[GTALUG] Recommendations for useful laptop suitable for Ubuntu

[nick]

On 2019-07-15 1:57 p.m., D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
> | 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.
> 
Multiple cores over 4-6 are not required for most workloads unless audacity is
rendering multiple audio streams, normally audio is encoded per code not split.
In addition unless you are compiling large projects or rendering pretty complex
video or images in blender having more that number of cores is not needed. 

If you talking instruction speed per core it's about 10-12% on the Intel side
since Sandy Bridge so if we were talking Haswell to current, that's three 
generations or 30 to 36%. AMD is close or just as fast now with Ryzen 3 which
is good for gaming and other single threaded or single instruction expensive
workloads, I was a little surprised that browsers are the key users here and
not current encoding codecs.

Hope that helps,

Nick 
> | [] 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.
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