<story><title>Ask HN: Are there any reasonable alternatives to MacBook Pro for developer?</title><text>Hi,&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m writing this on my late 2012 MacBook Pro. Time goes by and I know rather sooner than later I&amp;#x27;ll need to replace it with a new machine. In 2012 I paid around 1000$ for MacBook Pro + Samsung SSD (256GB) + 16GB RAM, I made modifications on my own.&lt;p&gt;I check notebookcheck from time to time. I read reviews, opinions about new laptops. The point is, I don&amp;#x27;t know if there is any machine that could be recommended in reasonable price. At work I&amp;#x27;m using some new MacBook Pro which (i5&amp;#x2F;16GB&amp;#x2F;128GB SSD) which is noticeably slower than my current machine.&lt;p&gt;Performance of the computer is quite important for me. I&amp;#x27;m an Android developer, compilation of a big project I&amp;#x27;m working on takes enormous amount of RAM and CPU nowadays (with new Android Studio it&amp;#x27;s even worse). From time to time I work on web projects, so handling several instances of docker shouldn&amp;#x27;t be a problem for a new machine. I prefer Linux over MacOs over Windows, so good support for Ubuntu&amp;#x2F;Fedora would be nice.&lt;p&gt;I checked some computers in details but most of them fail in one or more aspects:
- hinges - MacBook has superior hinges, if I pay more than 1000 - 1500$ I expect to have great hinges
- price
- performance
- Linux support&lt;p&gt;Price is quite important for me, I&amp;#x27;m from Eastern Europe. What computer would you recommend in, let&amp;#x27;s say, &amp;lt;2000$ ?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>jhoechtl</author><text>HiDPI on Linux is pretty much non existent. I am telling from experience. I have booth a decent 4K external monitor and a HiDPI IPS internal display. The only setup which is ok in the sense of least horrible is Gnome mutter Wayland with experimental per monitor fractional scaling enabled. And this one is only ok if you can restrict yourself to the few ported pure GTK3 Gnome apps. Which means not that much. No Firefox. No Chrome. No Thunderbird.&lt;p&gt;And the speed of fixing HiDPI on Linux has actually slowed down.&lt;p&gt;Frnakly, and I am a hard core Linux OSS fan - come back in two years and check again.&lt;p&gt;The Linux desktop IS dead.</text></item><item><author>aviraldg</author><text>Do your co-workers not have issues with HiDPI support on Linux? I&amp;#x27;ve heard it&amp;#x27;s not the best experience and can require quite some fiddling to get working correctly.</text></item><item><author>CoffeeOnWrite</author><text>I’m on my 4th Thinkpad T-series - T520, T530, T450s, T460s - each one was a a winner. I ditched the T5XX series when they borked the keyboard layout by adding a numpad. Used to run Ubuntu, now I run Debian, stable or testing depending on point in release cycle at install time. I plan to take another look at Ubuntu now that they gave up on Unity. A coworker is happily on the T470s (first USB-C in the series). I always get 1920x1080 since my eyes are accustomed to it, but multiple coworkers are happy with 2560x1440. Used to get the Nvidia cards, now very happy with the integrated Intel graphics. In general, last year’s hardware requires almost zero messing with Linux to make everything work, whereas with the latest hardware, be prepared to solve a couple minor issues. Ubuntu’s font rendering or Infinality are both amazing and better than macOS or Win10 to my eyes.&lt;p&gt;I’m ridiculously excited to eventually upgrade to a T480s because it’s the first in the series to offer a quad-core CPU. They’re selling the quad-core with Intel graphics which is exactly what I want. I hope Lenovo did a good job with the thermal engineering...&lt;p&gt;Thanks to all the open source developers that deliver this totally rad experience on Linux, Debian, and Gnome &amp;lt;3</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rossy</author><text>Huh? I&amp;#x27;ve been running a 2x&amp;#x2F;192dpi Linux&amp;#x2F;X11 laptop for a couple of years, and the experience has been near perfect. Hands down better than on Windows. Some DEs even detect the panel DPI and configure toolkit scaling automatically. Firefox and Chrome have been two of the most well-behaved apps, especially since they switched to GTK3, but it&amp;#x27;s not just GTK3 that is well-behaved, Qt5 is as well. Since most apps I use are Qt5 and some are GTK3, they all get crisp HiDPI rendering automatically from the toolkit.&lt;p&gt;So I&amp;#x27;m not sure what you mean by &amp;quot;HiDPI on Linux is pretty much non existent.&amp;quot; Maybe it gets worse if you need fractional scaling or displays with different scaling ratios, but these seem to things all platforms are struggling with. Microsoft only made built-in apps like File Explorer per-monitor-DPI aware in Windows 10 1703 (released a year ago), and macOS doesn&amp;#x27;t attempt fractional scaling (eg. 1.5x, 2.5x, etc.) at all.</text></comment>
<story><title>Ask HN: Are there any reasonable alternatives to MacBook Pro for developer?</title><text>Hi,&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m writing this on my late 2012 MacBook Pro. Time goes by and I know rather sooner than later I&amp;#x27;ll need to replace it with a new machine. In 2012 I paid around 1000$ for MacBook Pro + Samsung SSD (256GB) + 16GB RAM, I made modifications on my own.&lt;p&gt;I check notebookcheck from time to time. I read reviews, opinions about new laptops. The point is, I don&amp;#x27;t know if there is any machine that could be recommended in reasonable price. At work I&amp;#x27;m using some new MacBook Pro which (i5&amp;#x2F;16GB&amp;#x2F;128GB SSD) which is noticeably slower than my current machine.&lt;p&gt;Performance of the computer is quite important for me. I&amp;#x27;m an Android developer, compilation of a big project I&amp;#x27;m working on takes enormous amount of RAM and CPU nowadays (with new Android Studio it&amp;#x27;s even worse). From time to time I work on web projects, so handling several instances of docker shouldn&amp;#x27;t be a problem for a new machine. I prefer Linux over MacOs over Windows, so good support for Ubuntu&amp;#x2F;Fedora would be nice.&lt;p&gt;I checked some computers in details but most of them fail in one or more aspects:
- hinges - MacBook has superior hinges, if I pay more than 1000 - 1500$ I expect to have great hinges
- price
- performance
- Linux support&lt;p&gt;Price is quite important for me, I&amp;#x27;m from Eastern Europe. What computer would you recommend in, let&amp;#x27;s say, &amp;lt;2000$ ?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>jhoechtl</author><text>HiDPI on Linux is pretty much non existent. I am telling from experience. I have booth a decent 4K external monitor and a HiDPI IPS internal display. The only setup which is ok in the sense of least horrible is Gnome mutter Wayland with experimental per monitor fractional scaling enabled. And this one is only ok if you can restrict yourself to the few ported pure GTK3 Gnome apps. Which means not that much. No Firefox. No Chrome. No Thunderbird.&lt;p&gt;And the speed of fixing HiDPI on Linux has actually slowed down.&lt;p&gt;Frnakly, and I am a hard core Linux OSS fan - come back in two years and check again.&lt;p&gt;The Linux desktop IS dead.</text></item><item><author>aviraldg</author><text>Do your co-workers not have issues with HiDPI support on Linux? I&amp;#x27;ve heard it&amp;#x27;s not the best experience and can require quite some fiddling to get working correctly.</text></item><item><author>CoffeeOnWrite</author><text>I’m on my 4th Thinkpad T-series - T520, T530, T450s, T460s - each one was a a winner. I ditched the T5XX series when they borked the keyboard layout by adding a numpad. Used to run Ubuntu, now I run Debian, stable or testing depending on point in release cycle at install time. I plan to take another look at Ubuntu now that they gave up on Unity. A coworker is happily on the T470s (first USB-C in the series). I always get 1920x1080 since my eyes are accustomed to it, but multiple coworkers are happy with 2560x1440. Used to get the Nvidia cards, now very happy with the integrated Intel graphics. In general, last year’s hardware requires almost zero messing with Linux to make everything work, whereas with the latest hardware, be prepared to solve a couple minor issues. Ubuntu’s font rendering or Infinality are both amazing and better than macOS or Win10 to my eyes.&lt;p&gt;I’m ridiculously excited to eventually upgrade to a T480s because it’s the first in the series to offer a quad-core CPU. They’re selling the quad-core with Intel graphics which is exactly what I want. I hope Lenovo did a good job with the thermal engineering...&lt;p&gt;Thanks to all the open source developers that deliver this totally rad experience on Linux, Debian, and Gnome &amp;lt;3</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kuschku</author><text>Try KDE on Wayland. Full support for HiDPI, full support for multiple monitors of different DPI even.</text></comment>