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Ask HN: Best Windows/Linux developer laptop in 2025

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Re: Ask HN: Best Windows/Linux developer laptop in 2025

#51

Post by MattPalmer1086 »

edtech_dev wrote: post #42
matteotom wrote: post #33

Were your Lenovo experiences with Thinkpads or something else? I've heard that their non-Thinkpad laptops are not up to the same quality as Thinkpads - personally except for a couple years using a MacBook Pro, I've had great experiences with top of the line Thinkpads (x-series mostly) over the past 15 years. My current x13 (gen 5) w/ 32GB of memory can handle local LLMs (not terribly quickly, but it works).

One of the issues was with a Thinkpad and another was with an Ideapad.

Even the ThinkPad range has a lot of variation in it and there are lots of build customisation options. I have never had a major issue with ThinkPads on Linux. I tend to spec them quite highly and keep them for many years.

I just bought a new T16 a month ago and it's great (32Gb RAM, sRGB screen, 2Tb SSD, Ryzen 7 processor). Installed PopOS in about 20 mins and everything just works.

However, as others in this thread have observed, I don't really see the point of trying to run local LLMs on a laptop, unless you want to just play a little. If you want to really play with LLMs wouldn't a separate larger box be more effective rather than trying to do it on a mobile device?

Re: Ask HN: Best Windows/Linux developer laptop in 2025

#53

Post by jensens »

I can personally recommend the "Tuxedo Infinity Book 14 Pro" maxed out on options with Linux/Windows Dual Boot preinstalled. AMD and Intel are offered both (personally I would choose Intel, because it comes with Thunderbolt 4). Also: up to 96GB RAM and PCIe4 SSDs.

Instead of Dual Boot they also offer a preinstalled VM with a licensed Windows. Tuxedo OS Linux is a slightly modified Ubuntu optimized for their Hardware.

Re: Ask HN: Best Windows/Linux developer laptop in 2025

#54

Post by kokada »

FlyingAvatar wrote: post #3

You have two requirements that are at odds: * Macbook is not an option * Want to be able to mess around with some local LLMs. Your choices for a Window laptop that can run a local LLM is either to get a large amount of system RAM and have it be abysmally slow, or to run a very tiny model on a discrete GPU which will (a) not be very good due to its small size and high quantization and (b) evaporate your battery life.…

> You have two requirements that are at odds:

Not really now that we have the AMD Strix Halo: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/02/review-asus-rog-flow....

The only available SKU right now is the above one that is a weird gaming tablet/laptop that seems to not be good in either (too heavy for a tablet, too cramped for laptop usage), but the performance is definitely there (similar performance of RTX 4060 for laptop, using a similar TDP of only the GPU for the whole APU) and you also have 32GB of unified memory for LLMs. Also, the chipset itself supports up to 128GB of RAM, so technically in future we could have an even better SKUs for LLMs (but nothing announced yet AFAIK).

Re: Ask HN: Best Windows/Linux developer laptop in 2025

#56

Post by d3Xt3r »

juujian wrote: post #40
d3Xt3r wrote: post #38

I second @jamesliudotcc's suggestion (ASUS ROG Flow Z13). One of the key differentiators vs other laptops is the 128GB unified RAM which runs at 8000 MT/s, which should be excellent for LLMs - I'm not aware of any laptop that can do better, in this form-factor and this level of portability. Specs aside, this machine can also run Linux well [1], which makes it worth buying, IMO. And if it can run Linux well, then usin…

Except AMD still has not figured out how to deliver on LLM acceleration on Linux.

Not sure what you mean by that, but ROCm works just fine. I'm using a patched ollama (for APU support) [1] and I can run models like llama3.1:8b and deepseek-r1:14b just fine on my Radeon 780M iGPU, on Arch (btw).

[1] https://github.com/rjmalagon/ollama-linux-amd-apu

Re: Ask HN: Best Windows/Linux developer laptop in 2025

#57

Post by giantg2 »

FlyingAvatar wrote: post #3

You have two requirements that are at odds: * Macbook is not an option * Want to be able to mess around with some local LLMs. Your choices for a Window laptop that can run a local LLM is either to get a large amount of system RAM and have it be abysmally slow, or to run a very tiny model on a discrete GPU which will (a) not be very good due to its small size and high quantization and (b) evaporate your battery life.…

You have the third option of getting a USB processing unit, such as a Coral TPU.

Re: Ask HN: Best Windows/Linux developer laptop in 2025

#58

Post by giantg2 »

matteotom wrote: post #33

Were your Lenovo experiences with Thinkpads or something else? I've heard that their non-Thinkpad laptops are not up to the same quality as Thinkpads - personally except for a couple years using a MacBook Pro, I've had great experiences with top of the line Thinkpads (x-series mostly) over the past 15 years. My current x13 (gen 5) w/ 32GB of memory can handle local LLMs (not terribly quickly, but it works).

Lenovo got bought out years ago and quality gas suffered. Their non-thinkpads are low quality, but also low price. I wouldn't want to do any coding on them.

Re: Ask HN: Best Windows/Linux developer laptop in 2025

#59

Post by hn92726819 »

edtech_dev wrote: post #15
FlyingAvatar wrote: post #3

You have two requirements that are at odds: * Macbook is not an option * Want to be able to mess around with some local LLMs. Your choices for a Window laptop that can run a local LLM is either to get a large amount of system RAM and have it be abysmally slow, or to run a very tiny model on a discrete GPU which will (a) not be very good due to its small size and high quantization and (b) evaporate your battery life.…

Running LLMs is more of a nice to have. If I can run something like DeepSeek-Coder-V2 even if it's a bit slow, I'll be happy.

If you have a powerful computer at home, you can also offload your ai work to it. It's still local in the sense it's your computer, but it would require network access.

Re: Ask HN: Best Windows/Linux developer laptop in 2025

#60

Post by carlosjobim »

LorenDB wrote: post #37
carlosjobim wrote: post #27

You could buy a MacBook and scratch away the logo, then replace it with a logo of your preferred brand.

That won't fix Windows compatibility or the stupid keyboard layout (i.e. control/option/command instead of the normal control/meta/alt).

You can easily pry off the keys and change them around to suit your own layout.
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