Ask HN: What’s a good laptop for software development at around $2k

> https://kfocus.org/order/order-m2.html

NVIDIA gets really old, really fast. My personal laptop has an NVIDIA GPU and AMD iGPU, my desktop is AMD.

For my laptop, a zen2 build of the kernel nets me about 15% more battery life and a snappier system. Unfortunately NVIDIA makes installing that kernel tedious, so I just run the regular kernel. I also have to install the proprietary drivers because noveau keeps crashing (across multiple distros).

n=1 and everything, but I'd strongly recommend avoiding NVIDIA and going with either an Intel iGPU or AMD iGPU/dGPU.

Unless you want to do some ML, in which case NVIDIA is a must.

The ASUS ROG line of gaming laptops had exactly what I wanted, although they look a bit garish, they are good value for what you get.

On Black Friday I got a G14 Zephyrus with a 8c16t Ryzen 9, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD and 14" FHD IPS screen. I think I paid £1300. There's a free RAM slot, so I upgraded to 32GB, I think it supports 48GB max. There are a couple of gotcha's mind you:

- It came with a WiFi chip with poor support for Linux (and it wasn't great on Windows). I got an Intel one from eBay for £10 and it took a few minutes to swap out.

- You need to restart X to switch from hybrid to integrated graphics, which you want to do on battery to save power.

- You need to restart X to switch from integrated to hybrid graphics, which you want to do when you get back to your desk so you can use a USB-C display.

- The default fan curves mean the fan turns on and off every few seconds. I changed the settings so it is off most of the time and it runs fine.

- The powerbrick that comes with it is heavy. I use a 65W USB-C brick and have no issues for working, but for gaming (it has a RTX 3060) it needs more power.

- The model I have has no webcam, that's fixed in this year's modem.

Everything else works great. Battery life is 5-6 hours as standard, but if you disable turbo boost and you can get closer to 10 hours.

I love the battery life, which is great when running on integrated graphics.

The CPU is great too, I'm satisfied with autocomplete speed in my IDE. I think the 5900HS is also quite power-efficient, maybe the Intel versions are more power-hungry, not sure. Another benefit is that the laptop stays completely silent, and only whirrs up when gaming or doing heavier workloads.

The GPU in my version is "just" the 3060 Mobile, but it's good enough for me, and there are costlier version with better GPUs.

The ports are good enough for me. There's one USB-C 3.2 Gen2 which I used to connect to a DisplayPort screen, and there's an HDMI port, which I use to drive a 4k@120Hz monitor. I also use one of the USB 3.1 Gen 2 (10Gbps) ports with a hub to run all peripherals (mic, webcam, keyboard, mouse).

WiFi was giving me problems on Windows (I have the MediaTek card), but that was fixed at the end of 2021. Another smallish issue is that there's no webcam, but I use a standalone cam anyway.

WiFi seems okay for me, I've not had any problems. Restarting X is indeed annoying. Also only one of the USB-c ports has display port support, that took me a while to figure. I thought my usb-c monitor was broken until I took a closer look at the ports. No webcam is pretty annoying as well.

The Linux community for the laptop is actually pretty large. People have reverse-engineered a lot of the "nice to haves" [0].

[0] https://asus-linux.org/

The Realtek WiFi device is a problem with hp laptops too. Works but needs a cold reboot after the hibernate wakes up.

Are you saying the intel WiFi chip is pin compatible with the Realtek? That’s an amazing find.

I thought that most laptops have the WiFi on a mini-PCI card these days (or really anything in the past 10 years) unless they are really trying for the ultra-slim, solder everything down look.

Have my 2020 G14 since almost two years now and it's absolutely fabulous running arch as my daily driver.

2022 rog strix 12th gen i9 + rtx 3060

10/10 must Buy

I went with strix vs others because of power delivery. Apparently rtx 3080 is great and all but asus seriously fucked up because the laptops they put it in dont deliver it enough power and it gets similar performance to a 3060. So I just got the 3060, 300ms screen is mind blowing

Don't sweat the battery, they're removable, upgradeable to larger ones if you have to go a longer time on a charge and easy to replace. For the change left over from $2000, you can buy lots of them!

I've stopped buying new laptops and now I use refurbished Thinkpad P50 with i7, 64GB RAM, 512 SSD for ~1100 USD.

If I need to do something really computing intensive, I rent a cloud VM ;-) Actually, I've one for each project I'm working on, and I scale them as/if needed.

You get them decently refurbished on ebay as they are popular leasing models for companies which switch them out more or less on a fixed schedule. If you're lucky you get one that was sitting in a docking station for two years and is almost pristine, just the battery destroyed because it was on AC power uninterrupted.

Before I used the ThinkPad X230 and DELL Latitude 7270, each for many years and bought second hand. The DELL was particularly sturdy.

All of these are Ubuntu LTS friendly boxes.

Avoid Microsoft Surface Laptops, which require patches to run Linux, Microsoft doesn't offer an Image ready to burn on a stick. And although I'm writing this on an M1 MacBook, I can't recommend that box yet as a primary machine; I use it mostly for making and presenting slides and browsing HN and such, not for serious dev work. In a year's time, this may look different.

I don't recommend it for the given price point. I included all extra options such as insurance and the extra disk space.

I found it isn't fast enough in general usage. Had problems running a serverless javascript project. External monitors with scaling will bring the iGPU to its knees. The display itself is too small to effectively program on it, and the CPU is not powerful enough to run a multitude of unittests or compile more complicated programs on.

I use my X1 with an eGPU and two 4K monitors. Webdevelopment happens in VSCode with heavy usage of the VSCode remote docker plugin. This enables me to run unittests and development tasks on a beefy PC.

Taken all together this raises the price quite a bit.

The battery on the m1 was to enticing. I went back and forth between a ThinkPad x1 with Linux and this MacBook air. It's impressive and I have no regrets. When there's an arm laptop released with similar performance and battery life I can run Linux on, I'll definitely be picking one up

I got everything working again except for the webcam, which kind of sucks.

However, I've heard that the keyboards on the recent models are not as good. It's the only thing stopping me from getting a Nano...

Edit: Linux support is stellar on the X1 Carbon, which is no surprise since RedHat issues its employees with business Lenovo laptops.

In early 2020 it got stolen (full disk encryption with a strong passphrase luckily). I got a X1C 7th and expected it would be as good as the previous one. The first bad surpirse was the hdpi screen. Xubuntu did not work well with it, it required a lot of fiddling. Well and then I run some non-Xubuntu app here and there and it required extra fiddling. In the end I gave up and just reduced the screen resolution to some "classical" value and everything was fine again. Have not noticed that my code is worse because of slightly less smooth fonts...

Even worse the battery life is significantly worse than on the previous model. To my understanding higher resolution displays require more energy, there is nothing you can do. Have not checked whether the newer CPU could also have an impact. A full working day on battery is hardly possible anymore, even with little playing of videos or similar.

Finally my current X1C 7th came with a 4G modem that has no Linux driver at all. Not a big deal for me because I have only 1 SIM anyway and my phone has good data rates to share.

More on the anecdotal side: A firmware update was broken recently. I guess bugs happen everwhere. What I liked that Lenovo guys where active on github and a fix came quickly. Couldn't resist thinking: Like in the IBM days when Thinkpads got good support.

I am doing C development, with some Javascript thrown in for the client, quite comfortably on a laptop from 2008 (Core 2 Duo, 2GB of RAM, 320GB spinning rust HDD).

I use WindowMaker, Firefox, Xterm, Vim, Git, Clang and GCC. from login Window to my first xterm opened in the project directory is around 500ms. My build (C only) is currently around 700ms.

My editing is lag-free only as long as Vim's 'cul' option is turned off.

I read somewhere that it might support 5GB of RAM (4GB + 1GB), but I don't want to spend more money on it on a gamble.

I'm not sure that's fair, (and it's pedantically wrong - they're in production - but I know what you mean) the hardware is the nicest I've seen besides Macbooks (I agree with you about macOS, but I do like the hardware, keen for Asahi one day but that is very much beta (alpha actually I think)) and Linux is Linux? It works fine out of the box, everything 'in-tree'.

Unless you just don't want to buy any company's first product of course, which I suppose is fair enough, but I hope (for the longevity of a company I like & spares/upgrades for my laptop) that enough people don't feel that way.

Also, I get the feeling that the Framework isn't your typical first product. It's built to be upgradable, so unless you find something fundamentally off-putting about the shape of the board, I'm not sure if you get much by waiting for the next generation. If they release a slimmer case, better keyboard, touch screen, or whatever, then you should be able to retrofit the new thing onto an old machine. Of course, the product is still young. Time will tell if this actually pans out.

Not particularly helpful to you necessarily, but I was able to solve the battery drain on windows by tweaking the deep sleep and hibernation settings and I'm now reasonably confident that if I close the lid on the laptop for the night it'll have a similar level of battery left when I open it in the morning.

I think everything defaults to intel's "not actually sleep" sleep mode which destroys the battery like nobody's business

That's a killer - it's 2022 and Apple are still the only company who can get that right. I'd switch over to a Framework in an instant (for dual-boot Linux/Windows) if they could fix that.

AMD still supports S3 sleep on their Ryzen processors, but you'll need to check user feedback to make sure that the vendor did their job implementing it properly. In S3 sleep, the UEFI/BIOS is responsible for suspending and resuming hardware state. If not implemented correctly, you'll have high battery drain (components not suspended) or bugs on resume. Lenovo had dropped the ball on that front repeatedly, with the last two gens of T14 requiring BIOS updates to fix issues.

Concerning battery life: There are various tools like TLP[1] that help you optimize your energy consumption without much configuration. I get more than 6 hours of my machine when I'm coding on the go. However, I only have a few terminals with Vim and a web browser open. Some IDEs might need more power.

[1] https://linrunner.de/tlp/

I'm definitely very keen to use Asahi once it's more stable and has support for more of the hardware though. For now I have an Arch Linux ARM VM that I keep running for some things (Haskell development on M1 is still a bit of a mess) and I can VNC into a Linux desktop over 2.5 gigabit LAN when I really yearn for my old workflows.

I used to spend a lot of time to fiddle with Linux and my desktop in the past. You can do that if you want. But it's not necessary. Nowadays in 98% of the cases I say "good enough", in rare exceptions I might still use my freedom to fiddle and patch.

Most of the Development flow (and even most of the non-dev flow) happens in Open Source areas:

- Safari - Apps you download, like VSCode - Command line tools

The areas that aren't open source (The Calendar app, file browser) can be replaced as you choose.

I won't tell you to use a Mac, I just want to make it clear that the areas a developer works in are open. And, for anyone worried about things like SIP, that has a fully functional off switch

Oh, and you can run Linux (albeit with some work-in-progress features) - I've done it myself.

In my case, I consider the Mac one of the cons of working at my current place of work. My days are filled with minor hassles that I could really do without. Doing simple things takes longer, and I have to deal with random freezes, slowdowns and even crashes that I did not have to deal with when using my own laptop for similar needs over the past couple of years (mostly dev related with minor content editing).

So again, it is a tool, but it is not the best tool for the job for every person, especially developers.

I've been running ubuntu 20.04 for the past few years. You can have hot swap batteries and an inbuilt SIM slot if you choose. Not sure if the fingerprint is working (I didn't select that option) but everything else works flawlessly.

Side note: I have been maintaining an Ansible playbook for years now that sets up my developer workstation. I do know Ansible already, but I think it's a worthwhile weekend project if you are starting from scratch. You just need to be consistent and have all changes go through Ansible.

There are two reasons for this - Fedora ships a far more recent kernel than most distros (the only competitor being Arch), and Redhat does a lot of work on Thinkpad support. On my T430 at home literally everything worked out of the box with zero config, all the way down to fingerprint reader and keyboard backlight.

[0] https://ubuntu.com/certified

There were some BIOS settings to change first to get the machine dual-boot ready, nothing fancy so as I don't even remember what it was. Getting a bootable USB stick was more challenging for me!

Things get a bit fiddly if you want to use something like Manjaro or Fedora. But even then, it all just works.

This is my setup, so a bit different from yours though:

  ESS-15-AMD
  ESSENTIAL 15" AMD
  Memoria RAM 16GB
  Teclado Español
  Sistema Operativo Sin Sistema
  Pendrive No
  Wifi Intel AX200
  M2 250GB SSD NVMe
  Modulo SIM NO
  Procesador Ryzen 5 4500U

  659,00 €

Battery life is still about 6-8 hours when using text editor/developing or about 4-5, if watching movies. It's quite heavy laptop, but still fine for couch-slouching. A bit too heavy for travel.

It's a year old and so far it does have some discoloration on plastic, but nothing has broken and it feels fairly solid. The KDE Slimbook you've chosen seems to have aluminium body, so it would probably far outlast my basic plastic version.

No complaints so far about any keys stopping from working or feeling odd switching between it and my full-size more clicky keyboard.

I recently picked up an old 2005-ish (edit: 2011 actually) x220 for a few hundred quid off ebay which seems to be running nicely. Specs aren't anything to shout about but it works fine for what it is. Durability wise, its clearly been running for at least 15 (edit: 10?) years so its got something to it.

The keyboard is the best, I have never used a laptop with a better one.

Using a dual core sandybridge is slow but if you develop on a slow machine you'll never build something your customers can't use.

You can install coreboot on it and remove IME.

It is on the list of systems Qubes (and every other Linux) runs 100% on.

The screen is only 720p but you can install a 1080p with a mod.

12in is borderline too small a screen size but the laptop is compact.

An extended battery in it gets around 8hrs of use.

Almost the entire machine is magnesium, aside from a strip of plastic at the top covering the antennas.

It can actually run 1600mhz 16gb of RAM.

This is the philosophy I try to go by. Some call it premature optimisation, but I just like working on optimisation as part of the normal dev process, rather than a secondary step which is all too easy to gloss over.

It gets a bit more difficult when it comes to game dev though, which is the current dilemma I'm in (need a new personal machine, which may end up being the x220, but that'll find use in any case).

The x220 launched in 2011. It's an old machine, but not that old.

That said, I ran one myself for years and highly recommend it if you need a barebones, durable laptop for under 200ish.

I think I like the HP one slightly better: function keys can be set to trigger either F1-F12 or to the actions drawn on them without the Fn key (and the Fn key swaps this). If set to the actions by default, F1-F12 are still automatically used when pressing a modifier key, and no action is on F2, which means I almost never need to use the Fn key for those and I can intuitively use alt+F4. That's not the case on the ThinkPad. It has a proper menu key (on the Thinkpad, they decided to replace it to screen capture, which is on FN+Right Caps on the HP). I like the metal feeling of the case and the feeling of the keyboard (but the ThinkPad is good on these areas too). Both have a touchscreen, and there are visible, diagonal lines on the Thinkpad's screen. Which is not very problematic, but better without. The HP has an Ethernet port, too. I think Linux works slightly better on the HP too: the sound automatically switches to the headphone when plugged, and switches back to the internal speakers when unplugged, on the same distro (openSUSE Tumbleweed). Though that might be some settings issue. S3 sleep works flawlessly on the HP. On the ThinkPad, it is not supported and indeed it does not work well. They decided to switch to whatever Windows decided to do with suspend, which does not really turns off components but put them in low power mode, which is a mess.

The ThinkPad is lighter, probably has a better sound from the internal speakers (though the HP's sound is correct too). The trackpoint on the ThinkPad is way more useful, you can scroll with it by holding the touchpad's upper middle button which is not there on the HP.

Both have a long battery life. I can recommend both.

I've not tried the KDE Slimbook 15, but it is a more expensive rebranded version of another model if I remember correctly.

I've had several HPs over the years, including ZBooks, and every single one got very hot and blasts the fans all the feckin time :/

They were all company machines, but it's put me off ever buying one myself.

The 840 G3 was similar in this respect (that's how I discovered the Elitebook, the lab had an agreement with HP at the time), except I had to turn off the secondary HDD I chose to take when tweaking the configuration with hdparm -Y.

Though the ZBook seems more focused on performance than the Elitebook, so maybe the Elitebook will not cut it if you expect similar performance.

The ThinkPad actually spins its fans more easily than the HP I think, but it is also more powerful. The HP's noise when the fan do spin is also less annoying than the ThinkPad, it's a soft blow.

These are contradicting conditions. (Unless maybe on an M1?)

If you do use the CPU then battery life will drop even for the best laptops to a few hours max, while the fans will spin like crazy emulating a helicopter taking off. All the above mentioned laptops will behave like that.

At my last place I had a Thinkpad P1 which is supposedly for the above mentioned purpose, and still I suffered from heating and noise, and the battery life was abysmal (2 hours of Zoom call would deplete it, for example).

Although I just noticed that you didn't mention portability - in which case buy an older Thinkpad T4xx/5xx which had the dual battery setup, and buy some additional batteries too, and you can swap them on the fly. Sadly AFAIK Lenovo no longer makes these laptops...

Battery life tips: 1. get the simplest screen (FHD instead of 4K, 90Hz...). 2. don't get an integrated 3D card.

This sounds counter-intuitive. I thought integrated graphics used less power than a discrete amd/nvidia card.

It's an alpha, and there are significant things that don't work yet including HDMI, displayport, thunderbolt, GPU acceleration, video acceleration, and sleep/deep idle.

https://asahilinux.org/2022/03/asahi-linux-alpha-release/

The only issue I have is that original Docking station sometimes fails to switch audio outputs (Ubuntu LTS).

Using less battery power:

- use `powertop` to find processes that are sucking power

- stop browsers when not in use (e.g. `killall -STOP firefox-esr`, then same with -CONT when using them again, although Firefox tends to first spin 100% for a little while then; alternatively simply `killall firefox-esr`, Firefox will usually re-open the tabs)

- I use hibernate

Retaining battery life over the years:

- AFAIK Li-ion batteries last longest when kept cool, and when kept in the 30%..70% charged range most of the time; there used to be ways to tell ThinkPads to stop charging when reaching 70%, I've never used that though.

- I'm still hoping LiFePO4 (LFP) batteries will be sold for laptops some day, they would last much longer (but I guess when it happens, most third-party ones will be fakes (re-labelled Li-ion)...)

I have for the past 5 years or so focused on battery life over compute for my machines and then used RDP to access a VM dev machine hosted in azure. It’s worked great, and I was able to use free azure credits that came with msdn. You can do similar with ec2 and google compute. There are also container based dev environment services out there now. The benefit being you don’t need dev cruft on your everyday carry laptop. Plus if you get a new laptop or have multiple, your dev environment doesn’t change.

That said I did just switch to an m1 max as I also need to do Xcode. That has been a solid machine, though might be above budget. You could run Linux on it pretty sure.

As much as I appreciate the privacy and freedom enhancing aspects of some of these devices, ultimately a device that’s more practical for me in day to day usage wins out.

That generally leaves me with a more established manufacturer. Lenovo Thinkpad and Ideapad have options in this area and run Linux just fine. Dell XPSes are good too, though I wish they’d offer an AMD option. HP Envy/Spectre devices are rather decent too, though getting the touchscreen and sensors to work on these can be fiddly because HP compensates for their broken BIOS through the Windows drivers instead of just fixing shit.

Be very careful. They are very good laptops, and Dell's customer support for businesses is stellar, but the XPS machines play VERY bad with Linux. There are some XPS machines that are shipped with linux, so they should be fine. But most of them have wifi/bluetooth chips that have no support at all, or very bad support.

On my 9343 bluetooth did not work initially, and on the 9370 the fingerprint reader is not available (no driver available), but apart from that linux is just working - and I'm not particular fond of spending time on setting things up.

Much more of an issue is that the xps, as every non apple computer does not support s3 sleep anymore. So just closing the lid and putting it in a bag can lead to overheating and battery drain.

Honestly I don't get, why we can't have decent power management unless you buy a mac.

That's good to hear for you, but I'm not just making this up. I have the XPS 13 9310 which mostly comes with the AX500 chip for wifi and bluetooth.

- For about half a year it had NO support in Ubuntu (non-existent drivers)

- Then it finally got drivers, but it was extremely unstable. After an automatic update from ubuntu, the wifi no longer worked and it took several weeks for it to be fixed.

- The bluetooth VERY often won't turn on after a reboot, requiring me to reboot about 5 times before it finally works.

- Same for wifi, even on the latest drivers it often can't find any networks.

- Some networks can't be found by the linux drivers. No problems at all under windows, with the same laptop.

- Crashes or freezes of the whole OS as a result of these drivers.

There's probably a ton more issues that I'm forgetting...

Their compatibility is not as good as they say (it needs a couple of tweaks, one of which is crucial, otherwise the machine eats batteries while on standby), but it's still decent. Definitely not "VERY bad".

I’ve always run distributions with kernel releases that aren’t months or years behind upstream, which might have helped as far as hardware support goes.

Unless you plan to put them into a bag or backpack suspended:

With regards to transporting your laptop in a bag or backpack, safety should be your primary concern. You should always turn the laptop OFF [...] Under no circumstances should you leave a laptop powered on and in any sleep/hibernate/standby mode when placed in a bag, backpack, or in an overhead bin. The laptop will overheat as a result of that action.

https://www.dell.com/community/XPS/FAQ-Modern-Standby/td-p/7...

Only issue I have so far is that I have a crumb stuck under the shift key and haven't figured out how to get it out without damaging the key. It's a very flat keyboard which may not be for everyone.

---- MORE: Librems looked pretty cool. I might get one next.

But I've been running my T480s since 2018 and it is still going strong, I don't imagine I'll replace it unless I drop it on hard ground... wait I've done that. or spill coffee on it... wait I did that too. Did I mention they were durable as heck?

For software: I run PopOS for ubuntu-easy software and compatbility with a Regolith PPA because i3 window managers are amazing. Since its a thinkpad, you can swap out and replace most parts easily including the battery when it eventually wears out (literally takes <10 minutes).

Is good keyboard quantifiable somehow? As good as old T?

https://consumer.huawei.com/en/laptops/matebook-14-amd-2020/

Similar build and high power CPUs (not the mobile optimized/low power)

Would be still more performant than most of intel laptops in 2000$ range.

You can’t really do that, yet. Asahi is making good strides so that you can run Linux on the M1, but it’s not there yet for a daily driver.

Do you have a habit of modifying your wifi drivers and recompiling the source? I am big on open source but have never felt my life was improved chasing dependencies vs just brew install ... I have never had a satisfactory battery + sleep/standby experience on a linux machine, vs a Mac I can leave unplugged for weeks and it wakes back up where I left off, battery still holding charge, so I'm just curious what is worth the tradeoff, especially when your priorities are battery life, computational performance, and hardware longevity (I get a new MacBook every ~5 years)

Basically, I want Linux because I am familiar with how Linux and Linux tooling works, and that makes me very efficient on Linux. Using MacOS is okay but it feels somewhat like having one hand tied behind my back.

(As an aside: In 2022, I don't recognize the comments about modifying WiFi drivers, compiling from source or having sleep/resume issues. That definitely used to be the case in the distant past, but over the last five years or so Ubuntu have really got their stuff together. I don't think I would have ever recognized the comments on brew, which I always found infuriating and messy compared to apt. Perhaps it all comes down to taste, and that's okay?)

I agree about power management, but having freedom to configure things like this is a bigger factor for me personally. As far as package management, my experience with apt has been better than my experience using brew, though both are serviceable.

[0]: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/17929/how-can-i-di...

Tiling is snappy, workspace switching is instant. And I'm on a pre-m1 machine with 16GB RAM.

> Do you have a habit of modifying your wifi drivers and recompiling the source?

Not even once. But thank god for the people who do put in the effort to code support for shitty walled gardens[1]. This age old strawman argument diverts attention away from many of the other virtues of Linux.

My personal coding and gaming machine runs Linux. My work laptop is MacOS. Almost every day (as no exaggeration) there is something new that doesn't work on MacOS, that yet another hostage of the Apple ecosystem has fixed for Apple.

> improved chasing dependencies vs just brew install

This is a very strange comment considering that brew was inspired by Linux package managers. Brew is incredible compared to what is available on MacOS (which, to be clear, is nothing), but it doesn't hold a candle to what's happening in the Linux world - especially with the likes of ostree, guix, and nix.

MacOS is an operating system designed for creators and influencers. It can be modified to the bare minimum of development competency. Even Windows pulls ahead of it with WSL, and that's saying something.

I can't comprehend why developers voluntarily subject themselves to it.

[1]: https://asahilinux.org/

1. The much frequency with which stuff just works on OSX.

2. The opportunities to spend $30 on an app instead of $300-$800 worth of time on software that is Free as in Puppy.

My 2018 MBP would lose battery on sleep too. I don't even know what shutdown does because the force trackpad still keeps clicking while "off".

It’s awesome that I can build custom PAM modules and disk encryption unlocking solutions to enforce that both a password and a YubiKey need to be present to unlock the disk. I love being able to configure my display manager to discard the decryption keys for my user pool when I log out to get the same kind of security that I’d have on a phone.

Being able to modify soft- and hardware allows you to add features that other OS vendors don’t yet support, or retrofit new features and functionality onto old hardware to make it usable far beyond its planned EOL.

Do you actually do that, or do you just like the idea of being able to do it ? Even on a desktop PC, where upgrading is much easier and more common, I've never seen the point.

Either you upgrade fairly often, in which case you pay a relatively large amount for marginal improvements, or you upgrade every few years, in which case you need to replace so many parts you might as well replace the entire machine.

Say you upgrade the CPU to a newer model after a year, that's a fairly costly upgrade and how much additional performance will you get in return ?

If you wait a few years to upgrade your CPU, you'll find that the new CPU also requires a new motherboard, and the new motherboard requires a new type of RAM. They you find out that your old GPU is now a bottleneck, and when replacing that you realise your new GPU requires an new power supply as well. By the time you're finished all you've done is recycled the case.

e.g., if just the RAM is an issue, I don’t have to buy an entirely new device and pay extra for everything else.

Also, bugs in the OS where you're completely at the mercy of Apple. I like to do custom re-mappings on my keyboard, and the last time I tried a mac (around 2016), the keyboard reverted to the default layout every time I viewed a pdf. At the time, there was no way of fixing this issue. Along with the glossy screen, this issue convinced me that MacOS was not at the time a viable platform for me.

Out of the box, Linux UI is a bit better - but it's easy to make it excellent and make it fit like a glove. Tiling or partially tiling managers outside of Linux are terrible.

Whether you like a default full fledged desktop experience with Plasma or you go with a super tuned sway, you can really get what you want out of your machine.

The UI is the main reason I try to use Linux as much as I can but there are tons of other advantages. Docker works natively and fast, developing anything (but iOS apps) is a smooth experience. Package managers are 20 years ahead brew or chocolate on Windows.

If you use Arch you get an even better package manager experience compared to other distro: you get bleeding edge packages + AUR, a user contributed repository of scripts to build and install custom packages.

If you use something like NixOS you get to define your system with a configuration file and you can truly bootstrap and switch between different systems with a CLI command.

Speaking of big brands, the Dell XPS developer edition is on paper very Linux compatible, although in pratice, it's (insulting) marketing fluff (I've had one). I second the Thinkpads compatibility (I had several, I think they were T/W).

Then again, maybe they've improved since then. Mine was a 2019 model after all.

They're quite heavy but that's not an issue for me. Best bang for the buck I ever spent.

Bought it around 2015 in used condition for around 250EUR, then upgraded CPU, RAM, batteries (2x as of now), got a bigger SSD and HDD (512GB+4TB) and got an IPS display and a touchpad of the T480 which fits in there.

I just love that laptop. Superb linux support once you figured out how to setup the synaptics driver configs with synclient.

Oh and it's also the last generation (afaik) that can run coreboot as a BIOS.

Overall I probably spent around 800EUR on it, but considering its lifetime (sold in 2013-today) I say it's definitely worth it. So many "Ultrabooks" and Macbook Pros died on me before, because I always overstressed their GPUs.

There's a German Thinkpad wiki that contains all kinds of quirks and potential problems you can get, it's an amazing resource.

The tldr is you should update the BIOS first and update the firmware of your dockingstation with windows running, and then install linux to be safe. [1]

[1] https://thinkwiki.de/ThinkPad-Modelle

edit: Oh and I used an external m.2 adapter to PCI-e occasionally when I have to do ML related work when I'm not at home on my tower. It kinda works but performance is limited to somewhat PCI-e 4x speed even when it says 8x mode is being used.

I’m currently using a T470 [1] with 16 GB DDR-3 3200MHz RAM [2], a 2 TB NVMe SSD [3], a Wi-Fi 6AX card [4], the Innolux N140HCG-GQ2 1080p 100% sRGB 8-bit 400 nits panel [5] (based on the T14 / T490 display), and the Lenovo 61++ battery [6].

The result is a laptop that can hold 17 hours of battery (95Wh), supports a Thunderbolt 3 dock and the old Lenovo dock, supports USB-C PD charging and the old Lenovo charging port and is the perfect mix of performance, repairability, and compatibility.

You can build this laptop yourself, depending on how the pricing is where you are, for about 600 €.

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[1] https://www.afbshop.de/notebooks/20668/lenovo-thinkpad-t470-... [2] https://www.amazon.de/dp/B08LQG2SDS/ [3] https://www.amazon.de/dp/B07MLJD32L/ [4] https://www.amazon.de/dp/B087WVLPXW/ [5] https://www.xelent-store.de/Innolux-N140HCG-GQ2-400cd-Low-Po... [6] https://www.amazon.de/dp/B06WGMPFCD

Honestly, I don't even know what to get in case it would break. I even have a spare mainboard just because it was 30 bucks on eBay. But in case it would fail completely, I don't know how to replace it.

Most other devices would be a major downgrade in repairability, which I meanwhile value so much that getting yet another Ultrabook that runs 2 years would be no option for me. The framework laptop and the System76 devices look nice, and either of those would probably win in that case, depending on which system is more easily repairable.

But still, they're by far not as easily repairable when components break down.

However, I'd recommend a DELL or Samsung with a high-res OLED display. Those are gorgeous and have great color and luminance contrast for text.

Asus rog strix

You'll thank me later

- Run it in by fully charge it 2-3 times, (deplete it with normal use)

- Normal use keep it between 20-80%, write yourself a script or something to stop charging manually/automatically

- Deplete/fully charge it quarterly or twice a year to give the bms a change to balance the cells.

AFAIK it's not the balancing that needs to happen periodically, but the measurement of the voltage curve so that estimates are shown correctly. Balancing should happen all the time (and is, AFAIK, usually done by a low-level circuit, not a microprocessor) regardless of how far you charge or discharge. But if you know more, feel free to correct me.

If there is any leeway here, I would seriously recommend switching. You cannot beat the M1 MacBooks and macOS is close enough to Linux anyway.