 advertises something like 14h of battery life; the actual battery life I got running stock Ubuntu on it was.... less than 3 hours, and that's with power optimization packages that do things like making USB no longer work installed. I recently switched to a system76, and so far its battery lasts easily 6-9 hours depending on what I'm doing.
The T495 is s special kind of disappointment (I have one too), but the fault is with AMD. Zen 1 mobile has extremely aggressive C-States and they essentially never clock down. Ryzenadj helps a bit, but not much.
I have a P14s Gen 1 from work now, that’s one gen ahead but an entire different league in battery life (and it wouldn’t cook your fingers on the palm rest)
Newer kernels have helped a bit too, much more than TLP, if you still have that device try Fedora on it.
My experience too: until I got an X250 (i5, 2 core) earlier this year that lasts around 10 hrs on a charge. Cost $160 in mint condition. Noticeably less powerful than my old T430, but can still do some real work on the go. Screen and keyboard are seriously cramped though, so it gets uncomfortable over long stretches. Still, there's something to be said for small and light. My work laptop is a big heavy Dell workstation machine that could double as an offensive weapon in a pinch.
I spent over $2500 on a ThinkPad X1 Extreme three years ago. Died within three months (wouldn't turn on). Lenovo replaced all the innards, but then the 3D video didn't work at all. Had it replaced again. Two full replacements in the first six months. Later, I spilled a drink on the keyboard, and despite their claims of spill-resistant keyboards, it permanently fried eight random keys. By then it was past the warranty period (one year) and Lenovo was unwilling to service it at all. I was ready to pay, but it's not even an option. They told me I had to go through a third party. Couldn't even get any supposed "authorized repair center" to respond to my requests for estimates. A few months later, the video started going, and now it locks up a few minutes after booting.
I get that shit happens and sometimes products have defects. I'm willing to put up with a reasonable amount of annoyance. I'll never buy another Lenovo product, though, because once you're out of warranty, you may as well throw the thing away. They don't care at all.
I bought a consumer-grade Lenovo (Flex 15") for about $1200 CAD.
While it has amazing components like the AMD Ryzen, Radeon GPU, etc. The quality of the rest of the components is trash.
The trackpad keeps disconnecting, the screen is very poorly backlit, the speakers sound like headphones that came with 1990 Walkmans. It's not a good laptop even if it looks good on paper.
Yea, I've heard mixed things about IdeaPads. My comment was specifically about _Think_Pads. The names are easy to confuse but are very different in build quality.
Really? I bought an Ideapad for my mom a few months ago and I was pretty impressed with the build quality. It was plastic (as all $450 laptops are) but felt relatively rugged, and the internals were surprisingly open too. I was rather happy with the thermals too, there wasn't much we could throw at it to make it sustain uncomfortable temps.
Plastic laptop cases are objectively better than metallic ones. Plastic doesn't heat up your legs that much, and good carbon plastic is stronger than steel, weight-wise. Subjectively, metallic feels better though.
Only "objectively" by your priorities. The fact that metal heats up your legs is also a benefit (e.g. better heat transmission = better performance and component lifetime in the same environment).
As someone else noted, "strength" in material is not one-dimensional. Carbon plastic is still way more conducive to cracking, for one.
Ergo, there is no "objectively better" choice between metal/plastic/carbon in the general case, it comes down to preferences, priorities and requirements.
What about by volume? Also, stronger meaning what? There's a combination of factors here: not just whether it breaks, but also how (dent vs crack..). Also, how well it ages. Also, how much flex does it have and how does that affect the lifespan of the internal components?
I don't know those answers; perhaps carbon plastic wins on all metrics. It would be interesting to learn.
Usually tensile strength. For example: Tensile strength: even a commodity PA6-GF30 (most half-decent tools are made of) is ~110MPa [according to ISO 527], cast Aluminum - would be ~150MPa (22K psi for the imperial folks) depending on the alloy.
Of course, most laptops would be using an ABS blend, which is the hallmark low-quality tools.
>Dents
That would depend on the top finish, not so much of the material itself.
> That would depend on the top finish, not so much of the material itself.
Would it? If I dropped an aluminium bodied laptop like a Macbook or HP Envy, I'd expect it might scuff and slightly dent at the point of impact. If I dropped the cheapest plastic bodied thing from Currys/Walmart/whatever, I'd expect it might scuff and crack the plastic between screws or something.
What top finish would you apply to a cheap plastic laptop to make it 'ding' like aluminium instead of crack in a drop test?
I would not consider cracks "dents". I already mentioned the cheap 'ABS' plastic, they would crack (also it's not UV stable). You can look up PA6-GF30 (nylon, 30% glass fiber reinforced) tools and they survive ~2m (6 feet) drop tests. Laptops won't do that as their screens would crash. Here: a popular video[0] of some massive abuse of a multimeter.
Again, a good plastic with glass or carbon fiber reinforcement would have similar properties to al-mg body, yet feel cheap as most people consider all plastics quite the same. For example: polycarbonate, 30% carbon fiber would have tensile strength of 150MPa (which the same to cast aluminum)
No, neither would I. I was agreeing with the commenter you replied to, that I'd expect a plastic laptop to crack, and a metal one to dent. If it has to be damaged, I'd prefer the dent.
You said above that that was more to do with 'top finish' than 'material'; that's what I was responding to - how would you finish crackable plastic material to make it dent like aluminium/alloy instead.
Just an anecdote, but I know someone who had an Ideapad gaming model and while it seemed solid brand new, a year or so in it started falling apart and by year two it was looking ragged just from normal usage, mostly at home on a desk or a lap (so no wear from travel or being knocked around in a bag).
The issue seems to be less with structural design and particular choice of plastics that cause them to not hold up to wear.
On the flip side of this, I have an old 710S and apart from the now completely unusable micro-HDMI port it's held up really well throughout use and abuse over the years. Battery life holds up as well.
If only it had a less brittle video-out and TB it would be close to perfect even today, but these to otherwise minor factors unfortunately make it close to useless apart from as a spare travel device.
I am using a Lenovo Duet Chromebook (has good Linux container support) right now, and it is cheap and has good build quality. It is not particularly fast but it was about $260 including pen and keyboard case.
After ~10y straight of ThinkPad T-series, I won't be getting another one. The BS you have to go through to get firmware updates with important security and bug fixes is ridiculous. On paper they're in fwupd/LVFS but in practice it've very spotty. After a full day of trying other approaches, I eventually succumbed to installing Windows and Lenovo's adware-encriched update manager on a spare SSD just to be able to use my Thunderbolt port with my official Lenovo dock.
On top of that, every series have been getting worse and worse maintainability/extendability/serviciability for pretty every generation. The latest vanilla T-series are comparable to the first-gen Carbon-X1 in this regard.
...Now if only System76/any of the others in the open-laptop space could figure out a way to do more than 1080p on a 13-15" panel. It's 2021 and I can buy a decent 2K 10.1" USB-display online for $200, why are there no options for that many pixels on a new customizable laptop starting at $1200?
Before you conclude that Thinkpad have good Linux support, go on over to lenovo's Q&A forum and look up battery issues for the t14. At this point in time I've spent so much time on this that I could have easily saved 5k or 10k by having a machine that just worked!
Today you can get a Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 13.3" Ryzen 7, 16G RAM, 1T Disk, QHD screen for about the same price.
And in september and november Lenovo will launch additional QHD IdeaPad Ryzen models for an even lower price.
QHD (1440 resolution) is important to me because I've become accustomed to it on my workstations. And my work got me a Thinkpad Yoga X1 4th gen which has an internal resolution of 2560x1440 so now I just can't go lower than that.
Yes, you can get cheaper laptops. Whether they are "equivalent" is a matter of what you consider "equivalent". Certainly you can get Clevo from other sources at a lower price. They just don't come with the same enduring Linux support, let alone niceties like coreboot, etc.
That is the problem with basically any commodity market. The margin are so thin, it sort of hard to compete without the economy of scale. Not to mention the selling point of Linux support doesn't exactly have a large TAM.
My Ideapad Flex 5 runs great (Ryzen 7 5700u), but fingerprint and autorotate do not work (yet). Otherwise, it is completely stable and everything works.
I have a System76 Serval WS with AMD Ryzen 9 3900 and Nvidia GTX 1660 Ti manufactured last year. The laptop's internal display went wonky late last week but an external display still works fine. It's annoying to reboot -- the GPU drivers aren't loaded yet when the boot disk passphrase prompt is shown, so the external display doesn't show the passphrase prompt (and importantly: whether unlocking succeeded). It's within a 1-year warranty for parts & labor. I'm currently talking to with System76 support staff to ship it back for repair. The process has, so far, been easy and straightforward.
In the past they had pushed a driver update that disabled the laptop display when multiple monitors are connected. I had recognized the problem since their system drivers are open source and was able to recommend & review a PR to fix [0]. It was nice to see that patch go in.
it's frustrating that it just seems like there's no great linux laptop option. Feels like my best option is getting a MBP and either developing in a VM or like rig up some kind of container env. ugh.
I say it every time every time one of these threads pop up and I’ll say it again here: if it’s not 16:10 or 3:2 I’m simply not interested.
I buy devices like this for productivity. I don't care about black bars when watching videos because I don't watch videos on it. What I absolutely care about is the extra inch of text in my terminal or text editor.
Indeed it's nearly perfect, but I would only buy it with a considerably better processor. Both Intel and AMD have incredible stuff lined up for the next few years in that space. For now though, since I have to keep a Mac around for work, I'll probably stick with my M1 MacBook Air for my portable needs and keep using Linux on my desktop.
You're still forced into buying an intel chip now. I'm holding out for an AMD with frame.work before purchasing. Hopefully they will come out with one before I purchase a M1 macbook air.
Intel's upcoming Alder Lake and Raptor Lake CPUs look to be hugely positive improvements. The Frameworks laptop is 100% on my to-buy list once they come to Europe.
I miss 16:10 for coding use, but that ship has long since sailed. It's not like laptop manufacturers arbitrarily made the decision. TV display resolutions drive the market, display panel manufacturers target that market, and laptop manufacturers come along for the ride. There's no competitive advantage to fighting that reality. The sooner you come to terms with it the better off you'll be.
Because there exist so many counter examples in MacBooks, Surface products, Huawei products, the Framework laptop, Dell XPS laptops, and a couple of ThinkPads I will continue asking for what I want.
16:10 or 3:2 screens usually are not reduced in width (compared to 16:9), but extended in height. For example, the 16:10 counterpart of FHD is not 1728x1080, but 1920x1200. (Historically, it’s actually the other way around: When 16:9 displays were introduced, those were cut-down versions of existing 16:10 resolutions, with the same horizontal but less vertical resolution.)
If you’re used to the extra height, even ultra-wide aspect ratios such as 21:9 (or even wider) do not compensate for the lost height compared to the corresponding :10 or :10.666 height.
It doesn’t really matter, if the diagonal is roughly the same and you use 200% scaling. The corresponding 16:10 or 3:2 would still be preferable (or even 4:3, which was once the standard aspect ratio for laptops). For a given notebook width, you basically want as much height as possible.
For desktop monitors, it can be more of a personal preference regarding FOV and window layout. For me personally, I think a ~30" 16:11 [sic] would be close to ideal.
I math'd this out recently and decided that ~16:9 actually would be the ideal ratio for me.. On a ~42" 8k monitor, using 2x scaling.
I'm optimizing mainly for viewing three documents side by side here. Having your primary document (e.g. text editor or IDE) centered means you're not constantly turning your head one way or another. And it has the added benefit of working well for media (compared to 3 monitors in vertical orientation). At 8k and that screen size.. the aspect ratio doesn't matter as long as there's enough vertical pixels and inches.
I found the same thing when 4k was first coming out on an inexpensive hisense TV. It would be hard to go back to only 2 or 3 side-by-side editing panes.
If you're viewing this website on a computer, what dimensions are your browser window?
On mine, it's roughly the size and proportion of my last CRT monitor. I didn't do it out of nostalgia, but it's significantly less comfortable for my eyes to scan horizontal than vertical.
It's not that I want height as much as I don't want width.
Wide screen - great but add a little height so you can see more rows. Now you have a tall screen - great but add a little width so you can see more columns.
In the end, wide vs tall makes less of a difference than total size in inches and total number of pixels.
Take your preferred 4:3 and add horizontal pixels under 16:9, or your preferred 16:9 and add vertical pixeks under 4:3, on either case you can fit more on the screen.
See layer8’s comment above. Let’s say there’s a sweet spot somewhere between ultrawide and square. Why would 16:9 be ideal? The golden ratio is pretty close to 16:10, which is the basis of A4 (etc.) paper.
> Why would 16:9 be ideal? The golden ratio is pretty close to 16:10, which is the basis of A4 (etc.) paper.
No it isn't. A4 paper is roughly 7:5 (actually sqrt-2). The fact that people consistently get this wrong suggests that the golden ratio isn't actually all it's cracked up to be (IME the golden ratio makes for things that are too wide. My laptop has a 3:2 screen that I'm very happy with)
I love System76, and I use and love Pop!_OS (despite the offensive and undignified name). I tried to buy their beefy Thelios desktop with wood paneling (but they don't ship to my country). But... on what planet is a 1080p screen still OK for a mid-range or higher laptop in 2021?
For laptops, I've used Apples and Dells over the past 7 years and I don't think any of them were that low resolution.
I want to buy their shit; I even bought their insanely expensive $300 keyboard just because I think they are awesome. But I wouldn't buy a 1080p laptop in this day and age for any price.
Pop OS (as sane people call it) also happens to work fabulously on high resolution monitors! I run it on a 4-year-old 32" 8K Dell UP3218K monitor at 200% pixel doubling, and it looks fantastic — much better and way crisper text than any Mac (e.g., my work M1 Mac Mini with hyperexpensive 6K XDR Display or my 27" 5K iMac Pro).
For that Dell display, 200% is perfect, but Reddit says fractional scaling also works great on Pop OS. So it's not like they have some technical reason they need to use blurry low-res displays.
It's just kind of weird. I would absolutely buy this otherwise, but the weird retro display is a deal-breaker.
(I don't give a shit about the off-center keyboard or numpad though, so I guess we all have our own individual deal-breakers....)
As an aside: Pop OS is really awesome, though — a great distro for those of us who were always rooting for Linux, preferred open source and felt like we were the kind of person who wanted that approach to win out and would likely use Linux, but mainly ended up usually buying Macs for purposes of convenience and just getting our shit done. Pretty much works great and stays out of your way. :-D
Would love to hear what is offensive and undignified about it.
> But I wouldn't buy a 1080p laptop in this day and age for any price.
Most laptops are 1080p (or less), but I guess you're allowed to have that opinion.
---
Personally I feel opposite about them. I like their hardware, hate the OS. POP OS! is ugly, full stop. They'd be better off going with Arch or Fedora base so they can keep closer to modern GNOME and potentially offer other DEs easier. Every beta they ship for POP is super broken in one way or another, and I hate cosmic, so I rock Arch on it.
Undignified is just a matter of taste, I guess, but it is offensive to me when companies expect (and even 'demand' sometimes, in their press guidelines) you to deviate from standard captialization norms.
I have an ipad, but Apple can fuck right off with the capital P.
But putting an exclamation point right in the middle of your product name is even worse. Like why don't they just call it "Hey! I'm An Asshole! OS" at that point.
I love their hardware, too, except their incomprehensible low-res screen fetish. (They even offer you a low-res desktop display option when you buy a $10,000 workstation.)
I mean even the 13" MacBook Pro in 2014 was 2560x1600. All my Dell laptops were at least 1440p and since a few years back, full 4K.
Graphics AMD Radeon™ Graphics
Storage 1 x M.2 SSD(SATA or PCIe NVMe). Up to 2TB total.
In the configurator you have to pay attention to the read speeds to figure out if you are getting a SATA or PCIe drive. There is no indication for which brand of drive they are using. I have a few SSD controllers that are on my do not buy list, like anything made by Sandforce[1] after we lost almost an entire lot of computers to premature firmware failures and got absolutely no support from the vendor for even just resetting the firmware and starting over.
While you're right that the brand is not listed, every single drive in the configurator lists NVME. The "Storage" specification you show is just what the M.2 connection supports as far as interface. So if you have an existing SATA M.2 drive, or want to buy one to save money, you can.
The graphics are integrated into the APU, so you can look up their specifications.
> There is no indication for which brand of drive they are using.
Yes, though they tend to use quality parts. My 2019 Darter Pro (darp5) was configured with a one of the NVMe options and shipped with a 'Samsung SSD 970 EVO Plus'. No complaints on hardware quality or longevity so far. </anecdote>
it's very interesting you should mention that SSD. I saw an article the other day about Samsung swapping parts in that drive[0]. (Basically, newer versions of that drive are much worse than older ones).
Just to add my anecdatum: I am on my third or fourth System76 laptop, the others are all still working just after a few years I need to upgrade. One is now the living room stereo and one is the gaming room stereo. The point I'm making is that they last for years, I think my oldest is a decade old and still works fine. So, just one person's experience but there it is.
Obviously the "Linux-first" is a big value-add for this brand, but the hardware for the price isn't amazing.
$1200 gets you a Zen 2 (previous generation) 6-core, 12-thread CPU[0], 8GB RAM, 240 GB NVME, 15" 1080p (did not see brightness/color accuracy mentioned.)
But I like my laptops to come with fast refresh and a dedicated GPU, and I run Windows, so I'm not their target audience. Would love to hear how this is received by those in the right market segment!
You are right that's the value add. Not having to worry if the hardware works and having a curated linux (popOS is very much like ubuntu).
I've had a system 76 onyx laptop running popOS for over 2 years now. It keeps itself updated and I'm able to do my tasks with very minimal system configurations. Firmware updates come through fine. I think Linux hardware support is pretty good for a lot of laptops, but for me it was worth the extra money not to have to deal with it.
My system 76 is "Clevo" OEMed machine. Very much evidenced when I let stuff get in the fan and I had to replace it. Parts are available.
As someone who is new to Linux on desktop, it was pretty great. I got Unreal engine compiled, Intelij and It can even use steam. My machine has a Nvidia 1060? so its actually pretty decent for the limited gaming I do.
Like many things, if things go well and this scales up, the additional cost for having staff making sure linux is supported should go down.
It's all Clevo based anyway. System76 doesn't go much beyond what they source. It's a shame, if they actually made the effort to design a laptop that went beyond its foundation, I'd be more interested. But instead it's Clevo guts, Clevo problems.
Looking at the AMD laptop linked...
Lots of empty space that could have been slightly optimized for a larger battery. It just seems basically thought out... not like consideration is actually put into the design and layout.
Yeah, a big fan of what they've designed - just waiting for version 2 so that all the production bugs are discovered and ironed out. Hopefully v2 will come with an AMD processor.
I’m torn. I’ve heard amd Linux drivers are crap. I’ve never really had any problems with Intel. But yes I’m waiting for v2. I want them to prove out replacing the main board between revisions.
Hard disagree. On a 15.6" 1080p really is sufficient. The upsides of not wasting battery and just performance of not having to push more pixels makes it worth it. Even gaming channels like LTT talk about this a bit.
That being said - if you're coming from the macbooks retina it's definitely a downgrade. My guess however is that this device won't have a screen that is that good either way though.
> Hard disagree. On a 15.6" 1080p really is sufficient.
Considering what I've recently learned about the fractional scaling mess, I would only buy laptops with a 1440p or 4K display because they don't need fractional scaling.
I really wish there were more 24 inch 4K or 27 inch 5K monitors on the market and not the 27 inch 4K mess we're getting. I'm not sure what monitor manufacturers are thinking.
15.6″ 1366×768: 100ppi. It could be improved by 90% scaling, but that doesn’t tend to work quite so well. Basically everyone uses it at 1×.
15.6″ 1920×1080 (1080p): 141ppi. Generally comfortable at 1–1.25×, most will use at 1×.
15.6″ 2560×1440 (1440p): 188ppi. Generally comfortable at 1.33–1.75×, most will use at 1.5×. Definitely uncomfortable at both 1× and 2×. If you don’t like fractional scaling, you don’t want 1440p.
15.6″ 3840×2160 (4K): 282ppi. Generally comfortable at 2–2.5×, most will use at 2×.
These figures I’m suggesting are aiming for about 110–140dpi. I have a 15.6″ 2560×1440 screen, and 1.5× scaling mostly works very well, basically perfectly under Windows which I never use and with only minor issues under Linux/Sway with high-DPI XWayland patches once I’ve manually intervened to fix a few variously broken things.
Hmm, I guess I didn't think about the 15.6 inch size in laptops. I have a 14 inch laptop so I was thinking in terms of that size. 1080p on my laptop needs 1.2 — 1.3 scaling to look "normal". I know people dismiss this as personal taste but 1) IINM, Windows defaults to 125% automatically on such a display and 2) I have a hard time reading text without scaling my 14 inch 1080p display.
Sure, people, resort to scaling just the fonts but everything looks out of place if you do that. The fonts are big but the UI elements are still small.
Personally, I chose to compromise as well by scaling just the fonts on SwayWM because fractional scaling introduces slightly noticeable degradation of font quality which is unacceptable to me.
But yeah, in that case, 4K display on a laptop looks like a safe bet so I would only go for that in the future. Thanks.
14″ is an uncomfortable size for integral scaling: past 1366×768 (112ppi), all of the popular sizes call for fractional scaling: in my rough guide of 110–140ppi, that’s about 110–140% for 1080p (so the 125% you cited is good), about 150–190% for 1440p, and about 225–285% for 4K.
(13.3″ works better: 100% for 1366×768, 120–150% for 1080p so no integer there, 160–200% for 1440p, 240–300% for 4K.)
Fractional scaling in Sway doesn’t degrade quality in any way in Wayland windows: it leaves the scaling to the app to execute, and I haven’t come across a single app getting it wrong. Text will be rendered perfectly. Pixel-precise stuff can be a tad funny, e.g. a 1px border on an element in Firefox will be rendered as one or two device pixels in most contexts.
But then there’s anything still using X11: without the high-DPI patches, XWayland renders at 1× and scales it up so that it’ll look bad for any scale higher than one, whether fractional or integral. With the patches, you get to decide what to do.
On my 1440p 15.6″ display, I have scale 1.5 and xwayland scale 3, which normally works very well, but I do have to drop it to 1 occasionally for some things due to apps that don’t do scaling and the fact that the patches are still imperfect and you can actually soft-lock apps when they try to open certain windows (mostly popups, including menus) until you drop the scale.
> Fractional scaling in Sway doesn’t degrade quality in any way in Wayland windows: it leaves the scaling to the app to execute, and I haven’t come across a single app getting it wrong.
Funny you say that considering Firefox goes haywire if you use it on Sway with fractional scaling.
Other Qt apps like Qterminal are also not able to show tooltips normally if you enable scaling. Some Qt apps which I absolutely adore like Spectacle and Gwenview don't work at all though this might be a different issue.
> But then there’s anything still using X11: without the high-DPI patches, XWayland renders at 1× and scales it up so that it’ll look bad for any scale higher than one, whether fractional or integral. With the patches, you get to decide what to do.
The unofficial XWayland HiDPI patches? Yeah, I'm not gonna use them if they're official. It's a pain to compile and build complex packages like these. The AUR is fine for small and casual packages with a few dependencies but nothing complex, I feel.
Those issues are all for any scaling, not just fractional—the narrative was just muddied because it was first reported by users of fractional scaling. gtk!3898 fixes #6426, and probably the other two too because they seem to all be manifestations of the one root cause. (Incidentally, remember Firefox uses X11 unless you manually turn on its experimental Wayland support via MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1.)
Tooltips are working in all the Wayland Qt apps that I have (marble-qt, zeal-git, musescore, telegram-desktop).
If you have an AUR helper, replacing {sway,wlroots,xorg-xwayland} with {sway,wlroots,xorg-xwayland}-hidpi-git is really easy and not at all slow, though at least sway and wlroots do interdepend so that if you upgrade one you should rebuild the other or things may break (happened to me a couple of months back, there was a .so version bump). I decided that I’d rather have not-quite-perfect scaling and any package management concerns, rather than having XWayland content always look terrible. And remember that’s true of any scaling factor other than one.
> gtk!3898 fixes #6426, and probably the other two too because they seem to all be manifestations of the one root cause.
I hope the fix lands on my desktop soon because I'm still facing those issues if I enable scaling. Even when I don't enable scaling and just use the Zoom option in Firefox, it starts behaving strangely for dropdown menus in Firefox settings. The menus aren't where they should be and sometimes flicker.
> (Incidentally, remember Firefox uses X11 unless you manually turn on its experimental Wayland support via MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1)
Yeah, I've exported this as a user environment variable and confirmed with xeyes that Firefox runs natively in Wayland.
> Tooltips are working in all the Wayland Qt apps that I have (marble-qt, zeal-git, musescore, telegram-desktop).
Please let me know if it works for you on Qterminal.
I'd also love to have Spectacle working on Sway. It starts natively in Wayland but fails to screenshot anything and tells me to open a bug report.
Gwenview looks broken on Sway/Wayland. The colors are all messed up.
> If you have an AUR helper, replacing {sway,wlroots,xorg-xwayland} with {sway,wlroots,xorg-xwayland}-hidpi-git is really easy and not at all slow, though at least sway and wlroots do interdepend so that if you upgrade one you should rebuild the other or things may break (happened to me a couple of months back, there was a .so version bump). I decided that I’d rather have not-quite-perfect scaling and any package management concerns, rather than having XWayland content always look terrible. And remember that’s true of any scaling factor other than one.
I'm not really using any XWayland programs at the moment except rofi so I don't think installing those packages from the AUR is worth it for me. I'd be happy to use them if they were available as official precompiled binaries.
Any ideas why these patches aren't merged to master? Some disagreements among devs?
I've got some more anecdata around this. Chrome tooltips get a bit funky with fractional scaling on wayland (using chrome's ozone wayland platform interface).
(Either that, or it's something weird with my sway/monitor configuration, but I don't have anything unusual).
Even gaming channels like LTT talk about this a bit.
The major benefit of high-DPI displays isn't for gaming or graphics, it's for text. Once you're used to decent resolution and scaling, reading on anything else looks like a blurry mess.
I think this is the key. I've never used very good or very high-res screens for a sustained period of time, so I haven't gotten used to it. Personally I'm not too keen on jumping on them. My 1366x768 15.6" screen renders text just fine for me.
At 15.6 inches I think it depends pretty heavily on how good your operating system's font rendering is.
If you're stuck on Windows I can't imagine using anything lower than 4k at that size. On the other hand, I'm using a 17.x inch laptop currently, only about a foot and a half from my face, at only 1080p, and it's fine. (Before you blame my vision - I'm actually nearsighted. My vision is near-perfect at this distance.)
I certainly wouldn't accept this DPI from a current laptop, of course; the font rendering certainly could be a lot better and more density would be nice for easier photo editing and so on, but I think a lot of people have forgotten just how good 1080p can be if it's handled well in software. A whole generation spent most of their time on crappy CRTs. Compared to that almost any HD screen is an enormous improvement.
Sweet spot @15" for me is 1200p if I can get it 1440p otherwise. I haven't used a computer with less than 1200 vertical lines since 2004 and I don't plan on changing it.
Isn't 1080p way better for battery life + its mostly indistinguishable in pixels? unless you are like, looking really close at the pixels? remember its 1080p inside a 15" monitor, not a 24" monitor a PC has.
I have good eyes and strongly prefer wqhd (2560x1440) over 1080p on my 14" Thinkpad, because I can just barely lay out two windows side by side without stupid websites like Gmail and JIRA getting too narrow, using my scale factor of choice. With 1080p, I turn off scaling and it just doesn't work. Full screen is too big, anything less than 2/3 is too narrow.
I can easily get 10 hours of battery life with light use, sometimes more (my system idles at around 5W unless I crank up the brightness to excessive levels).
4k (UHD) on a 14" display is excessive, in my opinion. I don't know what the power consumption is like, but at the scaling that I prefer, the layout ends up looking identical to my wqhd setup, only crisper. That would seem like a waste of power. Shame all the recent T-series Thinkpads have gone down this route.
This! The wonderful world of reflowing webpages that assumes anything less than 1080p is a mobile is so frustrating. I too find WQHD a good fit for my 14" Thinpad.
My 16" Macbook Pro's display is certainly beautiful but the battery life is pathetic. If lower resolution really did save battery then I think I would make the tradeoff, especially since everybody runs the resolution scaled down from 3072x1920 so the only thing you gain from it is the subpixel sharpness.
Realistically the main appeal of very high resolution laptop screens is text, not images. The people doing professional colour work typically aren’t using any sort of laptop screen.
If you spend a lot of time reading/typing text on a computer, hiDPI helps as the text is a lot sharper. Though honestly I don't care as much and find that 1080 is an acceptable resolution for smaller screens (<= 22").
My biggest problem is the aspect ratio, on a laptop 16:9 simply is not enough vertical space. Hopefully Clevo will realize this at some point and make a laptop for System76 with a 16:10 or 3:2 screen.
I have a 4k x1 Carbon and I can confirm that it's dumb. I would prefer the battery life but also the iGPU isn't powerful enough to run an external monitor while the display is using 4k so I have to scale it down for that anyway.
What OS are you using? I installed PopOS onto mine and maybe something there is the issue. We have the same model and mine is maxed on specs but whenever I'm in 4k and using an external monitor it becomes unbearably slow.
Eh not really, I've used the hidpi MacBooks for work, it doesn't really make a big difference.
I can tell the difference between a 1440p/4k and a 1080p screen, but it doesn't bother me to the point where I won't buy machines which don't have it, it's just a nice bonus.
On a 1080p 14” with native resolution, the ideal terminal font size for me would be about 8px. There’s a significant difference in ergonomics around that range. I have two 14” Thinkpads and my eyes feel strained a lot faster on the 1080p compared to the 1440 if I’d have the same effective font size. The result is I can fit the content I want on the 1440 but not on the 1080p without eye-strain.
There’s really no magic way to make fonts as readable with 8px as with 12px.
I would have thought the same several years ago. At age 40+, 1080p on a laptop is still good. Even at 1080p, I have to go into accessibility settings to enlarge text. I'm pretty much out of the market for 4k screens on laptops these days. Also had to switch to a big phone and crank up the text size.
50+ with bad eyes, and I think the difference between 4K and 1080p is still very noticeable on a 15.6" laptop, in terms of sharpness.
Having said that, most people probably set the text magnification on a 4K screen to be the same as a 1080p screen, so any real estate gains tend to be a wash.
Since getting presbyopia several years ago, I had single vision glasses prescribed for using a computer. So when I am using a computer, as long as the screens are around 21" to 27" away from my eyes, everything is sharp. It sucks having an extra pair of glasses (and remembering to swap them when not using a computer), but I would go nuts if I didn't have them.
> Having said that, most people probably set the text magnification on a 4K screen to be the same as a 1080p screen, so any real estate gains tend to be a wash.
If someone's buying a laptop with a 4K display for real estate, he's probably misinformed. You buy a 4K display on a laptop for the pristine ~293 PPI vs a mediocre ~146 PPI on a 1080p display which would look even worse considering it would need fractional scaling while the 4K display would work with integer scaling.
> 1080p display which would look even worse considering it would need fractional scaling
That depends on the OS though, right? I don't know about Linux or Mac, but I'm pretty sure that if you scale on Windows, you're still running at the native resolution, but the UI elements get scaled. Nothing should look weird. At least that has been my experience on Windows... outside of apps that don't follow Microsoft's scaling guidelines.
Yes, that might be the case, but I don't want to be dependent on the implementation differences of different operating systems.
I like Apple's approach in this case. Enforce the usage of HiDPI displays by default with at least ~200 PPI which needs integer scaling. Instead of trying to work around the issue, they simply bypass it, which is what I'll do in the future.
Fair enough. I prefer the flexibility that Windows' Hidpi implementation offers over being constrained to Apple's method, but different strokes for different folks.
4K on laptops should be a bless, not pain, with recent enough Windows - you shouldn’t need to try enlarging text by lowering output resolution. That was a Windows quirk that everything assumes 96dpi regardless of dpi.
Depends on your browsing habits. I often end up with hundreds of Chrome tabs, which can easily result in 16GB of RAM being consumed by it alone. Thankfully there are plugins to automatically suspend unused tabs which help with that.
I read this workflow a lot and it absolutely boggles my mind how people can have some many tabs open. You can’t possibly be able to make sense of all those tabs at once. And if your not using the tab, why not just bookmark it? Seems the only purpose of 100+ tabs is wasting ram.
I have bookmarks, Pocket for "read one day", Raindrop for more advanced "might be useful one day" bookmarks. I still work on multiple projects, for work or personal, more or less simultaneously ( as in the same week(s)), and until I'm fully finished with something i don't close the tabs related to it. Some things just get blocked/stuck/lose their priority, for which case i do the occasional cleaning.
So just the stuff I'm more or less currently on, plus articles to read "soon", plus mandatory work related tabs (Jira, etc.) and it quickly explodes to 10GB+ of RAM.
With a browser that allows customization, you can configure vertical tabs to fill up excess wide screen real estate. Then you can credibly manage dozens of tabs.
I have something like 80 tabs open from my morning alone lol, 30/35 are some bibliography quest about a fairly specific topic, a dozen about the various approaches to fast sin & cos approximations, a few are mails & social networks
As someone with a laptop like this, dev work in certain situations (compiling heavy code, like systems languages) is essentially unworkable. The ram is actually 3.33 GB (memory is shared with GPU) and the CPU's are often dual-core. Visual studio code escapes alright (somehow), so maybe for light web dev work. But when my rust code takes 8 minutes to compile and 20 seconds on a PC, it almost makes it easier to compile once on my desktop and rsync it over (so subsequent compiles are faster b/c incremental compilation). This is just the reality of a low end system, it's competent at web browsing and note taking, and surprisingly I can last about 6-8 hours on a ~$400 laptop. I certainly didn't expect a compiling powerhouse, but I can literally install ripgrep in 26 seconds and it takes about 7 or 8 minutes on the laptop.
TLDR: Don't use with systems languages. Rust takes ages to compile and I have almost switched to learning go just because of it. Of course, I am expecting way too much out of a laptop (systems programming? really?) but I didn't expect it to be so terribly slow.
8 minutes for a first compile on a non-trivial code base (ripgrep) is not that bad. Sure, you might call it a "low end system" but these performance choices can also save on battery use, which helps when coding on the go.
From what I could find, ripgrep is 40kloc... That means roughly 83 lines of code compiled per second. I'm sure there are languages on the PDP-11 (a 1.25 mhz machine) that compiled faster than that.
Well, my laptop is AMD Athlon 3050U with ~3.33GB of ram ("4GB" but shared with GPU). Ripgrep definitely took that long to install last time I installed it. Dual core + ~3GB of ram, I can see 8 minutes being somewhat within reach. perhaps some aggro power throttling as well?
I was on my phone and trusted the Google results of "ripgrep sloc", thanks for the correction ! What takes so much code in the ripgrep codebase ? I am developing a cross-platform GUI app with audio, video and network features and it's not even 500k lines
I provided precisely the commands you need to run to get the output I got. Not only did you not run 'cargo vendor', but you're using 'cloc' instead of 'tokei', which has a less precise line counting algorithm.
but, cargo vendor will fetch the dependencies, which should definitely not be counted as part of the source code of a given program ? else every program should also count the kernel, graphics driver, etc.. which would make it a pretty useless metric
This conversation is super frustrating. This is occurring in the context of compilation speed. So if you're measuring compilation speed by LoC (which is itself just a heuristic), then you should, at minimum, count as many lines of code that are actually being compiled. That's what `cargo vendor` does: it fetches the source code of all dependencies that are needed to build the project.
You are losing sight of the forest through the trees here. This isn't an abstract argument about what is or isn't part of a program. This is a concrete measurement heuristic that has precisely defined inputs.
I am counting the number of lines that are being compiled when you run 'cargo build' on Linux. This includes things like huge Unicode tables and ffi bindings (for the entirety of libc, for example).
That might be correct when talking about _video_, but is factually incorrect when talking about _text_.
To understand why, just print an identical piece of text on 600, 300, 150 and 75 dpi on your printer and look at the printouts side by side. There is a significant downgrade in quality between each step, and anything below 300 dpi looks quite bad.
15.6" at 1080p is ~141 ppi[1] which is in the "not good" range. Your OS attempts to salvage the situation by applying font hinting (i.e. distorting your fonts to fit the pixel grid) and antialiasing (subpixel on linux, grayscale on the latest versions of windows & macos) - both of which are imperfect workarounds for the lack of resolution.
The MacBook Pro is ~217 ppi (1800p at 15.6"), which is better but still not perfect.
A 4K 15.6" screen works out at ~282 ppi, which is starting to be good enough to finally turn off font hinting and view fonts as intended by their designer rather than squished by subpar display technology.
> both of which are imperfect workarounds for the lack of resolution
Imperfect, certainly, but they are pretty good workarounds that usually generate perfectly readable text. In my experience, when text looks bad at 1080p, it is more often because hinting has been done badly, heavily distorting the letter forms, rather than the inherent limitations of the resolution.
To be clear, I certainly prefer reading text at higher DPIs, but at should be seen as one particular tradeoff to be weighed against the heavier battery and graphics demands of higher pixel count screens.
I understand what you're saying, but antialiasing, despite its being a flawed workaround, seems to work well enough for me that even when reading text on a 4K display it's not a huge difference that I can notice it so much that it bothers me (I used a 4K monitor for a couple of years). Sure, 4K for text might be better, but it doesn't mean that I notice a difference.
It's a 15" screen! For 4K to even begin to make sense, you need a 40" diagonal, and with your face about a foot away from it. (For a more detailed explanation, ask a local fifth grader.)
I think you need to try more screens. I thought the 27" 5Ks were perfect — unlike 4K 27" screens, I could no longer discern the pixels.
So why would I need higher res than that? I thought that but I was proven so wrong.
Through some weird work circumstances I got a chance to use the (ludicrously expensive) 6K 32" Apple XDR Pro Display. To my eyes, this looked exactly the same as the LG 27" 5K displays I had been using — and they do indeed have almost the same pixel density.
BUT THEN!!!!!!! I had to switch to Linux for some other work reasons, and ended up with the (old as hell) Dell UP3218K 31.5" 8K display.
For programming work, it is so much better and crisper than the LG 27" UltraFine 5K and the Apple 32" XDR Pro Display.
I cannot SEE the pixels on any of them, but the text looks DRAMATICALLY better on the 8K one. I can comfortably use smaller font sizes, and the regular same-sized text is so much crisper and more comfortable to read on the 8K.
I feel like this 8K display is one of the best computer things I ever got — it's like the display version of going from HDD to SSD — and not getting one years ago is the biggest computing mistake in my 25+ year career.
And I also say this as somebody who just this year got his first prescription for eyeglasses (my vision is deteriorating in middle age, but isn't so bad yet; I wear the glasses like half the time, and the dramatic difference with the high res screen applies with or without glasses).
NOTE: I don't notice any differences at all when viewing photos or videos — it is strictly about viewing text, for doing things like programming or reading email or web pages.
FURTHER NOTE: Although I strongly disagree with your comment here, I upvoted it anyway because I think it is a commonly-held opinion which I myself believed a variant of until my recent lived experience with the weird Dell proof-of-concept monitor, and I don't think it deserved the light-gray dimming. And also because I remember you recommending the metal band Annihilator several years ago on this website, the discography of which I then obtained and enjoyed. :)
I think my 27" 4k display is perfect. My dad has slightly worse eyes and prefers his 32" 4k display, which I find noticably grainier but perfectly serviceable.
I didn't mean to imply that a 40" diagonal was necessarily excessive (if you have the space, go for it!), I was just disagreeing with the claim that you need a screen that big for 4k. I have a smaller 4k screen, and I think the pixel density is perfectly fine.
The price is a bit too high (as always with System76). Last year, for the same price ($1,199) on sale, I bought a ASUS Zephyrus G14 with a Ryzen 4900HS and RTX 2060. Right now, you get it (for a bit more) with a 5900HS and RTX 3060.
Both the 5900HS and the 4900HS will beat the low-wattage 5700U in performance handily. The G14 has a 76 Wh, so despite the “higher”-power (35 Watt) CPU, it’ll still get a LOT of battery life.
System76 is nice, in this podcast the CEO is interviewed: [0]. He is dedicated to transparency, open source and privacy. They’re worth some extra money to me. Although I’m still waiting for their custom designed, all aluminium top of the line laptop :)
Is this custom design all-aluminum design on their road map? I'd buy it, I'd order it next year and pay right now even. The only thing preventing from buying one of their laptop is I am wary of all plastic laptops that break apart after five years although they are working perfectly. Basically I just want a MacBook that runs Linux perfectly.
They been planning it for years [0]. I guess experiences with their high end keyboard [1] will teach them valuable lessons, the podcast I posted is mainly about that keyboard and the manufacturing challenges. I indeed also hope for a MBP equivalent (non-clevo) System76 laptop.
1. The Max boost clock of 5700U is 4.3Ghz. Compared to M1 at 3.2Ghz
2. The TDP of 5700 is Typical TDP, it doesn't actually take into account of boost. Not that it matters in a single thread performance comparison because it wont use 15W per single core, but still relevant info to keep in mind.
On the other hand this is a Zen 2 on 7nm compared to M1 on 5nm. The Gap would be less if it was on Zen 3 and 5nm. But even then my guess it would something like 3000, still quite a bit to go to catch up with 3800.
they just write 10x more productivity, which should mean on average workout other qualifiers. clearly that's impossible for any non gaslighting definition of productivity.
I have an oryp5 (2019). The keyboard is ok. The numeric pad is annoying though, as others have commented. I definitely prefer my old mac which didn't have one.
The touchpad is awful. Way too sensitive to palm touches, even in windows - so it isn't just a linux driver issue. This might be related to the fact that its off center but I think its just lousy hardware. In linux I've tweaked both the touchpad area (reduced) and threshold settings but its still barely usable and I palm-touch constantly unless I hold my hand at an awkward angle.
Maybe this pangolin is better but I looked at the overhead picture of the keyboard and it looks almost identical to my oryp5. The touchpad may be upgraded hardware, so I don't know.
I love what system 76 is doing, PopOS is great, but I really wish they'd get off these Clevo laptops. The hardware just isn't very good, IMO.
I have a System76 Gazelle. The trackpad tends to freak out when I reboot, issuing random clicks and cursor jitters - so I usually have to reboot again, or deactivate the trackpad in Ubuntu. Multiple firmware and OS updates haven’t fixed this.
+1 on this, I got mine 2 years back, together with the fan noises, this was the "features" that annoyed me most. Also the Gazelle feels cheap, the keyboard is not terrible, but is not great either. I wish they they have a better quality case, a better keyboard, and a brighter screen panel. I have not tried the other models, I hope to get my hands on the Darter Pro, it seems promising. I think what System76 is doing is pretty cool, I just wish their products were more competitive.
I bought a system76 years ago wanting to support their open source work. Maybe it's changed since (?), but mine had a Clevo shell which meant it had a bad keyboard and a terrible trackpad, with a cheap plastic feel and lots of flex. It's the first laptop I ever replaced within a month...
The keyboard was later recalled, so I swapped it out with a new one they sent me which wasn't cut to the correct dimensions and never fit (bubbling up in the center and leaving a gap around the keyboard for things to fall into).
There's no mention of the color gamut on that display. Necessary 1080p complaints aside, I couldn't buy a Linux laptop last year because all of the displays are trash. If you're lucky you can find 100% sRGB, but I and many others need 100% DCI-P3 and it's just not on offer. My 2-year-old $450 phone has P3 coverage, but almost nothing in the laptop space does.
I have bought a few System76 laptops, though not this variant - I like to buy the ones that ship with coreboot.
As for the price difference: you can buy the base model of the System76 and upgrade ram/disk yourself. This is harder to do on the Lenovo ones; it seems the T14 has (some of) the ram soldered on (ugh).
But, it is nice to see that you can actually buy a T14 with Ubuntu preinstalled (if you are willing to wait 4+ months...), and they list it next to the (more expensive!) Windows version:
The thing about Lenovo is one can get a 4 year, on site, service contract for less than $500. If a keyboard key breaks, no problem, they swap it and come to your house.
Over the hears I've had monitor pixels die. They don't care, they'll replace it.
And unlike with Apple Lenovo doesn't mind if you replace the hard drive or other components yourself, the warranty is not voided.
Linux is a side project for Lenovo though. System76 is a Linux-only vendor which means every interaction is with someone who knows what the heck they're talking about.
When typing, my right fingers always resting covering 4 arrow keys (provided it's a full-sized keyboard and arrow keys are separated from the rest with enough blank space). I use right fingers to reach Home/End/PgUp/PgDn buttons, INSERT/DEL on numeric. So it's quite useful to have them all close-by.
I had a NUC(NUC6i7KYK) that no matter what I tried, I couldn't make WiFi work reliably. Tried Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, tries upgrading the driver blobs from Intel, nothing worked!
Then one time for fun I tried Pop!_OS, and lo and behold, never had a problem with WiFi again!
System76 seems to be making good laptops but on side I’m happy with my zephyrus it’s amd 3900HS it has a 3070 for AI and it’s 200/300 $ more and has a great Linux community. Not sure what system76 value prop is on that market.
Sure, Linux happens to work on your Zephyrus. But System76 is a Linux-only vendor and is working to integrate hardware and software. That means you're getting great support from Linux geeks on any issues that arise - and investing in the future of Linux rather than begging free help from a community.
I really appreciate how affordable upgrades (RAM, Storage etc) are. I am not used to it. Apple adds a hefty premium on these upgrades (I understand this is not a 1:1 comparison). Configuration looks really solid and affordable!
Is it coreboot-based? Modern laptops firmware is bigger than Linux kernel and has too much crap inside. Intel is openly hostile to the open source firmware, while it's theoretically possible to do that on AMD systems.
Pretty much no details about the display. What kind of panel is this? What's the maximum brightness? How fast is the refresh rate? How large is the color gamut?
One thing I notice in this and Framework's laptop is how much space we are trading for upgradability. Both SO-DIMM and M2 are massive. I guess for 2TB option you need M2 2280 rather than the 2242 variant. But SO-DIMM is just huge, and you need two of them. Compared to M1 which has LPDDR5 within the package, and SSD Controller Built in.
We need something that combined the Dual Channel Support within one Slot and at least half the width of SO-DIMM.
Kinda interesting that this has a 49 Wh battery while the smaller and less powerful Lemur Pro has a 73 Wh one [1]. I have the 2020 Lemur Pro and love the ridiculously long battery life. I guess this is more of a plug it in most of the day machine vs. an ultralight.
Would have been a go-to viable option had it not been for the Framework Laptops and the Apple Silicon lineup.
I doubt the battery life on this thing is going to last a single day or even more than 12 hours compared with the Apple Silicon laptops out there or even the upcoming M1X Laptops.
Hence this, I am in no hurry to rush into buying this contraption and will just skip it for the alternatives.
Does anyone know how much power this draws when idle? With a 49WH battery and assuming 5W idle (which is what you can get the 4k series ryzen mobile down to on windows on a good day), that's just under 10 hours. Anyone have any tighter numbers? I would seriously consider buying this if I could actually expect 10 hours battery pretty consistently.
I believe ECC is incredibly hard to get these days, but I could be out of touch. It certainly was last year. I haven’t seen it in many laptop offerings over the years, except perhaps Dell’s workstation-type offerings as an option.
I’m curious if bitflips have been an issue for you in your experience. I don’t think I’ve encountered it, but I may have misattributed various bugs to software defects when they were in fact due to bit flips.
That's the problem with bitflips isn't it? It's only a possibility that can be considered when all other possibilities have been eliminated.
Whenever I've had non-ECC systems KPs/BSODs, it's possible that it might just be due to a bug, but in the back of my mind, I know there's always the possibility that it was due to a bitflip.
I feel psychologically uncomfortable working on a computer without ECC. I say ECC everything - Desktops, Laptops, and even smartphones.
This laptop proclaims a maximum of 64GB of RAM. If you do populate the slots with that much non-ECC RAM, that only further increases the surface area for random bitflips. What use is more RAM in a Linux laptop if it hasn't been made more reliable?
It's high time more laptops shipped with ECC. At least unregistered ECC, if not buffered ones.
Definitely check out System76. They're one of the few Linux-only laptop vendors. That means you're supporting the future of Linux by making it mainstream and helping more Linux-focused models exist.
Dell and Lenovo put up with Linux but it's a side project for them at best. And other vendors dgaf.
I have a laptop running Linux that cost me $400 in 2016. Similar spec is $600 now. I'm fairly sure I can get by with what I do (YouTube, streaming, documents, web programming) fairly well with it.
I wonder about AMD support, I've been running Pop OS on a Thinkpad A285 for a while and the computer freezes pretty consistently. I'm not sure if it's related to video playback but it seems like it might be a pattern.
I love the idea of System76. But the low budget keyboards on their rebranded hardware don’t do it for me.
I heard they planned to manufacture their own machines recently, but I’d rather buy a ThinkPad for the awesome keyboard than gamble on whatever keyboard they’re using now.
Nice specs. I wonder why they don't offer 1x16G (instead of 2x8G) or 1x32G (instead of 2x16G) RAM options though - that would leave the other slot free for a future upgrade.
As far as I know, having two equivalent RAM sticks for dual channel mode helps performance, so most people choose that over having single stick, which is often frowned upon in the desktop space, at least.
Disappointed at display resolution. I'm forever waiting for a laptop with AMD CPU, no dedicated GPU, 4K built-in display, enough RAM, a few USB port and a Ethernet.
I find it a little weird when integrated graphics is mentioned as prominently as such in marketing copy. "Ryzen CPU + Radeon graphics = Mobile AMD laptop."
It's roughly comparable to one of the non-haptic trackpads on a Macbook Air (pre-2015 I believe?). For me, I'm willing to put up with it because Apple is a dead end given their new surveillance hobby.
Trackpad mechanics is just something to get used to, just like switching to a keyboard with a different layout. Annoying/frustrating at first, after a week you can care less.
It's like the comparatively fucked up natural scrolling on macOS, when coming from windows, or whatever it's called. Your brain will accommodate.
Wouldn't that only really apply while doing intensive memory accessing. Something that you would probably only be doing a very small percentage of time.
no - simply refreshing memory state costs power. The DRAM memory refresh cycle happens about every 60ms. In the background, memory cells are constantly read and rewritten.
> As a rule of thumb, however, you want to allocate around 3 watts of power for every 8GB of DDR3 or DDR4 memory. High-performance memory such as Ballistix® parts can draw more power, especially if you overclock the voltage beyond XMP settings.
Thanks for followup, I was curious if the ram was allocated in blocks if sections could go unused.
Right now I have 16gb and it's been great and I generally don't put much pressure on it (except for some occasional Android Studio virtualizing).
However, it seems as though software resource usage has a tendency to creep up over time so it seemed like more RAM would be a safe option. I also tend to use the computer more lightly when it's unplugged.
I don't know much about hardware so all input is appreciated.
What price are you putting on getting Linux support from the vendor? System76 is Linux-only so they work to integrate their hardware and software together...few others offer this.
Most people who do tech work in the sense of using a computer for most part of their days such as software devs (I hope) use external keyboards and screens and mice anyway, 99% of the time. AC adapter plugged in.
With the WFH trend, this will be a growing trend.
I unplug the AC adapter and monitor to go over to someone's desk or hold a presentation perhaps a few times a month at most. I would not want to write code a whole day on even the best laptop keyboard and the most crispy 4K laptop screen.
There is a surprising lack of choice for laptops targeting this mode of use though. For example the $3k Dell precision I have now doesn't like being used plugged in for extended periods. They put a category of battery in them that swells when heated. So if you, like me, leave it on for say a year at your desk (This happened during the pandemic) - it expands and the keyboard and trackpad stops working.
When you go for a "workstation" class laptop, the manufacturers have crammed so much perf into an impossibly small package, that it's screaming loud and glowing hot. Just make it twice as thick with half the battery size and I'll buy it.
