Me? I'll go with Apple silicon Macs. Lightweight, good performance, good battery life.
Topic: Do y'all prefer Mac or Windows laptops?
Posted under Off Topic
As somebody who has been repairing Apple devices for many years, I would never ever own one. The planned obsolescence, poor engineering and anti-consumer practices are so absurd.
I'm not saying other manufacturers are much better, or more reliable, but you're less likely to have to sell a kidney to buy a new one because Apple won't replace a $0.02 component on the motherboard because it's not covered under your ApppeCare policy and no third-party repair shops can obtain the part.
Linux.
kora_viridian said:
For everyone else, get a Dell with Windows. They're not the best but they're everywhere. If the boss is paying for it, you can get next-day-air replacement parts. If you're paying for it, Dell and everyone else sells parts for them, and every repair shop has worked on one before. If you don't need the latest and greatest, there's a constant supply of three-year-old machines that corpo types are getting rid of for cheap.
I used to repair, upgrade and give away laptops (as a hobby, not a job) and Dells were usually the easiest to work with. Which, given how I'm completely self-taught, is very helpful. They were usually older so I popped Lubuntu on them.
Most laptops aren't really modular, but you can usually at least max out the RAM and toss in an SSD. Those alone will make an older machine much more usable.
Updated
peacethroughpower said:
Linux.
Which distro do you use? I've been wanting to try linux but the choice paralysis is tough lol
cloudpie said:
Which distro do you use? I've been wanting to try linux but the choice paralysis is tough lol
Lubuntu. I initially chose it because it was for resurrecting old PCs and now it's just what I'm used to. (I started with Crunchbang but that's long, long since deprecated.)
cloudpie said:
Which distro do you use? I've been wanting to try linux but the choice paralysis is tough lol
I've been an Arch Linux user for a long time now, apart from not being so user-friendly as other distros* it would be a great solution to the choice paralysis. It's pretty customisable so you can just swap desktop environment whenever you feel like it (rather than having to fresh install Lubuntu after you decide you want to try LXQt because you installed Xubuntu and then decided you didn't like Xfce) and install pretty much everything else all the other distros have to offer.
* After going through the somewhat tedious setup steps, I personally don't think it's all that unfriendly, the wiki is actually kept up to date unlike the documentation of many distros (I've seen plenty of Ubuntu documentation that's years out of date) and the AUR makes it pretty easy to install software that wouldn't appear on a typical repository and would usually require a manual install of it and its dependencies. It is bleeding edge, however, so you should expect things to go wrong sometimes and be willing to research how to fix it.
Updated
Apple wants your money and advertising and Microsoft wants your data and compliance.
I would much rather give my effort and sanity, if nobody minds.
Linux sure doesn't.
They're doing it for free, after all.
faucet said:
I've been an Arch Linux user for a long time now, apart from not being so user-friendly as other distros* it would be a great solution to the choice paralysis. It's pretty customisable so you can just swap desktop environment whenever you feel like it (rather than having to fresh install Lubuntu after you decide you want to try LXQt because you installed Xubuntu and then decided you didn't like Xfce) and install pretty much everything else all the other distros have to offer.* After going through the somewhat tedious setup steps, I personally don't think it's all that unfriendly, the wiki is actually kept up to date unlike the documentation of many distros (I've seen plenty of Ubuntu documentation that's years out of date) and the AUR makes it pretty easy to install software that wouldn't appear on a typical repository and would usually require a manual install of it and its dependencies. It is bleeding edge, however, so you should expect things to go wrong sometimes and be willing to research how to fix it.
I can second a recommendation for Arch Wiki, as it's useful to Linux in general. Absolutely do not use Arch as your first distro, though. It's the second worst possible choice, behind Gentoo.
every os sucks, and laptops (especially box store laptops) have become disposable vendor lock-in nightmares nearly to the same extent as tablets and phones. apple and hp are the biggest offenders, but you have to shop around for a long time to find a brand that doesn't want to join their party. even if you do manage to keep it working, you'll have to throw it away early anyway because hardware and software vendors abandon the old for the new, and the new version of the os needs more powerful supercomputer hardware just to boot up.
if you still want to sell your soul for a laptop, chromeos is just as viable as macos and windows. it really depends on what you want to do with the laptop.
if you don't, then you can get a laptop with one or another distro of linux preinstalled and supported for you by a few laptop vendors. you'll pay a premium for it, but the alternative is installing linux on a less expensive windows laptop and making a hardware support gamble.
unless you do a lot of shopping research and spec hunting, there's a non-trivial chance you'll install linux and find out you dropped good money on some cheap windows-only hardware with shoddy, incomplete, or missing linux support (or, ironically, on good hardware that, thanks to vendors locked in to microsoft, is simply too new for current linux support). the odds you'll need the unsupported hardware are low, but they're not zero, and it's harder to replace or work around than on windows desktops.
after all that, dell is among the top laptop brands for both windows and the linux gamble. pc repair shops can get just about any replacement part even if the laptop is years old and used, almost enough to repair a ship of theseus in some cases, which means you can likely replace windows-only devices with linux-compatible ones.
cinnamoncrunch said:
every os sucks, and laptops (especially box store laptops) have become disposable vendor lock-in nightmares nearly to the same extent as tablets and phones. apple and hp are the biggest offenders, but you have to shop around for a long time to find a brand that doesn't want to join their party. even if you do manage to keep it working, you'll have to throw it away early anyway because hardware and software vendors abandon the old for the new, and the new version of the os needs more powerful supercomputer hardware just to boot up.if you still want to sell your soul for a laptop, chromeos is just as viable as macos and windows. it really depends on what you want to do with the laptop.
if you don't, then you can get a laptop with one or another distro of linux preinstalled and supported for you by a few laptop vendors. you'll pay a premium for it, but the alternative is installing linux on a less expensive windows laptop and making a hardware support gamble.
unless you do a lot of shopping research and spec hunting, there's a non-trivial chance you'll install linux and find out you dropped good money on some cheap windows-only hardware with shoddy, incomplete, or missing linux support (or, ironically, on good hardware that, thanks to vendors locked in to microsoft, is simply too new for current linux support). the odds you'll need the unsupported hardware are low, but they're not zero, and it's harder to replace or work around than on windows desktops.
after all that, dell is among the top laptop brands for both windows and the linux gamble. pc repair shops can get just about any replacement part even if the laptop is years old and used, almost enough to repair a ship of theseus in some cases, which means you can likely replace windows-only devices with linux-compatible ones.
You could just get a Thinkpad. Those things are wonderful.
Linux, me no wants big tech giants to see my smut.
I use both Windows and Mac, I prefer Windows due to the accessibility and it being the standard.
thehuskyk9 said:
I use both Windows and Mac, I prefer Windows due to the accessibility and it being the standard.
Do you use Linux too? It's rare to see folks use both Mac and Windows.
wolfmanfur said:
Do you use Linux too? It's rare to see folks use both Mac and Windows.
I don't think I've ever used Linux, lowkey interested to give it a try. I use 1 MacBook strictly for work, another MacBook for personal use on the go, and a Windows desktop as my main squeeze.
My brain somehow didn't register that this was specifically talking about laptops, oof
kora_viridian said:
I've been at this long enough to have read "N+1 will be the year of Linux on the desktop", for N from about 2000 to 2023. So I don't always recommend Linux first thing. :D ("Long enough" starts with Slackware from floppies on a 100 MHz Pentium.)
the year of linux on the desktop is most likely 2007, which combined the age of windows xp, the disastrous launch of windows vista (mainly from the grossly understated system requirements and the "vista compatible" badge fiasco), and pc journalists lauding ubuntu 7.04 feisty fawn as an alternative more ready for prime time than vista. in my case, it was the year of linux on the laptop, a dell inspiron 600m.
kora_viridian said:
At first I was just going to clean up that install, but after seeing how much of the previous owner's PII was all over the place (fun game: search for your first and last name in the Registry), I instead wiped the C: drive with dd and did a fresh reinstall of 8.1.
yikes. yeah, nuke and pave is generally the first thing anyone should do with a used or hand-me-down laptop.
or the last thing anyone should do to theirs before getting rid of it.
kora_viridian said:
With Open Shell installed, I mostly don't have to deal with the "everything is a phone, lol" that Microsoft tried to push for a while.
they're definitely pushing it again with windows 11, doubly so with win11 in s mode.
kora_viridian said:
I remember when Broadcom refused to let any Linux distro include the firmware that made their wifi chips work. The best way to get your Broadcom wifi working on Linux was to use a script that downloaded the Windows driver from Broadcom, unzipped the driver package, found the DLL in the package that had the right firmware in it, cut bytes 17 through 69,420 out of the DLL to obtain the actual firmware image, and then wrote that image to a file that Linux could load into the wifi chip at boot time. :D
lol, yep, fun times. i took a much more drastic approach when i found out my acer laptop had one, though. i got a copy of the service manual, took it apart, found the module, ordered a third party replacement compatible with both linux and freebsd (which is now my daily os), and swapped. reassemble, bob's your uncle, and wifi just works.
Updated
I used to have a laptop from my aunt, this was like my first time to actually use an windows laptop, It was not shabby but had a lot of fun with it until AMD driver corrupted my laptop, and It's just a black screen when you booted it up.
Thanks AMD, you ruin my computer and I'm return back to using my phone again.
patrickthehuman said:
I used to have a laptop from my aunt, this was like my first time to actually use an windows laptop, It was not shabby but had a lot of fun with it until AMD driver corrupted my laptop, and It's just a black screen when you booted it up.Thanks AMD, you ruin my computer and I'm return back to using my phone again.
You can just wipe the hard drive/SSD and start again. Perhaps with Linux this time.
peacethroughpower said:
You can just wipe the hard drive/SSD and start again. Perhaps with Linux this time.
How so? I'm not very mechanically or digitally familiar with laptop.
patrickthehuman said:
How so? I'm not very mechanically or digitally familiar with laptop.
To install a new OS, you boot off of an install medium (e.g. a CD or USB flash drive) and follow its instructions to install to the computer's main drive. I can't give specific instructions without knowing what hardware you have, but you'll need to access the BIOS and create an install medium.
peacethroughpower said:
To install a new OS, you boot off of an install medium (e.g. a CD or USB flash drive) and follow its instructions to install to the computer's main drive. I can't give specific instructions without knowing what hardware you have, but you'll need to access the BIOS and create an install medium.
Unfortunately, I don't have those around, plus it's an really old laptop that my aunt gift to me, it has no battery, has god awful 4gb of ram, HDD is surprisedly fast by it's age and it's components, It had a window 8, then updated it to windows 8.1 then windows 10.
patrickthehuman said:
Unfortunately, I don't have those around, plus it's an really old laptop that my aunt gift to me, it has no battery, has god awful 4gb of ram, HDD is surprisedly fast by it's age and it's components, It had a window 8, then updated it to windows 8.1 then windows 10.
If you're willing to put some work and money into it, you can upgrade it. Max out the RAM, replace the HDD with an SSD and install Linux since it will run on anything.
peacethroughpower said:
If you're willing to put some work and money into it, you can upgrade it. Max out the RAM, replace the HDD with an SSD and install Linux since it will run on anything.
Well, I'm not an expertise on electronics, nor Linux, because Linux is probably the hardest operation software to used on. And I'm probably considering buying a new laptop from my savings, though restoring old computers is interesting.
What does the OS have to do with the hardware? :trollface:
Actually, the bigger issue is when you realize that the Surface and MB are the most horrible systems to repair, and even have antifeatures to make them fail for even more reasons than the cheaper laptops. Note: I'm typing this on a Dell N7010 which was basically an Alienware. At least it's pretty easy to fix, even if pretty dated. XD
If you're wanting to get some ancient laptop up for basic thin-client/browser/movies-style stuff, just use one of the Chrome installers, or Mint Linux. They seem like the lowest-effort not-bloatware OSes.
Thanks to the magic of virtual machines and a CPU that supports it well (i7-640M circa 2010 here), you can just run Android games, Windows or Linux VMs, and so on, if you have enough RAM.
windows literally just to play obscure fangames of a dead franchise lol, plus i use a lot of creative software that i just would rather not fuss with figuring out how to run through a vm or smthn
but i do also use an ipad sometimes for portability's sake
Windows. I know the laptop I'm buying isn't going hold up over time, so it might as well be a cheaper one than a more expensive paperweight.
It's coming to a head here. Pretty soon you won't be able to reasonably use Windows outside of a VM, because ugh. It's super user-hostile. I mean jokes about doing like Spinal Tap and turning it up to 11 aren't a joke anymore.
alphamule said:
It's coming to a head here. Pretty soon you won't be able to reasonably use Windows outside of a VM, because ugh. It's super user-hostile. I mean jokes about doing like Spinal Tap and turning it up to 11 aren't a joke anymore.
hm, ive def thought about swapping to linux but just wasnt sure whatd it mean for the programs that i use, though i may start to look into it more. my dad had installed linux mint on a handful of things and i actually liked the experience of using it quite a bit but is there an, at least, reliable workaround for running windows-only games/software on linux????
I use windows but i've thought about switching to linux. I've used some linux so i'm familiar with it. It would just be a big hassle to set everything up on a new operating system and I would need to make sure all the programs I use will be able to run on wine or have compatibility with linux.
I'm not a huge fan of the OSX user experience in general, but at the very least I can appreciate that Apple dosn't have the terrible habbit of having new versions that make everything suddenly worse and less intuitive like Windows loves to do with nearly every version past XP.
like, Win10 (outside of the dumb widget BS on the start menu) was genuinely pretty good, with a lot of good ideas like the ribbion menu on explorer. but 11 just throws so much out of the window and puts toggle options several dropdowns deep for no good reason. and they changed the check box grapics so that the partial check is like a dash in a box rather than the box being filled in and they lowered the contrast so it's way harder to tell the difference between each one at a glance, especially with monitors with higher pixel density and screenshots that are zoomed out and also it just looks worse. I don't know why they change stuff that works fine for no reason.
darryus said:
...but at the very least I can appreciate that Apple dosn't have the terrible habbit of having new versions that make everything suddenly worse and less intuitive like Windows loves to do with nearly every version past XP.
True! I initially wasn't a fan of MacOS/OS X, but ever since Windows Vista came out, I started thinking about switching to Mac, and when my old ass Lenovo laptop broke I switched to Mac and I can safely say I love it