[GTALUG] Recommendations for useful laptop suitable for Ubuntu

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Alex Beamish via talk <talk at gtalug.org>

| On Mon, Jul 15, 2019 at 10:09 AM D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk <
| talk at gtalug.org> wrote:

| It worked fine at the June meeting of the Perlmongers, sharing a Google
| Hangouts session. The next day, it wouldn't boot -- couldn't even get it to
| POST.

Usually it is something simple.  Like a connector that has some
oxidation.  But it is a lot of work to disassemble laptops with no
promise of success.

HP "business class" notebooks tried to compete on quality and features
with ThinkPads.  My impression was that they were quite good.

HP consumer notebooks are quite a mixed bag.  Many were built as
cheaply as possible.

| > Exactly which qualities of a notebook matter to you?  (You may not
| > actually know without living with one for a while.)
| >
| 
| Good question.
| [] Decent speed -- I did some Audacity editing on my laptop when my
| workstation died, and my goodness was that slow.

Most 5 year old notebooks had HDDs.  Now only SSDs make sense and they
are a lot faster.  Was disk I/O the factor slowing your old machine
down with audacity?

Processors haven't gotten much faster.  They do have more cores.  I
don't know if audacity exploits multiple cores.

| [] Decent wifi -- the HP Pavillion's Wifi receiver was pretty temperamental.

WiFi drivers can be a problem area with Linux.  Not very often.

You want to be sure that the WiFi adapter supports 2.4G and 5.0G
bands.

| [] Decent battery -- no complaints about the HP, it would last two hours+
| on a charge. That's enough for me.

The only current notebooks with less than about 4hrs of battery life
are some gaming notebooks.  Normal new laptops seem to have claims of
6-10hr battery life.

| [] HDMI output -- I can get by on just the laptop screen, but I do like to
| have the ability to have multiple screens.

Pretty universal, except for notebooks that have "better" interfaces.
For those execptions you need a dongle.

- DisplayPort / mini DisplayPort have simple HDMI dongles (unless you
  want HDMI 2)

- Apple things support "Thunderbolt" and need a donle from that
  standard.

| [] Reasonable size -- I think the HP Pavillion had a 14" screen, and that
| fit into my knapsack nicely. I don't need a gigantic screen.

14" is a nice middle-of-the-road size.  It's good that you already
know that you are comfortable with it.