I’m trying to downsize from an aging gaming laptop to an ultrabook I can use for writing, web browsing, and JavaScript / Python web development. I understand an ultrabook will be a downgrade in the performance department, but I don’t need all the performance my current laptop offers.

I’ve been looking at ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 8 machines and they seem like a good sweet spot of price to recent parts/repair-ability. Anybody have other suggestions for Linux ultrabooks? Needs to be <$400 USD.

PS. For more intense tasks, such as training language models, I plan on renting cloud compute as I don’t have the space for a deep learning machine at home.

edit: meant under $400, I am a dumbass

  • I was rocking a revived Thinkpad W540 which probably cost me around that price after I upgraded everything I could. The only word of caution I’ll give you if searching the used market is that older NVIDIA cards are deprecated by newer drivers on top of NVIDIA Optimus being a royal pain in the ass on Linux.