Ask HN: Best Windows/Linux developer laptop in 2025

* Macbook is not an option

* I go through phases and switch between Windows and Linux as my primary OS.

* Want to be able to mess around with some local LLMs.

* I travel frequently, so portability is somewhat important. Currently own a 13 inch, but 14 inch should work too I think.

Notes:

* My current laptop is a 6yr old Dell XPS. It has generally served me well.

* I bought an Asus Zenbook for a family member and I have been impressed with how well it has worked out. Anyone with any recent experience with Asus laptops for development?

* I have had bad experiences with Lenovo twice, which makes me wary of Thinkpads, but willing to consider it if it makes the most sense.

* Framework look very appealing but I have heard mixed reviews.

* 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.

If you want to run local LLMs on a laptop and actually have them be useful, a Mac is currently the only real choice.

That said, with the money you save buying a Linux laptop instead, you can pay for a lot of tokens for whatever hosted LLM you want and it will be higher quality than what you could potentially run locally on a Mac.

- Framework reviews are important to figure out the current generation. I tried one out and it had few issues other than me not having the time to tweak it how I wanted. Hardware was great, battery wasn't great at that time (needed simple software optimizations), but Framework now has larger batteries too that seem to have resolved that. The folks I know with them have mostly switched from Mac or X1 Carbons to Frameworks and quite happy with it.

- Specifically for travel, the recently announced Framework 12" looks really inviting if travel looks like the way to go.

To run an LLM on either, some amount of extra ram might help, depending on the model... if you want something heavier it might be cheaper to run a model privately in the cloud as needed, or use an eGPU and plug it in when you want. Local LLM use seems to be fun, but having something at home running it so it's accessible seems serviceable too.