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Poll: What's the best laptop for Linux these days?

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Re: Poll: What's the best laptop for Linux these days?

#281

Post by samuell »

kaivi wrote: post #90

I've gotten myself a Dell Latitude 7330 Rugged Extreme laptop recently. It's what my ideal laptop is supposed to be: easily serviceable, plenty of ports, indestructible and linux-friendly. Even the onboard WLAN supports monitoring mode. Running NixOS+xmonad on it, encountered no problems whatsoever after it was configured. One major difference from an ordinary laptop experience is the old-style resistive trackpad, bu…

I have been way less than happy with my plain 4yo Latitude 7490, although rumor says Dells should be pretty durable:

- The battery got swollen and destroyed the clips in the underneath cover when it pushed it off.

- Have had to replace both of my memory modules (Hynix something), and replace with another brand, after they broke.

- Memory modules requires re-seating at least a few times a month, especially if I run with the computer in a backpack (this is supposed to be possible to do with a durable laptop, no?)

- The NVMe SSD harddrive has needed multiple re-seatings.

- Some possible further glitches I might have forgotten.

Sad on a laptop which otherwise feels pretty great. I like the slighly rubberized coating, the keyboard, touchpad and screen, and weight is not too bad either.

Anyways, this makes me a slight bit skeptical about Dell's reputation as a durable brand in general. Others having some more hard facts on this? (I have been lately looking more towards Asus ExpertBooks, with claimed military standard durability).

Re: Poll: What's the best laptop for Linux these days?

#282

Post by Jnr »

nine_k wrote: post #269

I see very disparate use cases for these laptops, so the competition is not really that fair. - Fastest CPU + GPU + battery life, x64 not needed, money no object: M1 MBP. - Reliable, serviceable, upgradeable, fashion-despising: T14 / T480 / T490. - Serviceable, upgradable, but sort of new kids on the block, and less fashion-oblivious: Star Labs Starfighter, Framework, System 76 Oryx Pro. - Sleek-looking at the expens…

Even though M1 MBP runs Linux, it has a very basic GPU driver, no hardware acceleration for video decoding/encoding. The "Fastest CPU + GPU + battery life" probably will not be true if using Linux on it. Would be great if Asahi users could provide regular benchmarks between MacOS and Linux on M1, to see how it is progressing.

When it comes to Thinkpads and other similar laptops - get one without the dedicated Nvidia GPU. That is just a nightmare on Linux.

Re: Poll: What's the best laptop for Linux these days?

#283

Post by protortyp »

mkurz wrote: post #247
wheats wrote: post #7

Someone correct me if I am missing some nuance here but I think the two MacBook options aren't contenders for best laptop running Linux. The drivers simply don't support basic things like the touchpad or wifi (at least not without extensive reworking and a modified kernel). Perhaps in some years Asahi Linux will be functional as a daily driver on the newer ARM/Apple Silicon but it's definitely a hobby laptop right no…

You do miss some nuance here. Touchpad and Wifi does work great. I do use Asahi since more than 6 months as daily driver on my MacBook Pro M1 Pro. It works great, and now we even have a quite ok GPU Driver since like a month or so. I even run IntelliJ for Java/Scala dev. The only things not working I am waiting for is webcam and speakers. My bet in 2023 the whole system will just work for everyone and will be the kil…

Did flashing it with Linux have any impact on battery life? The main reason I switched from a Thinkpad T480 (2017) to a M2 Air two months ago was the horrible battery life of the Thinkpad. The M2 has been lasting me almost two days of work, compared to only 3 hours on the Thinkpad. But I miss quite a lot from linux

Re: Poll: What's the best laptop for Linux these days?

#284

Post by SCdF »

clepto wrote: post #158

I used a Framework for a while, and I’d definitely give it my vote for the best Linux laptop I’ve used(Also PopOS has the best out of the box support for most laptops in my experience). This being said, I traded my framework out for an M1 MacBook Pro, and just use OS X now. The reality is my OS X environment is functionally identical to Linux(and this includes very heavy use of Docker, I don’t know what anyone compla…

My experience with docker sucking on an M1 was based entirely around the images being non-native to ARM, and that completely destroying the entire laptop's performance.

I have recently changed teams though, my new setup doesn't require non-native images, and now it's fine again.

Re: Poll: What's the best laptop for Linux these days?

#286

Post by Zvez »

evil-olive wrote: post #24

I'm typing this on a brand-new Lenovo (T14s gen 3 AMD), the first brand-new laptop I've bought myself in about a decade the wifi didn't work on the 5.15 LTS kernel that NixOS defaults to, so I had to upgrade to 6.0. and there's some wonkiness with suspend, where the system will sometimes re-suspend itself a moment after opening the lid. a minor annoyance that I haven't taken the time to debug yet. my previous Lenovos…

>where the system will sometimes re-suspend itself a moment after opening the lid. a minor annoyance that I haven't taken the time to debug yet

heh, I have a similar issue on my T470 in xfce. And in my case it can sometimes even hang in this state: you see your desktop, but can't interact with it. So you have to go the terminal and kill screensaver service.

The small issues like these are the reason why I still prefer to use macbook for work: its not perfect and might be too opinionated, but at least it is predictable.

Re: Poll: What's the best laptop for Linux these days?

#287

Post by bosie »

PartiallyTyped wrote: post #280
nine_k wrote: post #269

I see very disparate use cases for these laptops, so the competition is not really that fair. - Fastest CPU + GPU + battery life, x64 not needed, money no object: M1 MBP. - Reliable, serviceable, upgradeable, fashion-despising: T14 / T480 / T490. - Serviceable, upgradable, but sort of new kids on the block, and less fashion-oblivious: Star Labs Starfighter, Framework, System 76 Oryx Pro. - Sleek-looking at the expens…

I just wanted to add that the M1 has a limitation on the number of display outputs iirc 2 for the MBP, 1 for the MBA (but > 0 solutions exist, each with their own limitations).

> but > 0 solutions exist, each with their own limitations

What are you trying to say with this “> 0” syntax? That solutions exist?

Re: Poll: What's the best laptop for Linux these days?

#289

Post by Jnr »

aussiesnack wrote: post #222
cmckn wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean to be fair he is the Linux power user.

You'd think so, but from his own account he's not. Pre Asahi he used Fedora because it was easy to get working and he found Debian too hard to install. Could just be dry Finnish humour.

For me personally it's much easier to install and maintain Arch based distros than Debian based ones. It is very simple and doesn't try to do everything in your place. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Ubuntu/Debian/Fedora and others are great if they work out of the box. As soon as some proprietary GPU or other driver gets involved it can get painful. I recently installed Fedora on latest Thinkpad with dedicated Nvidia GPU and could not get it to work properly on Fedora. Driver crashed and did not load during startup. After trying a bit I switched to Arch and while the initial setup took longer, everything works and I can actually update it without requiring to add some shady 3rd party repos or compiling essential packages after each update manually myself.

Re: Poll: What's the best laptop for Linux these days?

#290

Post by Mikeb85 »

zote wrote: post #245
boomboomsubban wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never read that about Torvolds, who I believe uses fairly standard GNOME. Could you be confusing him with Stallman who does things like use wget for browsing the internet?

They may be referring to how he uses that specific laptop. > uses fairly standard GNOME. Last I heard he is(was?) a Fedora user

Literally THE Gnome distro lol...
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