[sf-lug] Considering purchasing a lightweight laptop: thoughts Thinkpad X1 carbon vs. Thinkpad T460S

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Jon Lam (jonplam at gmail.com):

> I do not mean to hijack this discussion. Does anyone have any experience
> running dual boot Windows and Linux on the Acer V Nitro?  I have a older
> mid 2010 Mac Book Pro and am looking at a different configuration.

I'll be very surprised if anyone on this mailing list satisfies that
extremely specific request.

If as I suspect nobody says "By a freakish coincidence, I happen to
dual-boot that exact model.  What do you want to know?", perhaps you can
follow up by saying what actual problem you're trying to solve.

For example, you might be trying to ask "Would I have Linux driver
problems on an Acer V Nitro?"  Part of your problem there is that Acer V
Nitro isn't a specific model.  It's the marketing name for a series of
laptop models, all of them pitched at gamers.

All of those use Intel Skylake-architecture motherboard chipsets and
Nvidia GTX960M graphics chips.  I personally wouldn't touch Skylake at
this point.  Linux support requires a fairly cutting-edge kernels as
Matthew Garrett described this past April:
https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/41713.html  
As far as cutting-edge Nvidia graphics chips aimed at gamers, I'd
personally avoid those, too, as they're open source-hostile.  (You would
end up needing to retrofit Nvidia's  propritary drivers.)

Why Acer V Nitro?  Gamer usage?

Also, unless you have something about your use-case that is best
addressed with dual boot, consider a VM solution instead, so you can
use both OSes concurrently and needn't juggle a complicated bootloader
setup.  In my experience, dual-boot is almost always a tactical error, 
most often chosen mainly because the user didn't consider alternatives.