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

news.ycombinator.com

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

#391

Post by whatshisface »

noisy_boy wrote: post #337
Jnr wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thirded. As an owner of Thinkpad X1 Extreme with Nvidia GPU, I'm never going to buy another laptop with Nvidia inside.

What problems have you been having?

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

#392

Post by nine_k »

noisy_boy wrote: post #334
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…

> - Sleek-looking at the expense of everything soldered and glued down: Thinkpad X1, MBP 2019. Thinkpad X1 Extreme doesn't have soldered/glued down setup (well, except the battery): both RAM and SSD are user replaceable. Though one might argue that it is essentially a P-series machine...

Sorry; that was my extrapolation from other X1 Carbons.

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

#393

Post by hithereagain »

davidw wrote: post #117
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've also heard legends about how great Dell's Worldwide repair program is where people have had parts delivered to them next day on the island of Borneo in Indonesia, but that's yet to be tested. This was a long time ago, but I bought a Dell with Ubuntu while visiting my parents in Oregon, and took it back with me to where I was living in Innsbruck, Austria. The hard drive (I told you this was a while back) died o…

I recently paid for Dell's next day service with a new PC purchase. The PC arrived broken, and Dell refused to send anyone out to fix it. Instead, I waited weeks for a replacement, feeling like a chump.

When I complained to Dell, none of their employees seemed to understand that they had failed to honor their warranty, or why I would be disappointed.

The replacement machine works fine, but Dell violated their agreement with me and so I can no longer recommend them.

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

#394

Post by nine_k »

Aspos wrote: post #358
Jnr wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I have 4 ThinkPads with Nvidia GPUs on my desk now and none had driver issues in Ubuntu, they all work out of the box.

Noveau or Nvidia's proprietary? How's battery life when you're not using the GPU heavily (normal desktop work)?

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

#395

Post by Jnr »

Aspos wrote: post #358
Jnr wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I have 4 ThinkPads with Nvidia GPUs on my desk now and none had driver issues in Ubuntu, they all work out of the box.

They do "work", but the dynamic GPU switching is problematic, especially with Wayland. Especially when using external monitors. I could not have decent performance and heat/noise using external monitors.

You can (and really have to) stick to using X but multi-dpi monitor mixing there is problematic.

Also the KMS and tty management seems a bit buggy with Nvidia (even with early KMS).

And then even after you get all of this working "fine" with X or Wayland expect some random crashes of the desktop environment.

Then if you somehow survive the crashes, sleep mode is extremely unreliable, even when using the correct nvidia systemd hooks.

Not all of these are "driver" issues, but those are real life issues when trying to use multi-gpu laptops with Linux, when one of those GPU's come from Nvidia.

I also have Linux computers with Intel and AMD GPU's and that is a completely different story.

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

#396

Post by nine_k »

mmcnl wrote: post #372
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…

Why leave HP out of the equation? I have an EliteBook, it has two RAM slots, serviceable SSD, battery, etc. Linux works with literally 0 issues.

HP, from my experience, has a number of pretty good ideas, but I was unimpressed by the mechanical unreliability of the result :(

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

#397

Post by Aspos »

nine_k wrote: post #394
Aspos wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have 4 ThinkPads with Nvidia GPUs on my desk now and none had driver issues in Ubuntu, they all work out of the box.

Noveau or Nvidia's proprietary? How's battery life when you're not using the GPU heavily (normal desktop work)?

Nvidia proprietary. Never was interested in battery life to be honest. However my Thinkpad P1 gen3 does last coding over 4h flights, can tell you that.

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

#398

Post by noisy_boy »

whatshisface wrote: post #391
noisy_boy wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thirded. As an owner of Thinkpad X1 Extreme with Nvidia GPU, I'm never going to buy another laptop with Nvidia inside.

What problems have you been having?

I shared some in my comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34183088

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

#399

Post by monort »

michaelt wrote: post #301
mato wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I voted for the Dell XPS, but really wanted to vote for the Dell Latitude. I recently upgraded to a refurbished 8th gen (KBL, top of the line i7 model with NVMe and Thunderbolt) Latitude 7390, and everything "just works", including BIOS updates via LVFS/fwupd with only a few days lag over the announcement on Dell's site. With this level of support I finally feel like a first class citizen running Linux. Oh, and it ha…

I, meanwhile, have a Dell Precision 5570 and on the latest LTS Ubuntu it suffers from intermittent trackpad lag; crashing when moving from one docking station to another when suspended; the fans sometimes running when suspended; poor audio quality from the built-in microphone; it intermittently becomes unresponsive to mouse and keyboard; and it exclusively has USB C ports. I very much do not feel like a first class c…

Update touchpad firmware to get rid of the intermittent lag.

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

#400

Post by Octabrain »

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…

> - Reliable, serviceable, upgradeable, fashion-despising: T14 / T480 / T490.

I got motivated to buy the T14 as my next machine until I saw that the RAM is not upgradable. Only SSD and the extra M.2 slot. :(

EDIT: At least the gen 3

EDIT 2: And the AMD version.

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