What laptop do you have?

[tooki]

<rant>
I used to be a desktop enthusiast, until about 5 minutes ago, when I realized they're pretty much useless.

There's one huge disadvantage to laptops that often gets ignored (and I don't think anyone's mentioned it here yet): ergonomics. Working at a laptop is just nightmarishly bad for your neck and hands. As someone with significant repetitive strain injury (and high susceptibility for it), I have sworn off laptops. (I have one for travel and the occasional sofa browse, but it's rarely used now.) A desktop system (as in, on a desk, not the form factor of the computer itself) on an adjustable height desk, with the display on a monitor arm, does wonders in preventing RSI problems. If you need the portability as well, then you can do as others have suggested and have all the desktop peripherals connected via a USB or Thunderbolt umbilical, making untethering easy.

You can get a laptop that is close enough in performance to a desktop. A general desktop in the current age isn't orders of magnitude better than a general laptop.

This has been the case for something like 10 years (and on the Mac side, since 1998, other than a break during the lousy G4 era).

My current desktop which cost 3 grand in parts can't even boot UEFI linux. What a piece of garbage.
 </rant>

Unfortunately, if you're gonna run Linux, you're gonna run into more problems with regards to choosing hardware.

Apple? I pretty much hate the company, but must admit they have quality laptops.

Recent Apple laptops have, as others have stated, AMAZING battery life. But mind you, this is only when running OS X. If you run Windows or Linux on it, you will sacrifice something like 20% of the battery life. The new Force Touch trackpad is also amazing, but again, also functions only in OS X. If the things you do can be easily migrated to OS X (which is usually the case for people running Linux as their desktop OS), you might find it to be a mighty fine platform to work on, since it's got a true UNIX on the inside, with a great UI, broad selection of open-source software, broad selection of commercial third-party software and accessories, and tight hardware integration.

They are not, however, as mechanically robust as a Lenovo. It's been a looooong time since Apple made a laptop that survives being driven over by an SUV without a crack!

HP consumer products are just trash. Dell seems pretty good. Surface book seems good, but it's overpriced. Would prefer to stay away from the generic lenovo/toshiba stuff as their build quality will probably will probably make my skin crawl after building high end watercooled desktops for 5 years.

Recommendations please? Excuse my passive-aggressive tone. I'm pissed, as I've been trying for a week and failing to boot UEFI linux with my poor excuse of a motherboard from asus. So what do you have and what should I get? Don't care about price, but I must warn, I am extremely picky when it comes to computers.

Well, it's easier to recommend something if you actually said more about your needs -- what it's to be used for, etc.

That said, if you're gonna go with a PC laptop, go with a Lenovo. I don't think there's a better built laptop on the market, period. (I live in Switzerland, in a city known for banking. Swiss banks tend to lavish pretty much endless amounts of money on IT, and I think it says something that here, they all buy Lenovo. Similarly, the insurance companies, whose entire business is quantifying risk, seem to all use Lenovo as well.)

I prefer OS X to just about any other OS. The main reason is keyboard shortcuts, for instance CMD-C, CMD-V (copy and paste) doesn't overlap with Terminal commands ctrl-c and ctrl-x. Just about anything on OS-X is CMD-<some key> so it's really easy to tab between aps and just navigate without ever using a mouse. The other reason is that it's Unix. Since I write software for Unix systems all the stuff runs natively on it. I used Linux as my primary Desktop OS for years, but OS-X is best of both worlds, a lot of the commercial software runs on OS-X plus you get all the goodies from the Linux ecosystem as well.

With that said if you are into Electronics, Windows is probably still a king there. I purposely avoid tools which require Windows, but it's impossible to avoid them all. I still have to drop to Windows in a VM for FPGA programming for example. With mapped drives it's not a big deal.

Couldn't agree more. The Mac has evolved from the eccentric enthusiast's platform it was in the 1990s, to one that's now in many ways found the best of both worlds, in that you have the entire OSS ecosystem, plus commercial software (MS Office, Adobe, Autocad, etc.), and VMs for everything else, all with a good OS, on great hardware, with great support. I know a ton of developers who abandoned Linux as their desktop OS for the Mac, because it really can run everything, and runs it well. They were tired of having to choose between great OSS IDEs (and the UNIX environment) OR having a good desktop UI with the commercial apps they needed (e.g. Outlook for corporate communication). (Cuz let's face it, while OSS has made great strides in applications, most are still miles away from their commercial counterparts. LibreOffice doesn't come close to MS Office in functionality or usability. The Gimp is light-years away from being a professional Photoshop replacement. Etc etc etc.)

[Lomax]

Cuz let's face it, while OSS has made great strides in applications, most are still miles away from their commercial counterparts. LibreOffice doesn't come close to MS Office in functionality or usability. The Gimp is light-years away from being a professional Photoshop replacement. Etc etc etc.

While I agree that The Gimp is nothing short of an embarrassment, there are many FOSS programs I count as leaders in their category. For one thing I think LibreOffice is miles better than MS Office; faster, easier to use, and less cluttered (though admittedly this may be because I do not have any need for the tight integration with other MS products that MS Office offers). Further examples where I would choose a FOSS equivalent over paid for/closed source applications include

• Firefox (web browser)
• Inkscape (vector graphics editing)
• Tox (secure instant messaging & voice/video chat)
• Evolution (personal information manager)
• Blender (3D modelling, animation and rendering)
• LibreCAD (basic 2D CAD)
• Scribus (desktop publishing)
• KeepassX (password management)
• Qalculate! (advanced calculator)
• Grsync (rsync file synchronisation GUI)
• VLC (media player)
• Regexxer (multi-file search & replace tool)
• Wikipedia (encyclopedia)
• SailfishOS (mobile device operating system)

Those are just some of the FOSS tools & applications that I would find it very hard to live without. I'm not saying these are always better or more feature complete than the paid for alternatives, but they are certainly good enough for my needs, and offer plenty of polish and user friendliness. In many cases a smaller set of features is actually a benefit; less is more and all that. Ultimately, I think a lot of the time when people say things like "most are still miles away from their commercial counterparts" it's just borne out of ignorance of what's out there - and the FOSS community is not very good at marketing itself.

Edit: Paid for/closed source software that I could not live without:

• Adobe Photoshop (bitmap/photo editor)
• Sublime Text (text editor on steroids)

[Mechatrommer]

Edit: Paid for/closed source software that I could not live without:

• Adobe Photoshop (bitmap/photo editor)

why dont live with GIMP?

-blender with 3d studio max or inventors or solidworks or autocad?
-inkscape vs coreldraw?
-libreoffice vs ms office?

if you have tried them all, i bet its the commercial packages that you cant live without... to some extent, i've tried gimp and blender, i dont see much reason to continue using them... not to mention the close to nonexistent documentation...

[rdl]

If all you need is basic graphics editing, then GIMP is a bloated, overly complex, and a confusing mess. I still use PSP 4.0 which I bought back in the 90s, runs fine on Win 7 and can open, edit and save almost every possible format. I also use LibreOffice and have since the OpenOffice days. It totally destroys MS Office because of one thing, no ribbon.

Some other useful free programs (I have no idea as to open source because I don't really care).

TrueCrypt
FreeFileSync
Eraser
SumatraPDF
Notepad ++
Handbrake

[tooki]

As someone who has done a ton of professional technical writing and translation, I can say that LibreOffice Writer doesn't come close to having Word's functionality. Writer is fine for simple documents (regardless of length), but it lacks all sorts of things that I find crucial as a writer, both in terms of formatting options, but also in how it doesn't help you automate formatting (e.g. with capable style sheets), and its change tracking is just laughably bad. If I had to do professional writing work in Writer (or Google docs, for that matter) I think i'd kill myself.

As someone who worked in customer/tech support at a software company that made an application that integrated with both Word and Writer, I can also say that Writer is a buggy, inadequately tested piece of crap from a technical standpoint. Its documented APIs simply didn't work at all. Or if they did work, their behavior would change dramatically in some little point update. In contrast, Word's APIs work beautifully and reliably. In the end we had to remove features from our Writer integration because we could not make it work reliably, and the nonexistent or incorrect API documentation made it too time consuming for the developers to investigate. In the version of the application released after I left the company, Word got an entire add-on to allow real-time integration. They didn't even attempt it for Writer, that's how hopeless it was.

I'm not saying Word is flawless, it's not. But it's far, far, far better than Writer.

As for usability: the people who like Writer better are the ones who simply don't like the Ribbon. Writer's original UI was basically a (bad) clone of Word 97. Very recently, they made their own Ribbon-like UI, which I confess I have never bothered to try out since I don't use Writer. Microsoft invested a fortune in usability research for the Ribbon, and in actual user testing, it does really well, no matter what some people insist. Microsoft has published a great deal of information on the creation of the Ribbon as well as the specs of the end result; it's fascinating. I highly recommend looking into it for anyone with an interest in UX.

[Lomax]

As someone who has done a ton of professional technical writing and translation, I can say that LibreOffice Writer doesn't come close to having Word's functionality.

It's funny you should say that, because I very recently completed a ~50 page technical user manual in LibreOffice, with lots of tables, illustrations, etc. LO handled things like chapter indexing, keyword indexing (including the use of a concordance file), change tracking, external data linking, styling and formatting with remarkable ease. I was able to perform all the tasks typically associated with the creation of a technical manual without running into any issues, and I was extremely pleased with the polished results. It may be that your needs are more advanced, but LO Writer is more than good enough for my needs. I cannot escape the suspicion that you are making assumptions about limitations that are either not present, or have been overcome since you last used it.

Edit: Here is a feature comparison with MS Word 2016.

[Muxr]

As someone who has done a ton of professional technical writing and translation, I can say that LibreOffice Writer doesn't come close to having Word's functionality.

It's funny you should say that, because I very recently completed a ~50 page technical user manual in LibreOffice, with lots of tables, illustrations, etc. LO handled things like chapter indexing, keyword indexing (including the use of a concordance file), change tracking, external data linking, styling and formatting with remarkable ease. I was able to perform all the tasks typically associated with the creation of a technical manual without running into any issues, and I was extremely pleased with the polished results. It may be that your needs are more advanced, but LO Writer is more than good enough for my needs. I cannot escape the suspicion that you are making assumptions about limitations that are not present, or have been overcome since you last used it.

Edit: Here is a feature comparison with MS Word 2016.

Libre Office is great unless you have to collaborate with other people who use Word. Formating gets out of hand very quickly when multiple people edit a document using different programs.

[Lomax]

why dont live with GIMP?

I use Gimp daily, but it sucks rotten eggs. Worst UI/UX of any desktop application in the history of software. No really. Which is a tragedy, since underneath it's shitty exterior lies a very capable image editing engine.

[Mechatrommer]

no ribbon.

i know i'm also the one who dont like ribbon, but i dont care ribbon crap or not as long as it functionally robust...

[Mechatrommer]

if we are talking merely photochopped chicken on a dinner plate then, just FOSS can do the job fine...

[Muxr]

UI based software is a 2nd rate citizen on FOSS platforms. Not a lot of people write or care about UI apps on Unix (and Unix-like systems like Linux).

Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.

That's Unix philosophy. And I wouldn't have it any other way. This is also one of the reasons I prefer OS X for desktop because you get the best of both worlds. Native Unix support as well as commercial support of the big GUI apps.

There are always exceptions of course. Chromium and Firefox, Eclipse, Atom, KiCad (lacks polish though) to name a few are all FOSS apps that beat their commercial counterparts.

[tooki]

Aaaargh, I'd written a nice detailed response and an errant mouse click made it all go away. (Curse you, websites that don't use AJAX to silently save your draft as you type!)

Let's see how much I can reproduce without causing my RSI to flare up:

It's funny you should say that, because I very recently completed a ~50 page technical user manual in LibreOffice, with lots of tables, illustrations, etc. LO handled things like chapter indexing, keyword indexing (including the use of a concordance file), change tracking, external data linking, styling and formatting with remarkable ease. I was able to perform all the tasks typically associated with the creation of a technical manual without running into any issues, and I was extremely pleased with the polished results. It may be that your needs are more advanced, but LO Writer is more than good enough for my needs. I cannot escape the suspicion that you are making assumptions about limitations that are either not present, or have been overcome since you last used it.

I didn't say it was useless. It's just not as good. And there's no question that some things have been improved since the last time I tested it. But most of my complaints remain entirely unaddressed.

I'll be the first to admit, proudly, that I'm a very discerning, demanding user. Microsoft has managed to deliver a professional level program that meets my needs almost all of the time. LO reminds me of using ClarisWorks in the 1990s, which was awesome for middle school work, but would be woefully inadequate for my professional needs now.

I just reinstalled the latest LO to make sure I'm not talking out of my ass. The user interface is still a wreck, mostly a poor knockoff of Word 97. (I'm a trained UX designer and technical writer, so both the lousy choice and implementation of many UI elements, and the terrible wording of the UI text, both stand out to me like sore thumbs.)

Change tracking is still laughably primitive. It's now caught up with about the level of Word 97. It has only an annoying dialog to show a list of all changes, and even that is very barebones. (Word is much better at showing what was changed and how, not just that it was changed.) At least it now can track changes within a table -- a few years ago, it handled the entire table as a monolithic inline image of sorts, and would only show you that something in the table had been changed, but not what!   

Writer still lacks a great many automation features that Word has, which either save time right away, or correct poor formatting to good (for example, converting a tab added after-the-fact to the beginning of a line into a proper indent, thus converting display markup into semantic markup -- a huge win for document consistency). Nothing this automation does cannot be done manually in Writer, but most users don't know anything about that, and so will do crazy things like number all their paragraph headings by hand. Word helps by turning what you actually did into what you intended. (And if it guesses wrong, a simple Ctrl+Z reverts it and leaves it as entered.)

Also, on Windows (but not Mac, sadly) Word can autodetect the language of a sentence, which is very handy for multilingual documents. (In Writer or on Word for Mac, you must manually assign a language to a span of text.)


But I think my real point was this: LibreOffice is often paraded out as an example of how great OSS desktop apps can be. Yet frankly, it's not that great. If that's the best, what's the average?!?

Edit: Here is a feature comparison with MS Word 2016.

That's a laughably bad comparison, in that it doesn't actually really list many features. Totally useless.

Libre Office is great unless you have to collaborate with other people who use Word. Formating gets out of hand very quickly when multiple people edit a document using different programs.

Indeed, formatting can suffer tremendously when going round-trip between programs. One problem I've seen is that out of habit, lots of users continue using the .doc format to go between Word and Writer, even though it's arguably the worst format for that. ODT and DOTX both fare far better. But ultimately, even if both programs can parse the file formats perfectly, it's intrinsically impossible for the document representation to be 100% faithful all of the time unless you faithfully and flawlessly reproduce every single feature, behavior, and bug of the program whose file you're opening.

For example, did you know that an Excel spreadsheet internally uses one of two different date formats? One, the one for files originally created on a Mac, uses the January 1, 1904 epoch. The other is for files originally created on a PC, which use the January 0, 1900 epoch. Yes, January 0, because of a bug in Lotus 1-2-3's date handling. When Excel was first released, Lotus was the dominant spreadsheet, so Microsoft had to recreate that buggy routine to preserve file compatibility. This post is a fantastic read on the subject of file compatibility: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/02/19.html

The only way to not have formatting degradation is to use a lowest-common-denominator format and never attempt to use a feature that exceeds that. But neither Word nor Writer has some mode to limit you only to the LCD.

[eugenenine]

After having to use MSExcel on $work$ computer I'm very happy with LibreOffice at home.  I've lost track of the number of times Excel has crashed and totally corrupted my spreadsheet.

[tooki]

I use GIMP and mspaint to do all my image manipulation, and I never felt I need to use PS. Since learned PS as part of primary school education, I never used it.

This goes right at my point about the adulation over OSS apps like Gimp: They are regularly compared (favorably) to commercial counterparts, but by home users with minimal needs. For them, the free OSS apps are absolutely sufficient.

What they totally forget or ignore is that Photoshop isn't designed for home users, it's designed for graphic design professionals whose needs are significantly more advanced, and for whom any inefficiency that slows them down adds up to significant lost income in the long run. Not to mention that since it's an industry standard, everyone in the industry expects Photoshop files.

My entire career, I've worked closely with graphic designers (both print and web), and what they do in Photoshop, no other program can do. Not even close. There are various specialized apps that can do some aspect of Photoshop's functionality the same or better, but nothing integrates them into one universal tool. In particular, the print side of things is woefully absent in Gimp. (Even just "rudimentary support" for CMYK requires plugins.)

Photoshop does not have any meaningful competition at any price. Many software companies have tried, but none has succeeded. At this point, it's almost impossible for anyone to do that, since Adobe has a 25 year head start over any newcomer. (That Adobe has a de-facto monopoly on professional graphic design software is a sad state of affairs. I've come to hate Adobe as a company, but their products are solid. Or at least they were… ever since they became a monopoly, their QA has been neglected, as has customer friendliness.)

[tooki]

After having to use MSExcel on $work$ computer I'm very happy with LibreOffice at home.  I've lost track of the number of times Excel has crashed and totally corrupted my spreadsheet.

Here's something I've wondered about (and do not have an answer to): Many people, like you, talk about Office being buggy, crashy, causing lost work, etc. I don't have any reason to doubt that that has been your experience. Yet nonetheless, that cannot be so widespread as to be a universal problem, because if it were, companies would have ditched it ages ago, since downtime = lost income. So why is it so buggy for some people, yet not for most??

When I worked at a software company a couple of years ago — the only job I've ever had where I had to use a Windows PC instead of a Mac — my PC had seemingly 10x as many troubles as anyone else's. I swear Windows could tell I don't like it and exacted revenge on me!  (A less mystical explanation might be that I'm far more versed in Mac troubleshooting than Windows, but even the PC sysadmin at work couldn't fix my PC's problems.)

[nctnico]

After having to use MSExcel on $work$ computer I'm very happy with LibreOffice at home.  I've lost track of the number of times Excel has crashed and totally corrupted my spreadsheet.

Here's something I've wondered about (and do not have an answer to): Many people, like you, talk about Office being buggy, crashy, causing lost work, etc. I don't have any reason to doubt that that has been your experience. Yet nonetheless, that cannot be so widespread as to be a universal problem, because if it were, companies would have ditched it ages ago, since downtime = lost income. So why is it so buggy for some people, yet not for most??

When I worked at a software company a couple of years ago — the only job I've ever had where I had to use a Windows PC instead of a Mac — my PC had seemingly 10x as many troubles as anyone else's. I swear Windows could tell I don't like it and exacted revenge on me!  (A less mystical explanation might be that I'm far more versed in Mac troubleshooting than Windows, but even the PC sysadmin at work couldn't fix my PC's problems.)

From my PC fixing days (fortunately far behind me) I have learned that there are PCs out there which crash when executing certain programs. A PC may work fine for days but a certain order of instructions/memory reads corrupts something and crashes the whole thing. Now imagine what gets corrupted without you knowing about... The bottom line is that the first step in trouble free computing is getting a good quality computer and most certainly not a piece of consumer crap! Too many people just compare by specs on paper without looking at the quality of the components used.

[AlxDroidDev]

After having to use MSExcel on $work$ computer I'm very happy with LibreOffice at home.  I've lost track of the number of times Excel has crashed and totally corrupted my spreadsheet.

I use MS Excel quote a lot (daily, actually), both at work and at home, and have been using it since version 2.0 (on windows 3.1), and I never had the problem you described, and some of my files are huge. The few times I've seen other people with corrupted spreadsheets, was due to:
- a failing hard drive or some other bad media
- a bad PSU, that would randomly turn the PC off, without closing Excel
- an I/O system (IDE/SATA interface, HDD, etc) bottlenecked by  other programs, that would hang everytime Excel would save the file. Does anybody remember the time when the IDE card was an ISA add-on card?
- lack of memory on the computer, which would cause Excel to hang, making the user force-close it. This could corrupt data, but Excel is not to blame: memory is cheap and there is no reason not to have a computer with less than 16Gb of RAM.

The bottom line is that the first step in trouble free computing is getting a good quality computer and most certainly not a piece of consumer crap! Too many people just compare by specs on paper without looking at the quality of the components used.

Exactly! That's another reason why I have always built my own computers (except for my very first PC, a Gateway 2000 386DX/25). I choose the motherboard, CPU, memories, GPU based on detailed specs, quality and compatibility among them.

[tooki]

From my PC fixing days (fortunately far behind me) I have learned that there are PCs out there which crash when executing certain programs. A PC may work fine for days but a certain order of instructions/memory reads corrupts something and crashes the whole thing. Now imagine what gets corrupted without you knowing about... The bottom line is that the first step in trouble free computing is getting a good quality computer and most certainly not a piece of consumer crap! Too many people just compare by specs on paper without looking at the quality of the components used.

That certainly sounds plausible. That's one of the reasons I use Apple computers: I know they're using top quality components, with drivers that are tested and tweaked to work together optimally.

My Mac Pro tower is about a month away from turning 8 years old (!) and it's hands down the most stable system I've ever had. Of course, it's basically server hardware with a beefy graphics card. (ECC RAM, Xeon CPUs, etc.) It was so ridiculously overpowered for my needs when I bought it that it's still more than adequate for me today, after a few upgrades (RAM, SSD, GPU).

[testmode]

I've been a Thinkpad user since the T500.  Learned from experience with T500 that with laptops, it is sometimes better to sacrifice a bit of power to trade-off for portability. So am now currently using a T430s.  I've also always opted for a high resolution display, which was a premium back then, as it provides more "real" working screen area.  Hard drive has been upgraded to SSD with prices going down the "worth spending for" territory.  RAM is a bit of overkill for my actual daily needs at 16GB but I got the sticks on a good price back when I got them.  But it really comes handy when running *at-the-same-time* virtual machines, Firefox with 74 tabs (don't even get me started with Chrome and it's load up everything when you open it behavior), Excel with tons of data, multiple PDF files and the ever memory-hog Eclipse to name a few.

I have to admit though that I haven't been happy with the direction that Lenovo is taking the Thinkpad lately - for instance, the display of T430s is so inferior on almost all display aspects to what I was used to with the T500 that I considered "hacking" the LCD itself with something better at one point in time.  I eventually came to my senses that it won't be worth to do it and I just accepted it over time.  The keyboard feel/quality is also another topic by itself.  The *trackpoint* is practically the only thing that is making me hold on to the Thinkpad line now.

Having said that, my next one will probably be a Surface Book which I hope becomes "affordable enough" by the time my T430s becomes due for replacement.  I currently have a Surface 3 and I won't hesitate recommending it to anyone.

[joeqsmith]

I was tied to the ISA bus until I finally took the plunge to PCI.   I would like to get a new desktop but need a PCI slot and would have to write a new interface to support a newer OS.  It makes more sense to give up on PCI and move to Ethernet for everything.  For now an old P4 with XP is still my main computer.   I have a Lenovo MIIX2 8 that runs circles around it.    

[Thorondor]

The *trackpoint* is practically the only thing that is making me hold on to the Thinkpad line now.

Same here. I would love to have more options when it comes to laptops, but I can't go without the TrackPoint. Last time I checked, every non-IBM/Lenovo pointing stick sucked.