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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?

#421

Post by nortonham »

xet7 wrote: post #236
nortonham wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

parallels cost money? or am i wrong about that? There's no qemu equivalent on mac I don't think.

Yes, Parallels costs money, and if you run Win11 arm64, buying license for that also costs money. UTM is Qemu. Qemu can be compiled for macOS and Linux. I just today figured out how to compile Qemu on arm64 (actually using OrangePi that has 16 GB RAM and is arm64, similar like Linux on M1) so that it can run ReactOS. OrangePi has 8 cores (shown with "nproc"), so I used "make -j8" to make compiling use all cores, comp…

thanks, this is extremely helpful. Any idea if there is something like virt manager for macos. So far I'm not a fan of UTM.

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

#422

Post by stonecharioteer »

I've just bought the 2022 Asus X13 Flow with a Ryzen 9 6900HS and a 3050Ti. I wanted an ultra portable 2-in-1 so I didn't need a tablet and a laptop and because I wanted to travel in 2023.

Fedora works very well. I used the instructions on https:///www.asus-linux.com and everything except the fingerprint reader works. I used a ThinkPad T14s AMD Gen 2 before this, and while I loved it, Lenovo is becoming increasingly difficult to order from. I couldn't custom build a 32GB laptop any more, and I found it harder to identify which of their thinkpads I wanted to buy. I love the X13 Flow.

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

#423

Post by ex2can »

daviddever23box wrote: post #351

Currently using a first-generation Lambda Tensorbook / Razer Blade 15" Advanced (2021) - this is the Intel Tiger Lake-H variant (no P/E cores in this device) with a 15" QHD screen and an NVIDIA RTX 30-Series discrete graphics processor (see https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/04/razer-designed-linux... ). My other Linux laptop is a Dell Precision m5520, which shipped with Ubuntu 14.04 IIRC and has a 4K touchscreen.…

+1 for Razer Blade here with Linux. Great maintainability. For example, there's an extra M2 slot for another SSD

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

#424

Post by Lio »

rendall wrote: post #416
Lio wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dell only support the XPS 13 for Linux. I like mine, it's not perfect but seems pretty acceptable. Everything works out of the box including bluetooth, battery life isn't great though. If you want a larger screened Dell for Linux you should definitely go with the Precision line that you mentioned as you can order them with Linux out of the box. You might be OK with an XPS 15 or 17 but I've heard of issues with the GP…

> Dell only support the XPS 13 for Linux. They won't refuse to repair it. It's identical in all ways except for the screen size, so. If something really weird happens, they might kick it back to you, but nothing really weird is going to happen. > My advice for buying any Linux laptop would be always get one that comes with Linux out of the box even if you're going to replace it. Or get a Dell XPS 17 and install your…

It’s not the warrantee, it’s the device drivers.

All the parts of the XPS 13 are expected to work well with Linux. They've been selected specifically for that and they’ll receive firmware updates to improve that situation.

That’s not the same on the XPS17. On an XPS 17 the parts just have to work with Windows. They might work or they might not.

If something doesn’t work with Linux on the XPS 13 or Precision model it’s someone at Dell’s paid job to fix it. On an XPS 15 or XPS 17 it’s your job.

Get an XPS 17 if you want one obviously but you're not buying the same experience.

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

#425

Post by mypalmike »

djtango wrote: post #176
mypalmike wrote: post #152

I think the Thinkpad E series might be considered cheap junk here, but my Ryzen 7 E14 with 40GB RAM runs Windows 11 and Ubuntu great. I am using the extra SSD slot for Linux so I didn't have to partition anything. All the hardware works (though I haven't tried the fingerprint scanner yet). The only issue I've had is it doesn't love waking up the DisplayPort through the hub I bought, but that's likely a hub problem, a…

I was super tempted by the E14 this year as they had one with 40GB ram and discrete graphics but the 200/300 NITs display turned me off. Ended up getting a P14s instead

Yeah I'm super unfussy about displays, but can understand why that would dissuade some.

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

#426

Post by ergonaught »

piyh wrote: post #111
ergonaught wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't any major issues running Linux in a VM on an M1. Not my first choice, perhaps, but it's certainly functional.

How do you do this? I'm relatively new to mac, tried UTM and everything was stuck in QEMU modes and had terrible performance.

UTM is working fine for me, provided I'm using an arm distro. Chip emulation is a hard no.

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

#427

Post by NikolaNovak »

djtango wrote: post #186
NikolaNovak wrote: post #128

Interesting that x1 gets much more love than the canonical T series thinkpads. Myself, I am buying up the t480 laptops as they are I believe last generation to have easily user replaceable external batteries. Laptops with internal battery only make me claustrophobic :-/

My x240 had hot swappable batteries, I could get almost 16 hours of hardcore usage even after years of use. Those were the days

Yup; I've had an x250 once upon the time which was similar: lovely form factor, and I got the extended battery for it which made for slightly better cooling, longer battery life, and it felt easy/good to carry around.

(the 40 series, I personally avoided like the plague - I'm a trackpoint user, and the removal of the buttons for that series alone, made many an IT architect slam the poor machine onto desk in frustration; but with 50 they brought it back and haven't dared to mess with us since:)

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

#428

Post by sshine »

dima55 wrote: post #204
sshine wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> with Linux you don’t need the latest hardware If you work with compiled languages, having good hardware is a real quality of life improvement.

Depends strongly on the language and what you're compiling. C++ builds are glacial on any hardware. Plain C is usually just fine. I'm using a T430 and T61, and my life is great.

Rust and Haskell take time.

I haven't tried C++.

I have a 2021 M1 and a Linux laptop with a i7-11700 desktop CPU.

And compiling takes shorter on my computers than a lot of other computers.

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

#429

Post by chem83 »

lultimouomo wrote: post #268
fwsgonzo wrote: post #230

Nobody has tried the Lenovo Z13? I have one and it's way better than the ThinkPad I had before. It does get warm, and you can't play games on it, but it feels more premium and has a stronger CPU.

I have it and it's definitely a powerful and solid laptop with a great screen. But out-of-the-box linux support was not great at all. I am usually a debian user, but since it shipped with Ubuntu I thought I'd give it a try (there were other distro choices when ordering the laptop, but Ubuntu was the only debian-based one). The laptop came a couple of months ago with Ubuntu 20.04. I upgraded to Ubuntu 22.04, which was…

Just to confirm: are we talking about the same laptop? Can’t seem to find on Lenovo’s website that any distro is officially supported (although I may be missing something obvious).

Someone who has been interacting with their support a lot is reporting good compatibility with some workarounds: http://null.rip/2022/09/linux-on-the-thinkpad-z13-all-amd-al...

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

#430

Post by djtango »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #427
djtango wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My x240 had hot swappable batteries, I could get almost 16 hours of hardcore usage even after years of use. Those were the days

Yup; I've had an x250 once upon the time which was similar: lovely form factor, and I got the extended battery for it which made for slightly better cooling, longer battery life, and it felt easy/good to carry around. (the 40 series, I personally avoided like the plague - I'm a trackpoint user, and the removal of the buttons for that series alone, made many an IT architect slam the poor machine onto desk in frustrati…

Yes the soft buttons were awful! I remember the first time I installed Linux, the soft right click wasn't even supported. WHAT were Lenovo thinking... /facepalm

I have seen that people actually modded the x250 trackpad (with hard buttons for trackpoint) but I never had the motivation to do so after I moved to using the external trackpoint keyboard

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