I’m in the market for a new Linux laptop. My current machine is a 2018 i7 with 64GB of RAM, a 4K screen, 1TB of storage, 2x USB-C and 1x USB-A.
I’m looking for something that can match my current specs but brings great battery life, modern Wi-Fi, and a fingerprint reader. I don’t have to have 4K, and may actually prefer lower resolution for the battery savings.
I’d love to hear some recommendations for a machine built within the past 12 months. Thanks in advance for your feedback!
Have you looked into the Framework Laptop? It’s highly customisable, upgradable, and repairable. I don’t actually know how well it plays with Linux but as it is appealing to techy people who like to tinker I would imagine the community to be rather active.
Yup, it’s absolutely on my list. I’m specifically interested in the 16”, but it’s not available yet. Additionally, the soonest I could get the 13” is Q4. I’m wanting something before then.
Thank you for the feedback!
I was in the same boat before Framework launched and ended up with a ThinkPad X1 Extreme.
It’s a solid machine - easy to upgrade the SSD and RAM, easy to repair, very good premium support available for an additional fee. I paid for the support and had to replace a touchpad that started acting weird. They were at my house within 24 hours and made the repair at my dining table. So much better than AppleCare.
The Linux support is great. Everything works. The build quality is good as far as pc laptops are concerned. Lots of USB ports, HDMI out, and an SD slot. That’s the next best thing to the customizable ports on the Framework. The battery is a little better than the Framework. Really can’t go wrong with either one.
You can never go wrong with Thinkpad. Both of mine are 10+ years old and still running and they do with realyl well with Linux
Was looking at a Thinkpad; how well does Linux run in a web developer/graphic designer element? Is it pretty easy, specs wise?
I had an extreme, as nice as it was it kind of sucked on Linux due to all the dual gpu weirdness (working hdmi or battery longevity, pick one)
Has this changed recently? Because it used to be due to the wiring of hdmi though the external gpu
I have a gen4 with Nvidia 3050, and with the newer cards/drivers the support for power states is actually decent. On arch I don’t need any of the trickery you used to have to do to power off the card, if the card is not used for some time (less than a minute) it properly shut downs, and powertop reports something around 9w of power usage if you don’t fire up the CPU for compilation or such. When a program needs it, it powers back on. You still have some of the Linux/Nvidia headaches (with Wayland etc.) but it’s much better than it used to be
I’ll take a look. Thank you for the recommendation.
Take this with a grain of salt since I’m not a framework owner (but very interested in getting one), but heads up that I consistently hear its battery life isn’t the best. The modularity makes it less efficient or something, iirc.
Apparently nowadays they were able to extend the battery life quite a bit with the new generation of 61Wh batteries (instead of the previous 55Wh)
Ah, good to know.
The battery indeed by no means (at least on intel 11th, 12th gen cpus) is what I would call exceptional (4-9 hours on a i5 1240p with two USB-A, two USB-C passive modules). Some expansion modules such as the microSD reader can be a detriment to battery life overall as well as some modules (like the older revision of the HDMI module) have issues not powering off for power saving properly.
For the HDMI module, Framework has published a guide for those that wish to mod their older revision HDMI modules to get power saving to work like how it does on the new revision. As such, there is hope that for those skilled enough to do their own repairs that the worse off modules today may be able to be made better tomorrow rather than thrown away for a new revision.
Noted, tyvm for the info!
Edit: sorry for sending this thrice, had network issue
I’d seriously keep waiting for the 16" Framework. It’s definitely going to be worth it.
If you like open source bios and trackpoint along with hot swappable mechanical keys, then take a look at System76 Virgo.
I like the idea of a System76 machine, but have never used one IRL. Nor do I know of anyone who has one. As a result, I’m hesitant on making the leap without some level of expertise/experience to back up the decision.
I’ve owned a few System76 laptops and they never seemed quite right. I’ve bought three, one I returned for no fault of theirs, I just thought it was far too big. The second I have had for 5 years, but it’s nearly dead now. Graphical glitching, might be as simple as a loose cable, but I have found the time to try to fix it. This laptop also has an issue where the keyboard drops keystrokes frequently enough to drive you mad, but not so frequently that they were able to warranty repair. Finally, I recently (2022) purchased a new one that I had I’ve had to send a back due to hardware issues immediately out of the box. They do have very good customer support, but it’s a shame that I’ve had bad experiences with the hardware itself. It’s been a while, but I’m still gunshy about pulling the trigger on System76 again.
This is the kinda thing that concerns me. I don’t want to get to a point where I’m unable to use the machine after spending the time to migrate to it.
I wouldn’t use one. They made PopOS, and it’s just crappy Ubuntu with a bunch of garbage changes.
I wouldn’t expect this in the next year at least.
It does have official support for some Linux distros, and their forum is full of Linux users
I’m trying to aim for the Framework Laptop 16. Coming out soon. Should be very modular.
Same!
Talking about the devil… 🎂 I just received an email for pre ordering.
Owno… the price tag… :\
Nevermind almost as expensive as Lenovo.
But once you’re in the environment, upgrades will be much cheaper than getting a new machine.
True that!.. I actually pre-ordered the Framework 16 now.
Same here. There’s really no reason why I should have to throw away the whole machine if the keyboard goes marginal after a few years or I decide I want a faster CPU.
Pre-order is placed!
If your OK with arm I’d say the macbooks and especially the macbook air are ready with asahi for daily use. I’m personally considering getting to run linux on as daily driver.
That’s an interesting point. I could buy my wife a new Air and update her M1 to run Linux. Thanks for the suggestion!
Check the status of Asahi Linux, they’re making a lot of progress on Apple silicon, but it’s very early. I wouldn’t recommend it, at this point.
Do you actually need 64GB of RAM? The Thinkpad T16 AMD would be a good choice, but the T14s AMD has just stupidly low fan noise in Notebookcheck’s review. You definitely want to focus on AMD, Intel’s efficiency is… not great right now. As an added benefit, you get AMD graphics from the APU, so none of the Nvidia driver fuckery, and better performance than Intel.
Personally, I’m waiting for the T14s Gen 4 AMD. The 7840u is zen 4, GCN 3, and TSMC 4nm over the 6850u’s zen 3, GCN2, and TSMC 6nm. The T14 and T16 just hit Lenovo’s model database ‘psref’ earlier this week, so I’d expect them out in the next couple months. The T14s hasn’t been seen yet, I’d guess it hits psref in the next couple weeks. But, I’m prepared to wait into Q4, if need be, and some think I will be.
Yeah, the RAM is a hard requirement. I’d like more if I could. My desktop is AMD so I’m not against using them at all if it makes sense to do so. I’ve also enjoyed Lenovo in the past but couldn’t find a well enough equipped unit for my liking.
What are you doing that makes having 64gb ram useful?
They already answered this:
I’m in DevSecOps, and do a lot of heavy development and testing, as well as PoCs. Ideally, I’d have 128GB of RAM but laptops aren’t quite there yet. The HD is a Samsung SSD.
I can’t see your comment about heavy dev and testing.
I’m curious about what exactly is chewing up that much RAM. Do you have a ridiculous amount of containers running? Or a big ram disk or something?
It’s not my comment. You are talking to the completely wrong person. Go look at their comments.
I develop software and do a lot of PoC with VMs and containers.
Ah, I think to get 64GB from a Thinkpad you’d have to move up to a P series, and even the P16s and P14s that are based on the T16 and T14 will be significantly warmer and louder than those others. They’re very much tuned for performance. Unfortunately, Lenovo is soldering RAM far more on their AMD models than the Intel models, so you won’t be able to run above spec.
Asahi is kinda unfinished, you’d need to run MacOS on it to get that sweet 10-25hour battery life probably. Many things don’t work yet either.
This is where i am leaning too
If you’re genuinely looking for Linux Laptops I’d take a look at https://starlabs.systems/pages/starfighter
There’s also https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/index.php
That StarFighter looks crazy. I too bad it’s 5 months out. Thanks for the recommendation!
the starlabs machine looks awesome! is it only me or does the chassis look like the framework, specifically the bottom part?
I haven’t seen all of them in person, but the other day someone showed me the StarLite which is their budget laptop and honestly it really surprised me. The only thing with similar build quality I’ve seen at such a low price was the google pixel book go which can be had used absurdly cheap.
I think they’re the company I’d use to buy Linux laptops if I used one daily, these days I use a MacBook Air m2 simply because the battery life beats all and for how I work that’s what I need most.
System76 makes their own distro called PopOS. Their laptops right now are rebadged, but I’m sure they support them well. They are in the process of designing their own and I’m waiting to see how it compares to something like Framework.
PopOS kinda sucks nards. Don’t use it.
You absolutely don’t have to. They will support you no matter what distro you have. All their custom bits are in the AUR and Nix, for example.
Those specs seem great. I would probably just swap the wifi chip and the battery if those are the main things that are failing for you. I would set the resolution to 1080p instead of 4k as well.
It actually doesn’t do 1080p well. It’s a 3:2 ratio.
Note: This might not work for your needs if you NEED the core OS to be Linux. It’s also not optimal if all the software you need to run is x86-only.
The Macbook Pro with M2 Max comes with up to 96 GB of RAM and a ridiculously high battery life. It comes at the price of… a very high price. And Asahi isn’t all that ready IMO, you’d have to run your Linux stuff in a VM or docker container. But for the most part I’ve found that MacOS doesn’t actually stop me from doing anything compared to Linux - the OS is less customizable, but software to run on the OS is still plentyful, especially if you use virtualization or containers (or containers + virtualization).
There’s just no real competing ARM laptop out there right now. Not at this performance level. I wish there was, I’d love this kind of performance/power consumption ratio on Linux where I could also eke out more battery life by customizing my kernel. It would be especially awesome if it could be something like a Framework where you can swap out the board for one with a better SoC in 5 years. But for now, the best laptop processors are Apple’s.
Thanks to Rosetta, I can also easily run AMD64 containers, so I have access to both ARM and x86 Linux software. The latter isn’t as efficient of course. But overall, I feel like there’s nothing I can’t do on my two Apple Silicon Macs that I could (and need to) do on Linux.
I have a development Mac Mini, but I want something portable with Linux. Thanks for the suggestion!
That seems quite top of the line even today.
For battery life, the screen, the screen, the GPU (seems you use an IGP), the size of the screen, and the CPU are the main culprits.
64GB RAM will use some battery do you really need that much?
Hopefully your 1TB is an SSD otherwise an SSD is a nice upgrade.
There are also fat fat powerbanks for power users far away from a 110/220volt line!
I Am curious, most often power hungry laptops are gaming ones… What do you do with yours?
I’m in DevSecOps, and do a lot of heavy development and testing, as well as PoCs. Ideally, I’d have 128GB of RAM but laptops aren’t quite there yet. The HD is a Samsung SSD.
I usually have the GPU set to integrated graphics unless I’m doing some heavy load in which case I’ll switch over to the nvidia GPU. I also switch between power modes depending on my use case at the time.
There’s not a lot I can do with the CPU other than the optimizations I’ve done thus far. It’s actually one of the main reasons I’m looking to upgrade so I can have better performance per watt and take advantage of various cores depending on workload.
Interesting, thanks for sharing!
What OS are you primarily using? I’d imagine Kali for pentesting if you do that, but what do you use everyday?
I tend to stick to Debian derivatives for the most part, but I do a lot of work across multiple flavors depending on what I’m working on at any given time. Sometimes I’m in RHEL, sometimes SLED, sometimes Ubuntu, etc.
To add, while I still enjoy my laptop, my biggest issues are battery life and heat. This thing could fry an egg when it’s under load. At best, I get 3 hours of usage on battery even with a lower resolution, low brightness, power management utilities optimizing performance, and running on my integrated GPU vs the nvidia GPU.
With specs like those, have you considered buying a desktop or server PC and setting up Sunshine/Moonlight? That way you can use a thin client laptop and have amazing battery life.
My work requires remote work that may not have Internet connectivity, so that wouldn’t work 100% of the time. Thank you for the interesting recommendation, however!
Is installing Linux as simple a process on Mac M1s or M2s as it is on other devices?
No advice on a new one, sorry. But if you decide you want to get rid of your current one cheap let me know :)
No sure about 64gb, but for performance/watt and reliable Linux I can really recommend the Amd p16s and t16(s?) machines from Lenovo. Have about seven in the office and they are excellent.
I too, as someone in devops, am wondering what you need that much memory for. Do you simply really like VMs? :)
Also, have you considered doing the really heavy stuff remotely? Whenever I need desktop type power (16 physical cores and 128gb memory) I simply wake the desktop, ssh into it and do it there.
I have a remote dev environment with 128GB RAM. This is for occasions when I don’t have access to that environment. And yes, I run a lot of POCs and tests, and have absolutely ran out of RAM even at 64GB.
Thank you for the Lenovo recommendation. I’ll take a look!
Look up any model you are considering on the following websites and if it’s listed it should tell you everything you need to know about Linux support. I’d say you’d be safe with most laptops these days though.
Just got a new gigabyte. The bootloader is shit combined with shitvidia to make a terrible combination to avoid. I expect most companies are doing the same bullshit with TPM/Secure boot. Everything proprietary is criminal theft.
Avoid at all costs
I’ve been running a Zephyrus G14 for the past 8 months and it’s been great. I wrote up the install instructions but have no place to publish them.
It’s not spectacular, but it has an 6800U (or H, I don’t even know), good integrated graphics, a dedicated Radeon 6800S, and can be configured with 64GB RAM and a 1600p display.
The 15" variant probably has a 4K display if that’s what you want. I would personally wait for the Framework 16 at this point though.
Thanks for the recommendation. The Framework due seem to be worth the wait. I’m honestly considering it.
/me waiting for ThinkPad T14 Gen 4, with amd cpu.
Should only be a few more weeks.