Up-to-date hardware (laptop) recommendations?

[E.S. Rosenberg]

I am not going to tell you which laptops to get since my interest goes
to a very different class (you are looking for DTR/Mobile Workstation,
I want Ultra mobile with touch), the only thing that I think does need
to be mentioned is the docking station.

You mentioned above you were considering to use one, though the laptop
hardware itself often tends to be supported well on Linux the docking
stations in my experience have tended to be the Achilles heel which
also tend to be documented way less since they are used less.

I used to also have a heavier larger laptop but once I switched to a
model that weighed less the 1.5kg there is no going back (and
generally for what I do they pack more then enough punch, I recently
replaced the HDD with an SSD and hope it will last me for another
year-2years before finally buying a new laptop by then with 8 or 16 or
more GB of RAM....)

BTW has anyone noticed how long we have been 'stuck' on 4GB RAM being
enough memory....

Regards,
Eliyahu - אליהו

2015-11-30 6:23 GMT+02:00 Shachar Shemesh <shachar at shemesh.biz>:
> On 29/11/15 21:02, Omer Zak wrote:
>
> (1/9) Shachar Shemesh/Roman Ovseitsev:
> Why connect internal monitor + 3 external monitors?
>
> My response:
> I was not clear in expressing my wishes.
> What I'd like to be able is to work at home with three monitors. I do
> not care if it is 3 external monitors (with disabled internal monitor)
> or 2 external monitors with an active internal monitor.
>
> Roman Ovseitsev's point about Skylake based laptop: not relevant since I
> do not need more than 3 monitors total.
>
> My laptop has a fairly basic adapter. I seem to recall, though I have no
> idea when I tried, that only two monitors simulteneously are supported. I'm
> fairly certain that this is a GPU memory issue, though, as xrandr does list
> a hefty list of potential ports (including, when docked, subdisplays of the
> display port).
>
> -=-=-=-=-=-
>
> (2/9) Shachar Shemesh:
> Recommends Dell, which has reasonable Linux support.
> Uses Dell Latitude E7440.
>
> My response:
> What does "reasonable" mean here? Are there any features not well
> supported by Linux?
> Do other models in the E7000 series have as good reputation? If yes,
> I'll check if any of them supports total of 3 displays.
>
> I can't think of anything that did not work for me, including setting the
> track pad sensitivity, controlling the built in keyboard backlight from the
> keyboard shortcut, and disabling/enabling the trackpad from the keyboard
> shortcuts. Ubuntu 15.04 with kubuntu proved somewhat unstable when
> docking/undocking (or, generally, when adding and removing the external
> monitor). If you're willing to live with "dock, set monitor state, logout
> and log in", then this is nothing serious.
>
> I've also had trouble with the external monitor going blank when docked
> sometimes. I've ended up swapping and swapping and swapping hardware with
> others in the office, eventually blaming the motherboard. Dell's support
> replaced it, and eventually the problem was resolved (it has recently came
> back, but I havn't started the hardware swapping debugging yet).
>
> So, all in all, I have not come across anything that did not work for me.
> You don't even need Windows/Dos to upgrade the BIOS. Just place the BIOS
> upgrade file (an .EXE) on the UEFI boot partition, and use the BIOS boot
> menu to select "BIOS upgrade".
>
> There are some driver bugs, but nothing serious IMHO.
>
> (5/9) Boris Shtrasman:
> How about Legacy and UEFI (or only UEFI) mode?
>
> My response:
> UEFI should be OK, but I need to disable secure boot so that I'll be
> able to upgrade Linux kernels at whim.
>
> At least Ubuntu have a signed GRUB, which means that the kernels need not be
> signed at all (which defeats the whole purpose of secure UEFI, but that's
> Microsoft's problem, not ours). My laptop does, in fact, support legacy
> boot, but I ended up using UEFI anyways (I wanted to experiment with it). I
> did end up disabling the secure UEFI boot, though I don't think I had to.
>
> One thing I did not expect was during motherboard replaement. With UEFI the
> BIOS needs to know which OSes it is booting, which means that merely
> replacing the BIOS and plugging in the same disk would not boot. The BIOS
> has Windows preconfigured, but that's no help for obvious reasons. You need
> to keep an Ubuntu DoK handy and do recovery reinstall of GRUB to get the
> machine going again.
>
> Also, Ubuntu install has great difficulty to install a legacy boot Ubuntu if
> the live DoK was booted in UEFI mode and vice versa. Keep that in mind
> during initial installation.
>
> Their standard way to create the DoK these days is to take the ISO and dd it
> on a DoK. This, suprisingly, creates a DoK that is bootable in both legacy
> and UEFI mode. They managed to cram a bootloader, a UEFI boot partition and
> an El Torrito boot loader in to the same image.
>
> Shachar
>
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