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

A few years ago I would have said ThinkPads but I think there are better options available now. At the end of last year I wanted to replace my T470, and wanted to upgrade to something with a more powerful (not U-series) CPU. The ThinkPad option that fitted my requirements was on back order for months, so I looked around...

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 use a slimbook with Manjaro/i3, and it's fast. Far more performant than Macbook Pro 2017 13-inch 16GB with iOS I have to use at work (a bit older hardware to be fair) and 1/2 in price. No freezing, can run PyCharm, VSCode and be on a video call with screensharing + run a pacman install at the same time and I've not been able to get it to slow down even a bit. Meanwhile Mac crawls to a halt with Google Meet or Slack calls screen-sharing.

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 €

The only issue I have is the touchpad location and style (no explicit buttons). It's not centered at laptop middle, but instead at text part of keyboard middle, but I mostly only use keyboard. Works ok as long as I reconfigure it to count middle button presses as left-click, otherwise I tend to misclick.

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.

Thirded. Even switching to a 2 years old used T every other year is still cheaper than spending 2k just to get what's currently high end and hope it lasts you 6+ years.

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.

serious question: what is the practical difference between MacOS and Linux?

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)

These threads always surprise me with the number of people who buy new thinkpads. Nothing wrong with them I'm sure (well, maybe a few things wrong with them), I just never even considered it as an option.

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.