The Homer Car, But It's leinir's Laptop

Or alternatively "But Why Don't You Just Get A Different One?"

We are now into week three of me sitting in a virtual machine on my better half's laptop, while we wait for my replacement Dell XPS 13 2-in-1 (2019) to arrive, after Dell conceded that they could not fix the old one. Short version: The graphics fan went wonky and stopped spinning, so they sent an engineer out to replace the mainboard (because everything is soldered on, including the fan assembly), and then it stopped booting. So they sent out another, and that also immediately failed to post, and then decided that wasn't worth trying again, so they would send me a replacement laptop. Three weeks later, and i have a tracking number, with no updates for a couple of days, though it also isn't past the estimate they gave me for getting it (two weeks for an in stock item, from Ireland to England, nice...).

Now, the above might sound like a perfect reason to just cut my losses and switch to a different machine but here's where it all gets a little more silly: This is literally the only laptop on the market today which has the set of requirements i have for a laptop. They are not, i think, particularly terrible ones, but it turns out that there is a significant gap in the market between this specific laptop, and everything else out there. 

Here's a quick little rundown of those requirements:

• 360-degree hinge Basically, a way to turn my laptop into something that works like a screen for use at a my desk, where i plug in a proper keyboard and a trackball. In essence, this means a 2-in-1 design of some type, with the yoga-style 360 degree hinge design coming out on top for basically being able to turn the laptop into a display with a built-in stand. Acer's Ezel hinge design also works reasonably well for this, though it does put the display further away as a result of the design.
• High-resolution display My optimal resolution at the 13 inch size would be 1440p, but that's not an option on Dell's 2-in-1 offering, so 4K it is - but 1440p would be better at this size, then i wouldn't have to deal with fractional scaling (i run the system at 150%, fine in most cases, just a tiny bit odd in others, but entirely fine for the vast majority of situations). If there was a 15 or 16 inch 2-in-1 with a 4K display, that would be neat, but no problem, 13 inches works fine as well.
• Touch screen with pen support Yes, really, i do use this. It might seem like a gimmick if you've not spent time with it, but i use it for a variety of purposes. The touch screen is just one of those things that comes in handy for just... using a machine for casual consumption of stuff, and well, the convertible mode thing above means such a laptop also works not only as a display with keyboard and mouse plugged in, but also as a passive consumption device when you just have it in pure tablet mode. The pen? Yes, sure, i could just sketch ui stuff with a finger, but a pen is just so much more pleasant to use. Doesn't even have to dock, magnets work fine for me.
  
• Proprietary driver go away Hoping i don't need to explain this one too much, don't think there's all that much to discuss about how those aren't great ;)
  
• Recent-gen Core i7 or equivalent Similarly, hoping this will come as no huge surprise. Writing code, you kind of need crunch those numbers a bunch, and an i3 or (sorry Pine64, but maybe that's something that could be fixed) current arm options aren't going to cut it.
  
• At least 32GiB of RAM Simple enough, lots of laptops with those. But wait, that first requirement up there means that apparently there isn't. It turns out that, of all the requirements that one might have for a laptop today, any amount of memory that allows you to open KDevelop and throw, say, a couple of our larger frameworks at it (or, dog forgive me, the giant that is Calligra) means that you are in workstation territory, which means that you suddenly have no options that are not either experimental creativity monsters, or something you can't have in any form that is not... just a laptop.

The requirements list above means that out of all the available machines on the market, there is precisely one that fulfills them all. Oh what a luxury problem to have, yes, most definitely. I just have no choice but to buy a stupidly expensive piece of Dell sculpture which, while of course there are no expansion options and the only connectivity is two type-c ports, headphone socket (yes, what a crazy world), and a micro-sd slot), just feels amazing to me to type on when i'm away from the desk and is so light i barely feel when i  put it in a backpack.

"Why Are You Talking To Me?!"

Why am i writing this here on Planet KDE and friends? Well, it turns out that we have some friends in the KDE community who build hardware and ship it with KDE software. I would greatly like to have the option to buy one of your piece of beautiful hardware, but as you can see from that little rant above, that currently isn't really an option.

But, before you tell me that there's no way you can compete with Dell in creating such a heavily designed, ultra light weight, super thin device, I would ask you to look through those requirements again: I am not after a thin-and-light. I am after a productivity machine. I am after something which will both let me do my job (which requires me to work with fairly large, occasionally convoluted and interdependent codebases), and also allows me to enjoy it in a more casual fashion.

 So with the requirements above set out, here's a list of nice-to-haves:

• 15 or 16 inch display 13" inches is a little squinty-vision at times, and a 4K display at somewhere around the 15 to 16 inch size would be the sweet spot.
  
• RAM slots Please just pop a couple of those in there. One is good, two is better. With that, i can fit 32 gigs in, or perhaps even 64 for that OTT level thing at some later point, without the initial outlay
  
• Expandable storage M.2 nVME doesn't seem like a stretch these days, one slot will do. Just don't solder the storage on.
  
• Good keyboard As in, a keyboard worth typing on. Not asking for a mechanical keyboard, i guess, but something that isn't squishy, and which doesn't require me to always need to hit the key in the perfect centre to get letters to happen. If you want to test this for yourself, poke the corners of the keys on your laptop, and see whether they move uniformly, or whether they just kind of bend over.
  
• Thunderbolt 3 Yeah, not even asking for 4 here, though sure, that'd be nice. Really just need something so that my docking connection for when i scamper from the desk at the end of a day is just the one cable, so i'm not plugging and unplugging a bunch of cables all the time.
  
• Fans Sure, go right ahead and pop some of those in there. Seriously, as long as they don't sound like a jet engine and their tone isn't fingernails on a chalk board, it's all fine, and given this is a workstation? Yeah, fanless isn't really an option.
  

Hoping that running down that list makes you go "Hey, that doesn't look too bad", that's why i wrote this blog entry :D i've tried to make this seem like perhaps it's not a Homer-car, and instead it's more a kind of... light modification on systems that are already out there.

Oh, and that elephant over there with currency signs painted all over it: First, why would you paint it like that, poor thing's got enough to worry about without you getting out the brush, and is that paint even skin safe? Second, I hope you noticed the brand and name of the laptop i already have up in the first paragraph. That thing is not a cheap device. Dell sells the configuration i have for GBP2500, and that's not even counting the pen which is another almost a hundred quid on top. Full disclosure, i bought my one second hand and did not pay that much for it, but that is what these things cost, and if it were someone not a huge, multi-national company, but rather a small outfit with a track record of supporting KDE and free software in general? Sure, i'd pony up the cash for something like what i've described here.

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The word of the day is: choice, because i would really like one of those...