Hello and welcome to episode 52 of Linux After Dark.
I'm Joe, I'm Chris, I'm Gary, and I'm Dalton.
Welcome back Chaps.
What hardware do we recommend right now in 2023 for a desktop Linux user?
I have to carry out this at the top by saying that entry wire is a sponsor of
late night Linux, so that may color my opinions of this discussion.
But this is not a simple question and it's not a simple answer.
So where do we even start with this?
Obviously it depends on your needs.
Does it have to be new?
Well, should it be new is the question, is it a good idea to buy brand new hardware
if you want to run desktop Linux?
No, generally not.
Not unless you're interested in the possibilities that hardware might afford
and you're experienced in my opinion.
Because more than likely you're going to get a strong recommendation
for Ubuntu despite all its pros and cons, especially if you're a fairly
experienced user, you're going to load the latest LTS.
And even if you're in a period quite soon after the release date of that LTS,
it's likely that some of the hardware either isn't going to function or is
going to function badly.
And that's going to be a bad impression that you're left with.
So he's saying that if you buy, say, I don't know,
13th gen Intel desktop processor and try and record podcasts with it,
you're going to get weird pops and clicks for no apparent reason.
I don't know Joe, what that ever happened.
I can't imagine why I'm still using my old ninth gen Intel machine
to talk to you lot and record today,
despite the fact that I've got this hugely powerful machine right next to it
that I do the editing on and have to use my nose to shuffle files back and forth.
You think about the rise and prices as having problems,
even though if you run an operating system they're targeted for,
Windows 11 had problems with rise and processes
and not even super, super new ones when it first came out.
And Linux is playing catch up because they don't have that relationship
with the manufacturers in the same way usually unless there's crossover
in the way that the CPUs have been used directly with Linux workloads.
But we're talking about desktop Linux users.
And you're just not going to know that the EP stuff that has come out
with the 13th gen Intel CPUs.
I personally think it would be a bad idea to buy a Windows machine
with those in from day one of release and expect smooth running
or build one rather.
Well, of course.
And if you look up for Linux every so often,
there's an article published under that tag,
the efficiency and performance cause optimizations.
It's to do with the scheduler and the kernel itself.
And there are iterative updates and improvements.
But you're going on that journey with the kernel development team.
So that would be my first piece of advice.
Is don't buy the thing that has just come out
unless you're happy to go on that journey with the hardware.
I also have another random issue where I can't hear anything until I mute
and unmute.
I just don't hear anything that I should be hearing whether it's a call
or YouTube or whatever.
So yeah, I am in full agreement with you even with the latest kernel
and we've actually just relatively recently had the point release of Ubuntu.
I'm sure it'll all be differently if I was running Arch.
Come on, get your emails in now.
But even then, like you said,
you're kind of tracking the progress of the hardware.
So I think we can all agree that absolutely cutting-edge brand new hardware
is probably not the best decision if you want to run Linux.
But once we get past that,
the strength of Linux is that it can run across a very, very broad range
of hardware.
So to give you an example,
it wouldn't be fun,
but it's not the end of the world to run Linux on spinning rust
as your operating system drive.
I'm not saying it would be fun.
You would notice some slowdown,
especially if you have ever used an SSD-based machine.
But compare that experience to running a Windows machine in 2023
with spinning rust.
It's just impossible.
I'm not going to have it.
I'm sure someone will email in and say,
no, no, I'm running Windows 11 on spinning rust.
I never notice it slowed down, but no, I'm sorry.
If you open up task manager,
the first thing you notice on Windows
is it thrashes the disk on and off.
I don't think we actually will get an email
from someone who's using Windows on spinning rust.
They can't open out, look.
No, but we'll get emails from people who are running Linux on spinning rust.
And that gives me an idea for a challenge.
We should do a challenge of like,
get a decent ish laptop,
put a spinning rust drive in it,
and see how long you can stand it.
I don't have any laptops
that can accept it hard drive anymore.
Really?
No, they're all low profile.
I don't have anything with a two-and-a-half inch slot.
Yeah, the only thing I've got is the T-400
that I used for the old hardware challenge recently.
And there's no way I'm using that with the spinning rust.
Well, we're going to get USB-3 caddies
and replicate the experience.
Oh!
And then have that as our boot drive.
But yeah, I do think that
if you have a heavy storage workload,
you're obviously going to notice,
but for desktop usage,
I still think you can just about get away with it.
But ideally,
you want at least a SAT SSD in that machine.
And they're so cheap now,
especially as we speak,
with the surplus of NAND that has hit
the warehouses of the world.
Now is a brilliant time to buy an SSD,
either SAT or an NVME one.
And you will get an uplift in performance.
I bought an SSD.
I think it was 120 gigabytes.
It was very cheap.
No name brand.
This was probably three, four, five weeks ago
for six pounds.
Please back up your data.
Well, look,
it would have just been rude not to buy it.
I'm very used for it.
But I just saw,
I'm not going to not buy an SSD for six pounds.
I mean, tell that to the stack of one terabyte SSDs
that I'll soon have after I upgrade them in my NAS.
Yeah.
But there's always old laptops that I can chuck them in.
It's my sort of theory for it.
And there's often,
well, always nothing that I'll miss if it dies.
We don't want to go over all ground.
We discussed Raman CPU in a fairly recent episode.
And despite some emails in,
which is fine if you can get by on four gigs of RAM
and things like that.
I think the baseline for RAM is eight gigs,
16 if you can,
especially if you're using a web browser,
which most people let's be fair for desktop workloads.
They have loads of browser tabs open.
Okay.
So all we've got so far is it has to be not a brand new machine.
It has to have an SSD eight gigs of RAM.
Then you get to the nitty gritty stuff,
which is a bit more difficult
because you can't really tell this
when you're buying, which I think is another reason
to wait before buying a machine.
Let other people,
who are fairly experienced,
run LSPCI,
run INXI,
run all of these things,
look for forum posts,
and someone will have put a hardware report
because something isn't working in Linux.
And you'll be able to find,
this is going back to my journey
of when I was less experienced looking,
getting machines running on Linux.
Okay, the Wi-Fi card's not working.
Okay, let's Google the model of this laptop.
Oh, look, here's a forum post.
Here's a Reddit post.
I've got no Wi-Fi on this machine.
And invariably, you will find the answer.
So apart from bleeding edge stuff,
it's also giving some breathing space for it,
not even being bleeding edge,
but literally for the hardware bill of materials
to make it into the hands of enough Linux users
so that that body of work is there.
You think about Wi-Fi cards.
I've generally not had a problem with Intel.
Killer Wi-Fi can fuck off.
Broadcom Wi-Fi can fuck off.
Real tech Wi-Fi can fuck off.
Media tech could largely fuck off,
but they've done quite a lot of work with OpenWRT
and the drivers have improved substantially.
But this is the kind of thing
where it starts to get a little bit more difficult.
Look, what we're saying is,
just buy five-year-old ThinkPad.
That's just the end of this segment.
Just buy five-year-old ThinkPad.
It's going to be fine.
I was going to go for an eight-year-old ThinkPad
because I think the C450 is great.
What I think 11th Gen is the sweet spot at the moment.
11th Gen Intel stuff seems to be really well supported.
I've got an X13 Gen 2 ThinkPad
that anything I throw in it runs really nicely.
And I've got an Elite Book Gen 8 from HP
and everything I throw in that runs really nicely.
So, couple of generations old has always been where I've gone.
I had a T420, then I got T450,
and then I had a Mac for a while,
and then I got the X13 Gen 2.
And anything that is two generations of Intel CPU old
as a rule of thumb seems to have always been well supported for me.
Well, it's interesting that the 11th Gen Intel
was just before the PCOS and ECOS.
It's the last to no BS generation of CPU.
Yeah, exactly.
It's the maturity of four physical cores on the CPU.
The 8th Gen introduced it.
The battery life was wobbly.
There were some issues.
You iterate through 10th Gen.
And I agree with Gary.
My daily work machine is running an i7 11th Gen.
I get eight hours away from the charger with it.
I can get through my working day.
And towards the beginning,
so we're talking nearly 18 months ago when I got the machine.
There was some interesting little quirks now and then.
But now it is super solid.
And I don't even think about stability issues or any, you know,
niggling little things that might have been going wrong at the beginning.
It's all been ironed out.
And I'm very happy with it.
I can hear just the hordes of emails saying,
what about AMD?
What about AMD?
Well, if you listen to Linux matters,
I think it was episode one where Winpress was talking about his search
for the perfect Linux laptop.
And he bought some ThinkPad or other with AMD.
And it was all, you know, Hunky Dory.
And then a click the link and looked at it and configured it.
It was just, I wateringly expensive.
And, you know, fair enough,
if this is going to be your primary work tool,
then spend all that money.
But like, we said Intel 11th Gen.
If you want Intel and you want it to be before all of the nonsense
with the PCOS and eCores.
But if you go 7th Gen Intel and before,
they are dirt cheap because they won't officially run Windows 11.
And so if you're looking for something that is powerful enough
and you want a bit of a budget,
I mean, you're talking like 150, 160 quid, I think,
for a decent machine.
Even less.
Even less.
You can get a T470s for sub 100 quid now.
Really?
With a 7th Gen i5, a gigs of RAM.
Wow.
It's sub 100 pounds.
Which is perfectly adequate.
Yeah, and that would be fine for most people.
1080p screen on them?
Yeah, as long as you check the listing properly.
Yeah, none of this 4K nonsense.
Yeah, that's another thing.
What about screen resolution if you are looking for a higher budget machine?
Is it really worth going more than 1080?
High DPI is so nice to look at when it works, right?
But it doesn't work, right?
Yeah, when I'm at a high DPI machine,
I start doing things like changing the dots per inch for the fonts.
I start blowing up the desktop elements.
I just can't handle it.
I feel like Ken Jung from community, that gift, just like looking
and squeezing my eyes, trying to see until I blow everything up.
And then I look at it and think,
well, waste of time, I've got this incredibly high resolution machine
that I'm blowing up the entire interface,
just so that I can see it.
Well, the tech certainly does get sharper and it looks nice,
but it still just doesn't work, right?
Even on the framework, I've run it at 150%.
And that's just, eh.
And those extra pixels are going to suck the battery life.
So, yeah, you have to ask yourself if you're going to need them.
I don't know.
I disagree.
I still use a 13 inch 1440p display at 100%.
How?
Yeah, but you're young.
You've got good eyes.
Maybe I just get really close to it.
Just give it a few years, honey.
Yeah.
I mean, I'm looking at my 27 inch 1440p display
and that is perfect for me.
I do have to zoom in on a lot of websites,
the old control scroll wheel.
And sometimes I go to a new website and it's just like,
really far away.
It's like, what's going on and after like scroll, scroll, scroll.
Ah, here we go.
Or use Firefox, reader, monitor, whatever it's called.
And I've just noticed now, web.telegram.org that I use.
That I've got scaled to 150%.
For example, because my eyes are terrible.
I need glasses, but I refuse to go and get them.
I think it comes down to personal preference,
because I'm definitely the kind of person who just wants
the highest resolution single screen that I can get.
And I just want to tile stuff on it.
But not everybody likes that.
13.
My display I daily drive at my desk is a 32 inch 4K display
and I run it 100% scaling.
I would just feel like I was in a clockwork orange if I did that.
Yeah.
How close do you sit to that carry?
I don't know.
Is it right on the edge of the desk?
My desk is about 1.2 meters deep.
And it's right at the back of the desk.
So at least a meter away.
That is, I just don't even.
I just feel like I'm in the cinema.
Yeah, I can do that.
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Quick bit of admin then.
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Well, we often talked about buying hardware
with Linux preinstalled on it.
And you know, I mentioned at the top
late night Linux is sponsored by Entraware sometimes
about once a month roughly.
So I am obviously going to say buy one of their machines.
But is it assumed that you're just not going to buy
from a Linux vendor?
I think part of the problem for me is that
when I'm buying a machine for myself,
I use it less frequently than a machine
my employer might buy.
So I'm already going to be biased towards
I want something that's a bit cheaper.
Generally sub 500 quid.
And getting something from one of those vendors
with the specs that I probably don't need.
But I think I need is always more expensive
than just going and buying a three-year-old thing,
pedal eBay.
And honestly, for the planet, please buy used if you can.
Yeah, on Linux Matters recently,
Mark was saying how he bought his latest mobile phone,
second user, and the carbon footprints
already been put out there into the world when you do that.
And there are advantages to this.
One of my friends has got a star book recently.
And it's incredibly lightweight.
And the nice thing about it is we were comparing.
A laptop that's not dissimilarly specced,
but made by ASA.
And the difference, there's just the tiny tweaks.
You just know that, for example, the BIOS.
The BIOS on my ASA machine is hard-coded
to only accept certain file names and paths.
And that doesn't include, would you believe,
Ubuntu properly.
So you install Ubuntu and it won't boot.
And it doesn't even have enough of an EFI interface
to add the EFI manually and set an entry up.
So you have to go through this weird rigmarole
of getting root access to the EFI partition
and copying a perfectly valid EFI file into the correct path.
And then suddenly it appears and says it's ready to boot.
And it is nice to have the peace of mind
that that machine is going to arrive.
And somebody's already been through this process.
They know that it boots Linux because they tested it.
But as you said, Gary, it wasn't cheap.
And my machine was 30 pounds on EFI.
No, I did have to do a bit of like polishing and stuff.
But it's got the same CPU.
It is a bit chunky, it's got a wide bezel.
But ultimately the use case is the same.
It's something with an 11.6 inch screen
that you want to chuck in your backpack.
And I don't really care if it gets damaged or lost.
It is literally a throwaway machine.
And certainly my history with running Linux on things
has been through hand me downs.
The idea of buying any new machine when I was a lot younger.
One of the things that drew me to Linux
was that I could get an old beta going on it.
So that's why I haven't bought pre-installed machines before
just because I was working with what I had.
I fully agree.
If you're going with, I need to do work on this thing.
Then absolutely buy it from a pre-installed vendor
if you don't want to use for some reason.
Because trying to buy something new from Lenovo
that doesn't ship with Linux or Dell that doesn't ship with Linux
and then putting Linux on it,
you're just going to have so many problems.
So yeah, pre-installed vendors,
if it's a tax right off, absolutely.
Or if you just really have to have the latest specs and stuff.
Because I've got an interwire Apollo that I bought new.
And I think that's an eighth gen i7.
And the good thing about that is that it has always worked.
No matter what I've thrown at it, it's worked.
And obviously I'm biased.
They pay me to say good things about them or whatever.
But that was a machine that was meant to run Linux.
They put it together and got all the firmware working and everything.
And there is something to be said for that, I think.
You know, rather than just the crapshoot.
Look, if you get a think pad,
especially let's say an eight year old think pad,
that is going to work perfectly.
But if you get some weird like, I don't know,
a Huawei made book or whatever it's called
or some weird Vivo book from a source,
like whether that's going to work 100% or not,
there's just no way to know really.
Right, it has to have that critical mass of nerds
who have bought the thing wanting to run Linux on it
who have already done the work for you.
Yeah, and by and large, those are X off lease
enterprise machines, right?
Like I could not guarantee that I could walk into PC world
and buy a laptop off the shelf that would run Linux properly.
If it's an idea pad or whatever the Lenovo consumer line is
or a Zen book or something like that,
I've done it before where I've seen something really cheap
in a sale and bought it and always had a bad time.
Because you had that Zen book, didn't you?
Yeah, I had a Zen book 13,
which was an 11th gen i5
and I had a terrible experience running Linux on it.
It was OK, 90% of stuff worked.
But there was always just like the odd thing that didn't work.
Like I had one of those infrared webcams for Windows L.A.
And Linux tried to recognize that as a webcam.
So you got this weird like flickery infrared picture
of your cell every time.
Or it didn't have a headphone jack.
And the USB-C audio interface that came with it
never worked properly in the Linux.
There were just always little really annoying things like that.
Or the touchpad didn't deactivate when you turned the screen 360 degrees round.
It says touch screen.
So you put it on your knee and the mouse would still move.
So there's always little things like that.
And I got that machine 300 pounds off of MSRP in the John Lewis sale
or something, which is what made me buy it.
Yeah, maybe you're being quite pleased with it at the time.
I was.
But it's just slowly all of these little things
that don't quite work either way at you.
He's out of the honeymoon period.
Yeah, and you're always kind of tinkering
and being like, well, what if I put the latest kernel on it?
Or what if I try the newest fedora
or what if I install Arch?
And you might get like, oh well,
this thing works better under this distray.
Or that thing works better under that distray.
But once the honeymoon period's over,
it just was never quite there.
Did it go on the stack?
Or did you sell it?
No, I did sell that.
I put Windows 11 on it and put it on eBay
and sold it for as much as I paid for it
about six months into ownership.
So that wasn't too bad.
But there's definitely machines I've bought like that
that I've taken a massive loss on
or now just sitting the stack.
It's really funny you say that, Gary,
because I have an almost parallel experience
with a slightly cheaper machine.
And again, it was an Azusa one
that I got refurbished from Argos.
And it was to fulfill that,
I want to check this in my backpack
and not worry if it gets stolen.
I think it was 80 pounds.
So it's reasonably well-spect,
and it was literally an open box return untouched.
It still had most of the protective wrapping on.
Battery was 100% health.
When I put the machine into standby
and resumed, the touchpad didn't work.
And so I had to reboot with the keyboard.
And I started looking around
and I found a smattering of people
and I found a forum thread where people were having the issue.
And in the end, it was basically the way
that the I2C interface was wired up inside
and the firmware and the EFI BIOS
and all of the configuration for it.
And somebody raised a support ticket with a Zeus.
And they just replied and said,
we don't support the Linux operating system.
Please install Windows where this behaves exactly
as you'd expect.
And I had the exact same thing.
I tried kernel updates.
I once had a laptop where the Wi-Fi card would do that.
But I wrote a system D unit
that would run when I opened the lid.
And it would reset network manager
and bring everything back online.
And I even forgot that I'd written that.
So I moved the drive to another machine
and wondered why the Wi-Fi kept tripping.
And I was like, oh yeah, there's a system D unit running
to reset everything.
And that worked fine.
But this, it just wouldn't budge.
And I ended up just selling it again
because it annoyed me so much.
So in conclusion then,
don't buy anything brand new
unless it comes pre-installed with Linux
and you get actual support for it.
Try and buy second hand generally
to save the planet.
And if you do make sure it's a couple of years old.
And if you are going to buy second hand,
then buy something that either came with Linux
or is really popular and well supported
because a load of Linux nerds
have tinkered with it,
found the problems and fixed them.
That's exactly what I was going to say.
Go where the nerds are.
Well, I don't suppose we'll get much feedback about this.
So if you've got some thoughts on it,
if you're one of the one or two people
who've got opinions on this, then let us know.
Or just go and buy a two-year-old thinkpad
which has been the advice for ever.
Yeah.
Right, well, we'll better get out of here then.
We'll be back in a couple of weeks.
But until then, I've been Joe.
I've been Chris.
I've been Gary.
I would not recommend buying the 11th Jet Framework.
Oh, not that again.
See you later.