Very interesting thoughts @morgan_hardwood. At the moment, I can get the ASUS ZenBook UX305CA for CAD $869, and I don’t see anything else in that price range with anything near that quality of display. Did you encounter any driver problems when putting Linux on it? My only concerns with this machine would be the screen size and the small disk space (512 GB) since I would have both Linux and Windoze installed (my bad…didn’t mention that).
I went the small and portable route with my most recent laptop. I picked up an 11" and found that it was simply too small for RT or DT. The tools eat the majority of the screen real estate. My previous laptop was 14" and I felt that I could manage adequately on it with DT, but wouldn’t want to go much smaller.
While looking at the ASUS ZenBook line, I also saw the 15.6" ASUS ZenBook Pro UX501VW. Very tempting but CAD $1999!
I had a look at the other machines mentioned on this thread as well. Some good machines at some fairly healthy prices. I’m starting to think that the most effective solution might be to get something like the UX305CA plus a good external monitor.
IMHO if you’re away from your primary external monitor for some time, then having a laptop with a great LCD panel is tremendously helpful. Some are much better than others.
However it’s not easy to find a laptop with really good LCD panel. Few reviews online reviews do a thorough job of reviewing the screens. Sometimes the only way to learn about the actual performance is to read the reports of very high end professional users in laptop discussion forums.
It’s on its way, should be here tomorrow, so if I’m at the office tomorrow I can let you know next week. I did check for Linux compatibility issues and the only thing was something to do with power management in kernels older than 4.6, that it wasn’t as effective as it could be. I’ll be using kernel 4.7.
Screen size in inches doesn’t concern me, I need resolution, and this laptop has it. 1920x1080 is perfect for RT. You could get the 3200x1800 version too. Keep in mind that the larger the preview area is (in pixels), the more processing power is needed to update the preview (e.g. when you move a slider of a CPU-intensive tool like noise reduction). I’ve been using RT for years on 1920x1080 and it’s fine for me. If you want even higher resolution (which requires even higher processing power) then consider getting a desktop PC instead. I don’t think you will need an external monitor with that laptop using the 1920x1080 screen, the resolution is enough and the colors on the monitor are great.
I did find three other options from that line, but they weren’t real options as they aren’t available where I live yet.
These are the other options:
I use a 24" 1920x1080 for RT on my existing desktop, and I totally agree that resolution works well. That machine unfortunately needs to remain full-time Windows for business reasons, so all my Linux activity takes place on my laptop, which means various other tools like DT live on my laptop only. Hence the hunt for a suitable laptop to replace my little 11" 1366x768 machine!
Maybe I’ll stealth-install RT on a UX305CA in a Best Buy and see how I like it.
The other machines you mentioned aren’t available here in Canada either.
Been using the ASUS ZenBook UX305 for a few days now. The 1920x1080, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD version. I installed Linux Sabayon with KDE on it alongside the Windows 10 it came with. Both operating systems fly! Both boot in seconds. It’s completely silent, programs in both OSes run smoothly, KDE feels faster and is far more responsive than on my more powerful personal laptop. I’m typing this from Chrome with a bunch of tabs open, and VirtualBox with Windows XP and VB6 running in it on the other virtual desktop - no problems. There were no driver issues, after installing Sabayon it just worked. The power supply is tiny, it’s about the size of a tablet charger, so my laptop bag now weighs next to nothing. I haven’t calibrated the screen yet, but out-of-the-box the screen colors look far more similar to those of my personal laptop when I load the calibration curves into it than when I don’t load them.
I’m most certainly happy with it.
I finally found a store with a UX305 on display, and this machine’s display is beautiful! The construction of the machine seems pretty solid. There was a UX303 next to it (8GB, 1TB HDD, 1920x1080), but the display was glossy, could not achieve the same brightness, and was in general simply inferior.
How much of the SSD was left after installing Sabayon KDE? And after adding the rest of the above?
If you’ve tried any photo processing on it yet, how did it perform for that?
I got the UX305CA (1920x1080 version, 8GB RAM) and I love it! Small, light, completely silent, and the screen colors are great out of the box! I calibrated both my once-top-of-the-line home laptop (Clevo W870CU from 2009, i7, 8GB RAM) and this one side by side one evening, both to D65. The UX305CA’s screen covers 98% of the sRGB gamut, is capable of a very high luminance (I capped it at 120cd/m2 but it could do more), does not change much after calibration and profiling (meaning it looks great and the colors are close to what they should be even if you don’t have a colorimeter), and the colors look good from a wide range of angles. In comparison, my home laptop’s screen covers about 70% sRGB, fails to reach 120cd/m2 after calibration and profiling (reaches just 80cd/m3 - if I reset the video card gamma table to linear it gets significantly brighter but that’s because it gets significantly bluer), changes very much after calibration and profiling, and the colors change dramatically with a small change in viewing angle.
Haven’t processed raw photos with it yet. Your question is not really a question of speed, it’s a question of RAM. This one has 8GB, so you can process raw photos and run Firefox and do whatever and it will be snappy as long as you don’t run out of RAM. Further, GIMP (2.9) is extremely slow and non-optimized regardless of hardware - getting it to run faster is a question of optimizing code, not of throwing more CPUs and matches and gasoline at it. I hope this gets addressed once the tremendous task of porting everything to GEGL/BABL is done.
My OS with KDE Plasma loads in seconds from a cold boot and feels very snappy. Can’t say the same for my i7 home laptop.
The touchpad works great, for a touchpad. It has no faults or jumps or anything like that. There is one thing I wasn’t expecting, and it’s a touchpad-shortcut that lets you scroll without having to move the cursor over to the scrollbar. Odd things can seem to happen before you discover and identify it. Once you get used to it, after an hour, it not only stops annoying you, but becomes handy. There might even be a way of controlling it through touchpad settings in your OS. Still, I don’t like touchpads in any shape or form and mostly use a mouse.
Well, could also be disk I suppose – my desktop has 8GB and an i7-4558U, but the drive is a “hybrid spindle/SSD” (just 8GB is SSD) instead of real SSD, and there web browsing while exporting is really awful compared to my Thinkpad with 4GB and an i7 2640M but a real SSD.
Since I started this thread, I owe it an update. I was quite intrigued with the ASUS UX305CA when @Morgan_Hardwood mentioned it. It has an absolutely beautiful display. Ultimately, though, I couldn’t get past the 13.3" display size (largely due to UI text in RT and DT and code in editors)…I don’t normally glasses but would have to with that display size. ASUS also has a 15.6" UX501VW with a gorgeous display, unfortunately with a price to match.
I wound up getting a HP Envy 15-as010ca, which is 8GB/1TB and has a decent quality IPS FHD display, which I have not yet calibrated (too much time in that code lately!). It’s been problem free with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. I’ve done a small amount of RAW editing in RT and DT, just to test, and performance has not been a problem.
I compiled RawTherapee on it and used it. This ASUS UX305CA with its Core m3-6Y30 CPU feels as fast in using RawTherapee (preview and saving) as does my Core i7-820QM laptop, while for general use (startup, shutdown, launching programs, programming) it feels much faster than the i7. Even though the m3 CPU is in some ways inferior to the i7, it makes up for that with room to spare by supporting newer features. Further, the m3 uses 4.5W while the i7 tractor uses 45W, meaning the m3 lets me process photos quietly and unplugged for hours, while the i7 rattles the house, wakes the neighbors and drains the battery in 30 minutes when new.
Have anyone considered having a surface tablet for photo processing? I am pretty sure you can run an OS based on Linux kernel on it. The display is pretty good too. Battery is good too but I am not sure how long will it last when you processing images in darktable / RAWTherapee or doing any other heavy on the processor task.
I didnt want to put up a new thread on a frankly boring subject so I hope that by posting my msg here it will still be seen and hopefully answered by somebody…
Here we go – what do you think about this laptop here, considering the cpu+gpu combo and keeping in mind that I will be installing Ubuntu and using it for essentially Darktable, coding in Python+VSCode (that doesn’t require much but I am trying to learn Keras-Tensorflow and that requires a supported gpu) + family-videos editing with Davinci Resolve:
For those that don’t want to click on, it’s an Asus TUF FX505 gaming laptop with:
15,6" FHD IPS screen IPS, anti-glare, 200 nits, Refresh Rate 60Hz, Viewing Angle 170/170, Contrast 700:1, NTSC 45%, SRGB 62,5%, Adobe 47,34%
(not really that important to me, I’m mostly linked to a 27" Benq monitor for my photo editing)
AMD Ryzen 7 3750H
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660Ti 6GB DDR6
RAM 16GB, HDD 1TB SSD Sata + HDD 512GB SSD PCIE
Is the AMD really that good/powerful? A commenter on that amazon page says that the gpu underperforms when linked to this AMD cpu and that it would perform much better paired to an Intel cpu. I remember somebody here saying great things about these AMD cpus.
At the same price (~1100 EUR) there is also this one with an intel cpu and slightly less ssd storage (this is less important, I have spare SSDs that I intend to fit in this new laptop):
As a reference my current laptop is a Dell XPS 15 9560 i7-7700HQ@2.8Ghz Kabylake with a Geforce GTX1050 and 16 Gb ram. Will this Asus laptop be appreciably faster than my current one?
I don’t think either laptop will make editing notocibly faster than it is on your dell. For the AMD system, I’d have a look at the battery life. For the Intel system, I’d see how much speculative execution patches to the Linux kernel slow down your workload. For both machines, check the WiFi/lan drivers work with Linux.
