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mgagemorgan
6y

So, I decided to post this based on @Morningstar's conundrum.

I'm dissatisfied with the laptop market.

Why THE FUCK should I have to buy a gaming laptop with a GTX 1070 or 1080 to get a decent amount of RAM and a fucking great processor?

I don't game. I program. I don't even own a fucking Steam library, for clarification. Never have I ever bought a game on Steam. Disproving the notion that I might have a games library out of the way, I run Linux. Antergos (Arch-based) is my daily driver.

So, in 2017 I went on a laptop hunt. I wanted something with decent specs. Ultimately ended up going with the system76 Galago Pro (which I love the form factor of, it's nice as hell and people recognize the brand for some fucking reason). Matter of fact, one of my profs wanted to know how I accessed our LMS (Blackboard) and I showed him Chromium....his mind was blown: "Ir's not just text!"

That aside, why the fuck are Dell and system76 the only ones with decent portables geared towards developers? I hate the prospect of having to buy some clunky-ass Republic of Gamers piece of shit just to have some sort of decent development machine...

This is a notice to OEMs: yall need to quit making shit hardware and gaming hardware with no mid-range compromise. Shit hardware is defined as the "It runs Excel and that's all the consumer needs" and gaming hardware is "Let's put fucking everything in there - including a decent processor, RAM, and a GTX/Radeon card."

Mid-range that is true - good hardware that handles video editing and other CPU/RAM-intensive tasks and compiling and whatnot but NOT graphics-intensive shit like gaming - is hard to come by. Dell offers my definition of "mid-range" through Sputnik's Ubuntu-powered XPS models and what have you, and system76 has a couple of models that I more or less wish I had money for but don't.

TBH I don't give two fucks about the desktop market. That's a non-issue because I can apply the logic that if you want something done right, do it yourself: I can build a desktop. But not a laptop - at least not in a feasible way.

rant

#makemidrangelaptopsgreatagain

laptops

shitty market
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  • 14
    6y
    How to tell if someone uses arch linux? They will tell you. 😁
  • 2
    6y
    @Kulijana You right. Or, in a lot of cases, linux in general. "Normals" view you as a god because they think Linux is fucking rocket science or some shit
  • 6
    6y
    I couldn't agree more.

    Also what the fuck is going on in the laptop industry to have them remove all the ports from every new model?
    I prepare every single laptop that comes into the office, and for some inexplicable reason, every shiny new model we buy comes with less ports than the last one. The more expensive it is, the fewer ports it will have, which doesn't make sense at all.

    For context, my personal laptop is a €650 Asus that I bought 4 years ago and it has every single port you could ask for (3 USBs, VGA, hdmi, Ethernet and even a freaking CD reader).
    The new Lenovos we're buying at work come with 2 or 3 USB C ports at most, so good luck plugging stuff in to install Debian.

    Just because they are prettier and more expensive, they make them less functional. It makes me so mad.
  • 9
    6y
    This is so relatable. I FUCKING hate the gamer aesthetic. It's ugly and it clunky and there's plenty of room for a cleaner look yet your dumbass still chose to put red LEDs everywhere and have the 'gaming' in the fucking title. And to get such "normal" looking laptop with good enough specs, you need to pay well over 1,200$! What?!
  • 2
    6y
    @Gnu-Not-Unix - SanDisk sells USB-C thumb drives. I'd recommend getting some - I can use them on my phone AND laptop. I get it tho and agree 100% - it also makes planned obsolescence easier if you remove shit.

    @RAZERZ - That's exactly where I'm coming from - why do I need to be a fucking gamer in order to have halfway decent specs? There should be an in-between, aka "mid-range" level every company has. Business = shit laptops, and gaming = OP'd laptops. Where's the "I just want computational power and decent RAM but not unnecessary clutter and overpriced gaming components"? They don't really cater to that market, as I found out.
  • 2
    6y
    Maybe the new ryzen laptops will do you some good. The pc series have been amazing, and if they can get it right on laptops, it might just make for some decent not over the top expensive laptops. Unless the makers decide to not give you a decent chip unless you get 3 titans with it...
  • 0
    6y
    @SoulSkrix
  • 0
    6y
    @SoulSkrix Think of it this way: If you're like me and have a fairly recent Android phone, you can use this to quickly transfer files from your phone to PC and vice-versa. Couldn't do that with USB-A without an OTG adapter which is prone to being lost, and USB-A wasn't reversible. Practically all the first-world problems with USB are out the window for me. Oh, sorry iPhone users...RIP you guys :(

    I realized the USB-A thing back in September and ordered a flash drive that had USB-C. Am I an early adopter or something now? Maybe I'm just really resilient to change, and hype for it...
  • 1
    6y
    @arcadesdude That's what I have. Slim as hell, and I really like the form factor compared to previous designs of SanDisk drives!!
  • 0
    6y
    @smallTalker, yup I remember that too. Remember Longhorn? A lot of people don't realize that Windows Vista was fucked up due to the de-railed development cycle of the planned successor of XP - Codename "Longhorn" - and the rushed development of a viable replacement that would be usable in its place after it got scrapped.

    All this, coming from someone who was probably only four when it started and in elementary school when it got scrapped and doesn't even use Windows - I'm a bit of a tech history freak lmao
  • 0
    6y
    @smallTalker About the RAM: Yes, manufacturers fucked it up. But today's machines are still sold with models that barely have enough RAM to do more than four things at a time, and it drives me absolutely nuts that they sell RAM cards with those amounts still.

    Does anyone still sell a brand-new 128MB RAM card for use in today's machines? NO! It would be useless and your machine probably wouldn't be usable. As software evolves, we need hardware - AFFORDABLE HARDWARE - to match. I can't say the same about the processor.
  • 0
    6y
    @smallTalker Same. Except the text editor part. I use gedit and that's enough for me. Which languages?
  • 1
    6y
    @Kulijana On ryzen -

    Ryzen looks promising, but AFAIK it lacks integrated graphics. So, if that holds true in laptops, I don't want a graphics card that's through the roof. The laptop needs to be the size of one with integrated graphics. I don't need a fucking balls-to-the-wall graphics card, but in ryzen's case, it just needs to be enough to work. Nothing more and nothing less.
  • 0
    6y
    @smallTalker Was there a scrubbed link? It explains your username tho!
  • 0
    6y
    @smallTalker Have any experience in Rust yet?
  • 0
    6y
    @smallTalker Rust is difficult, and I'm told it gets better.

    Smalltalk is object-oriented, right? IIRC Objective-C was influenced by Smalltalk in the non-C parts of the language...
  • 0
    6y
    @Gnu-Not-Unix my HP stream has no ethernet port, and only 3 usb 1.0 ports. like, come on - it's 2016 (when i got it), we should at least have one usb 2/3 port here??? isn't this supposed to be geared towards offices and students, who, oh i dont know - need fast file transfer, and more than 3 dinky usb ports?
  • 0
    6y
    @smallTalker Awesome! I'll look into grabbing a copy of that book sometime.

    I'll have to check into Smalltalk. Compared to today, how different is the syntax from the C-like ones we're used to?
  • 0
    6y
    @ParkCity You're not alone in this, brother!
  • 0
    6y
    @smallTalker That's fucking different. One of these weekends I'll have to look into it - I wish I had more time to learn about languages but I've come up short on time as of college.
  • 0
    6y
    @smallTalker No, I actually own a system76 Galago Pro. It's got a nice form factor and gets the job done, but I made the mistake of getting only 4GB of RAM (I NEED at least 8 btw) and there's a fucking stripped screw on the bottom of it. Oh, and the i7 it came with is a U-series piece-of-shit dual core, but because it's been soldered, there's nothing that can be done in that regard.

    Getting decent specs nowadays is fucking pricey...why does my phone oftentimes have a higher framerate than my PC? The only way to properly get the specs I wanted was through either Dell or system76.

    My one issue with the XPS is the facecam placement people keep talking about. Please keep that shit in the top-center bezel, please. I do Discord video calls, and so I'm glad I chose the laptop that could do that task...before video calls were even implemented, lol
  • 1
    6y
    👌
  • 0
    6y
    @smallTalker I bought the book from O'Reilly. Several people have discussed how they hope it could be the K&R of Rust. I'll report back when I've used it - that'll be some time, unfortunately.
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