Choosing A 2013 Laptop/Ultrabook For Linux

I paid top dollar for my Asus Zenbook Prime when they first came out a year or so ago, but it has been running Fedora perfectly and I'm happy as a clam with it. Great battery life, the specs are super, and I've been happy with it ever since I blew away that Windows partition. :-)

One thing, the Win8 based UX32 Ultrabooks that Michael highlights in his article are priced nicely but are still more expensive than the Win7 UX31 ultrabooks. Check this for the $896.39 version. As an extra benefit, the Win7 model comes with an open bootloader as opposed to the Win8 model.

How long is "great" battery life? Over 6 hours with normal use?

That just feels like an outrageous amount of money to me for something that isn't touch screen or containing a beefy GFX card.

~Jeff

Well the spec on idle battery life is 10 hours, but you know how that goes. The way I use mine with the 1920x1024 screen turned up bright, Internet running, and frequent builds, I get 4-5 hours typically.

Yes, you can get less expensive laptops. You pay extra to get this kind of capability in a light 2.9 pound package. If you are willing to carry around 4 or 5 pounds, then there are lower priced choices to pick from. And don't forget, this includes SSD, not rotating disk.

> Yes, you can get less expensive laptops. You pay extra to get this kind of capability in a light 2.9 pound package. If you are willing to carry around 4 or 5 pounds, then there are lower priced choices to pick from

Well, it's not in that class of capability, but my Mini-9 meets all my laptop needs quite well, weighs 2.3 lbs, and I got it for $200. Yes, that includes an SSD. And this was almost 5 years ago.

Well, the $949 model has two 128 GB SSDs rather than one, which is going to be worth the price difference as far as the hardware goes. Of course if you'd really rather have Windows 7 than 8 (it doesn't matter much to me because I probably wouldn't be using the Windows license except perhaps on a virtual machine), or if you really don't want to have to deal with disabling Secure Boot, then it could be worth it to you to buy the UX31.

@penguinist, have you considered setting up a VM running distccd on your system? That way, you could have a virtual build farm, and build farms make builds run faster.



(Yes, that's a joke...)

gus3: Well, I'll give that idea due consideration. That is to say, all the consideration that the idea deserves. :-)

Seriously, though, what I have done for time consuming builds is to offload them via ssh scripting to a remote 16-core large memory server machine (personal cloud) where they do build faster. Linux is nice in that way, we can continuously customize our workflow to optimize to our needs.