I am looking to buy a laptop for software development in the 0 to $2000 (USD) range.
What I am looking for: 1. Durability: battery life is important to me as well as general longevity of the hardware i.e. I would like it to last a long time.
2. Linux support: I use Linux as my OS of choice and I have no intention of using Windows/MacOS
3. Optimized for intensive computing usage.
Other things of note:
I looked into the Framework laptops and so far it looks like they are still a bit beta.
However, I am curious about users' experiences with:
* the KDE Slimbook 15: https://slimbook.es/en/store/slimbook-kde/kde-slimbook-15-comprar
* the Purism Librem 14: https://puri.sm/products/librem-14/
* Kubuntu Focus: https://kfocus.org/order/order-m2.html
* the StarBook 14-inch – Star Labs®: https://starlabs.systems/pages/starbook
Also tips about maintaining battery life would be appreciated. I've read too much conflicting advice about that lately :) Thanks.
"I've had these problems with Mac"
Reasonable response: Cool, use what works for you. EDIT> Here are some suggestions that match your constraints.
Annoying response 1: You should reconsider because Mac works great for me.
Annoying response 2: Your problems aren't real problems.
Annoying response 3: Let's live debug your problems in this thread to see if they're real problems.
Guys. I mean. Seriously.
It's got a gorgeous 4K OLED screen, a quite decent CPU and GPU, and it's currently $350 off + a $300 mail in rebate (there was an additional $350 off over the easter weekend, too). The track pad is not my favorite, but it's good enough, and the keyboard is very decent. I haven't had it very long and mostly it's plugged in so I can't comment too much about battery life.
My biggest complaint is that the screen is too good. When I'm done with the laptop and come up to my desktop, my IPS screens look washed out and sad. :P
Edit: I didn't buy the X1, I bought a Gigabyte Aero 15.
The ASUS ROG line of gaming laptops had exactly what I wanted, although they look a bit garish, they are good value for what you get.
On Black Friday I got a G14 Zephyrus with a 8c16t Ryzen 9, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD and 14" FHD IPS screen. I think I paid £1300. There's a free RAM slot, so I upgraded to 32GB, I think it supports 48GB max. There are a couple of gotcha's mind you:
- It came with a WiFi chip with poor support for Linux (and it wasn't great on Windows). I got an Intel one from eBay for £10 and it took a few minutes to swap out.
- You need to restart X to switch from hybrid to integrated graphics, which you want to do on battery to save power.
- You need to restart X to switch from integrated to hybrid graphics, which you want to do when you get back to your desk so you can use a USB-C display.
- The default fan curves mean the fan turns on and off every few seconds. I changed the settings so it is off most of the time and it runs fine.
- The powerbrick that comes with it is heavy. I use a 65W USB-C brick and have no issues for working, but for gaming (it has a RTX 3060) it needs more power.
- The model I have has no webcam, that's fixed in this year's modem.
Everything else works great. Battery life is 5-6 hours as standard, but if you disable turbo boost and you can get closer to 10 hours.
> https://kfocus.org/order/order-m2.html
NVIDIA gets really old, really fast. My personal laptop has an NVIDIA GPU and AMD iGPU, my desktop is AMD.
For my laptop, a zen2 build of the kernel nets me about 15% more battery life and a snappier system. Unfortunately NVIDIA makes installing that kernel tedious, so I just run the regular kernel. I also have to install the proprietary drivers because noveau keeps crashing (across multiple distros).
n=1 and everything, but I'd strongly recommend avoiding NVIDIA and going with either an Intel iGPU or AMD iGPU/dGPU.
Unless you want to do some ML, in which case NVIDIA is a must.
Don't sweat the battery, they're removable, upgradeable to larger ones if you have to go a longer time on a charge and easy to replace. For the change left over from $2000, you can buy lots of them!
I'm not sure that's fair, (and it's pedantically wrong - they're in production - but I know what you mean) the hardware is the nicest I've seen besides Macbooks (I agree with you about macOS, but I do like the hardware, keen for Asahi one day but that is very much beta (alpha actually I think)) and Linux is Linux? It works fine out of the box, everything 'in-tree'.
Unless you just don't want to buy any company's first product of course, which I suppose is fair enough, but I hope (for the longevity of a company I like & spares/upgrades for my laptop) that enough people don't feel that way.
- Intel i7 H series processor (best mobile Intel chips)
- Upgradeable RAM (currently at 24GB) - Intel Wifi 6
- Nvidia RTX 3060
- FullHD Screen with 144Hz
- Comfortable keyboard with backlight
- Two M.2 slots, laptop came with 500GB but added an extra 2TB.
- Good connecticity: HDMI, Ethernet, 3 full-size USBA 3.1 ports, 1 Thunderbolt port.
- Laptop runs on a 200W brick with a barrel connector, but on the go I plug it to a USBC 100W charger, works flawlessly.
- Good build quality: back of screen is aluminum, laptop itself is made with plastic with no deck flex or other problems.
- Only deal-breaker, not for me though, is the lack of webcam. I have a small USB one that attaches to the screen when needed.
Battery life is around 9h for me doing Node.js backend development with VSCode, Firefox with +40tabs, PostgreSQL and Docker running the server running locally. It lasts longer with the screen set to 60Hz and tinkering with the power settings to disable the Nvidia card when only doing CPU-intensive jobs.
Best of all: I only paid €999 ($1,081 taxes included) for it on Amazon Spain. Plus the SSD and extra RAM.
This is my setup, so a bit different from yours though:
ESS-15-AMD
ESSENTIAL 15" AMD
Memoria RAM 16GB
Teclado Español
Sistema Operativo Sin Sistema
Pendrive No
Wifi Intel AX200
M2 250GB SSD NVMe
Modulo SIM NO
Procesador Ryzen 5 4500U
659,00 €
Battery life is still about 6-8 hours when using text editor/developing or about 4-5, if watching movies. It's quite heavy laptop, but still fine for couch-slouching. A bit too heavy for travel.
It's a year old and so far it does have some discoloration on plastic, but nothing has broken and it feels fairly solid. The KDE Slimbook you've chosen seems to have aluminium body, so it would probably far outlast my basic plastic version.
Before I used the ThinkPad X230 and DELL Latitude 7270, each for many years and bought second hand. The DELL was particularly sturdy.
All of these are Ubuntu LTS friendly boxes.
Avoid Microsoft Surface Laptops, which require patches to run Linux, Microsoft doesn't offer an Image ready to burn on a stick. And although I'm writing this on an M1 MacBook, I can't recommend that box yet as a primary machine; I use it mostly for making and presenting slides and browsing HN and such, not for serious dev work. In a year's time, this may look different.
- 16:10 matte screen with no PWM
- Very good port selection (1xUSB-C, HDMI, 2xUSB-A)
- Good battery life (for a Windows laptop)
- IMO, the best keyboard layout
- Fingerprint reader
- It is actually around 1100$
- A difference between Intel and AMD versions is that AMD version does not support full length M.2 SSDs, it only supports the short ones.
- But it is probably not for computing usage since it is thin and light
A new gen with Alder Lake is announced a few weeks ago. It is almost the same but the biggest difference is that there are 2xUSB-C + 1xUSB-A instead of 1xUSB-C + 2xUSB-A. And the touchpad will be glass I think. Surprisingly the battery life seems a bit shorter on the upcoming gen. I currently cannot decide whether to buy Gen2 or wait for Gen4.
* The hardware has always been "more than good enough." I mean, you can always nitpick about some or other detail, but the machines work, they work well out-of-the-box with Linux, and they last a long time. We still have eight-year-old machines that are humming along.
* Support has always been outstanding at everything from answering questions to sending replacement parts with detailed how-to instructions. On one occasion we sent them an older machine for fixing and shipping back, and they handled it flawlessly.
* Most importantly, I've always felt that everyone we've interacted with at System76 actually cares about me as a customer. They're not a charitable organization, so they need to make money, but I've always gotten the sense that doing right by customers is a higher priority.
I've been running ubuntu 20.04 for the past few years. You can have hot swap batteries and an inbuilt SIM slot if you choose. Not sure if the fingerprint is working (I didn't select that option) but everything else works flawlessly.
Side note: I have been maintaining an Ansible playbook for years now that sets up my developer workstation. I do know Ansible already, but I think it's a worthwhile weekend project if you are starting from scratch. You just need to be consistent and have all changes go through Ansible.
Is my daily driver currently running Linux mint.
- overall very happy with it for my uses. I don’t do a lot of intense workloads on the laptop, mostly stuff like text editing and latex compiling.
- battery is great. With screen brightness reasonably low and working on low intensity tasks, I could get 8 hours I think pretty easily. Probably 3 hours of video calls.
- durability is good so far. My librem 13 lasted about 4 years before succumbing to a hinge issue which I believe has been addressed for the 14s
- ergonomics are good for me, trackpad keyboard etc. are great especially once you get used to them.
- expect some challenges if you’re going to run a different distro. Be prepared to put in some effort. Things are probably better now it’s been out longer.
- due to foss requirements the wifi range isn’t the greatest. You can easily and cheaply switch out the card if you want.
- One issue I had was plugging in a certain external dock to the usb c port and the entire computer shuts off immediately.
- not sure how it fares for intense compute tasks. I rarely get any fan noise but sometimes it will kick in noticeably.
I also echo others that, depending on the battery life situation, take another look at framework. I haven’t put a ton of hours on it yet but a very pleasant machine.
1. Dell XPS 13
2. Lenovo X1 Carbon
3. HP Dragonfly Elite (current)
Regardless of the brand I always stuc with i7/16Gb and at least 512Gb NVMe storage.
One downside with my current machine (HP Dragonfly) is it comes with 8th Gen intel processor not really a big problem for me, but fan it a bit louder to my liking.
Coming to Linux compatibility I've used Dell XPS 13 and Lenovo X1 with no issues. Haven't tried Linux on the current machine yet.
I recently picked up an old 2005-ish (edit: 2011 actually) x220 for a few hundred quid off ebay which seems to be running nicely. Specs aren't anything to shout about but it works fine for what it is. Durability wise, its clearly been running for at least 15 (edit: 10?) years so its got something to it.
[0] https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/Linux-Hardware/Linux-Note...
https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/why-TUXEDO.tuxedo
https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/Linux-Hardware/Linux-Note...
These are contradicting conditions. (Unless maybe on an M1?)
If you do use the CPU then battery life will drop even for the best laptops to a few hours max, while the fans will spin like crazy emulating a helicopter taking off. All the above mentioned laptops will behave like that.
At my last place I had a Thinkpad P1 which is supposedly for the above mentioned purpose, and still I suffered from heating and noise, and the battery life was abysmal (2 hours of Zoom call would deplete it, for example).
Although I just noticed that you didn't mention portability - in which case buy an older Thinkpad T4xx/5xx which had the dual battery setup, and buy some additional batteries too, and you can swap them on the fly. Sadly AFAIK Lenovo no longer makes these laptops...
Battery life tips: 1. get the simplest screen (FHD instead of 4K, 90Hz...). 2. don't get an integrated 3D card.
15", good keyboard and trackpad, amazing screen (get the 4k option and scale at 200% so you have a 1080p look and feel but super crisp), decent sound, powerful CPU, lots of RAM, M.2 PCIe SSD, etc. Although if you really want to get better battery opt for the 1080p screen which is still great.
Battery life with Linux on any laptop is kinda rough no matter what in my experience, it's okay but not MacBook Pro with M1 levels. Also the fans get kinda loud which you may or may not mind but is kinda par for the course with most Intel laptops as they're all a few mm too thin imho.
As for why Dell? Well personally I have always had superb experience with Dell support. Engineer on site a day or two later to fix any issues and when I needed a replacement they sorted it within a few days and let me send the old machine back a week later so I could backup and restore without a huge hassle.
I know others have had bad experience with Dell support but for me (in Europe) it has always been fine.
I think I like the HP one slightly better: function keys can be set to trigger either F1-F12 or to the actions drawn on them without the Fn key (and the Fn key swaps this). If set to the actions by default, F1-F12 are still automatically used when pressing a modifier key, and no action is on F2, which means I almost never need to use the Fn key for those and I can intuitively use alt+F4. That's not the case on the ThinkPad. It has a proper menu key (on the Thinkpad, they decided to replace it to screen capture, which is on FN+Right Caps on the HP). I like the metal feeling of the case and the feeling of the keyboard (but the ThinkPad is good on these areas too). Both have a touchscreen, and there are visible, diagonal lines on the Thinkpad's screen. Which is not very problematic, but better without. The HP has an Ethernet port, too. I think Linux works slightly better on the HP too: the sound automatically switches to the headphone when plugged, and switches back to the internal speakers when unplugged, on the same distro (openSUSE Tumbleweed). Though that might be some settings issue. S3 sleep works flawlessly on the HP. On the ThinkPad, it is not supported and indeed it does not work well. They decided to switch to whatever Windows decided to do with suspend, which does not really turns off components but put them in low power mode, which is a mess.
The ThinkPad is lighter, probably has a better sound from the internal speakers (though the HP's sound is correct too). The trackpoint on the ThinkPad is way more useful, you can scroll with it by holding the touchpad's upper middle button which is not there on the HP.
Both have a long battery life. I can recommend both.
I've not tried the KDE Slimbook 15, but it is a more expensive rebranded version of another model if I remember correctly.
I am doing C development, with some Javascript thrown in for the client, quite comfortably on a laptop from 2008 (Core 2 Duo, 2GB of RAM, 320GB spinning rust HDD).
I use WindowMaker, Firefox, Xterm, Vim, Git, Clang and GCC. from login Window to my first xterm opened in the project directory is around 500ms. My build (C only) is currently around 700ms.
My editing is lag-free only as long as Vim's 'cul' option is turned off.
Another one i found interesting is the framework laptop. Its completely modular.
And apparently their firmware is opensource.
https://frame.work/blog/open-sourcing-our-firmware
That said if you are looking to play games or have a dedicated graphics card your options will be severely limited.
I have for the past 5 years or so focused on battery life over compute for my machines and then used RDP to access a VM dev machine hosted in azure. It’s worked great, and I was able to use free azure credits that came with msdn. You can do similar with ec2 and google compute. There are also container based dev environment services out there now. The benefit being you don’t need dev cruft on your everyday carry laptop. Plus if you get a new laptop or have multiple, your dev environment doesn’t change.
That said I did just switch to an m1 max as I also need to do Xcode. That has been a solid machine, though might be above budget. You could run Linux on it pretty sure.
And, best of all, they provide first-class Linux support and provide their own Ubuntu-derived distribution, Pop!_OS.
As much as I appreciate the privacy and freedom enhancing aspects of some of these devices, ultimately a device that’s more practical for me in day to day usage wins out.
That generally leaves me with a more established manufacturer. Lenovo Thinkpad and Ideapad have options in this area and run Linux just fine. Dell XPSes are good too, though I wish they’d offer an AMD option. HP Envy/Spectre devices are rather decent too, though getting the touchscreen and sensors to work on these can be fiddly because HP compensates for their broken BIOS through the Windows drivers instead of just fixing shit.
Using less battery power:
- use `powertop` to find processes that are sucking power
- stop browsers when not in use (e.g. `killall -STOP firefox-esr`, then same with -CONT when using them again, although Firefox tends to first spin 100% for a little while then; alternatively simply `killall firefox-esr`, Firefox will usually re-open the tabs)
- I use hibernate
Retaining battery life over the years:
- AFAIK Li-ion batteries last longest when kept cool, and when kept in the 30%..70% charged range most of the time; there used to be ways to tell ThinkPads to stop charging when reaching 70%, I've never used that though.
- I'm still hoping LiFePO4 (LFP) batteries will be sold for laptops some day, they would last much longer (but I guess when it happens, most third-party ones will be fakes (re-labelled Li-ion)...)
Just in review, I got a system 76 with pop os as the daily driver. I do a lot of ML and also game on it in my free time, so having a desktop 2080ti in a laptop chassis was nice.
However, a major complaint I have is battery life. It's not just the ridiculous GPU, it's also that linux is apparently shit when it comes to power management. If you want to mobile compute and apparently you do, you might consider a thorough investigation into battery life as a part of your requirements.
Mine is great as a mobile workstation machine, but the battery life prevents me from enjoying cafe style programming.
A few years back, I switched off of using a laptop for my main machine. This allows me to spend my money on hardware with more cores, more ram, better gpu, better linux support, bigger screens, and upgrade paths. $2000 will buy you a lot of desktop computer.
Further, if you don't spend all of your $2k on fancy cases and overpriced gpus, you will have enough money leftover for a cheap but decent laptop. This laptop can then remote in to your workstation anytime you actually need the high end computing power.
Why I say that, you ask?
1: Advertised as "space age cooling" is just a dinky heat pipe: this laptop has HUGE cooling issues, super loud fan, impossible to share screen during meetings without everyone hearing your portable jet engine. I mitigated this by placing some good thermal strips to connect the heat pipes to the aluminium back of the laptop, this dropped it a few degrees and the back only gets slightly warm, not hot. Why couldn't Dell have done this? I'm still tempted to repaste the thing as well.
2: Dell's usual early 2000s corporate BS. The fan is loud. But you can't control it. Well you can, but you have to use Dell's crappy Power software which gives you three different settings for it. No speedfan, no manual fan control etc as it's all locked down.
3: Variants with 4k screens from about 2019 (idk about other years) with integrated graphics just _cannot_ drive the 4k panel properly in terms of performance.
4: The cooling sucks
5: The battery sucks pretty bad, you might get a couple hours out of it at most (esp on Windows).
6: The cooling sucks
Granted, they provide drivers for linux/support it etc which is great, and the machine itself (at least the one I got XPS 9380) is pretty powerful - it just can't cool itself well enough to get the performance unless you're fine sitting in front of the world's loudest white noise generator. Only thing is I paid £1650 for it late 2019...now they're available for like £399 secondhand. No wonder, they've probably all cooked themselves.
You should be able to disable the dGPU if you have no need for it, within the BIOS, to improve battery life.
As for why I recommend it?
1) It has a thin, MacBook-esque aluminium chassis.
2) A choice of two biometrics - Fingerprint and Facial (the latter works with Howdy on Linux).
3) The processor is a 11th (Z16) or 12th Gen. (Z16P) Intel Core i9. The former uses 3200MHz DDR4 AND the latter uses DDR5.
4) They both sport a RTX 30 Series dGPU for creative work or gaming.
5) MSI has decent Linux support historically, for their laptops at least.
6) MSI laptops feature a "hidden BIOS" which exposes hundreds of options and toggles (from undervolting and over locking, to tuning PCIe slot power limits). This is quite helpful at times.
7) It has a panel that pretty much ticks all the boxes except HDR: a good resolution of QHD, high colour accuracy (∆E < 2), a high refresh rate (either 120Hz or 165Hz), as well as touch support.
8) It sports RGB keyboard backlighting, if that's your thing.
9) It has a great selection of ports, with one (Z16P) or two (Z16) Thunderbolt 4 ports and two USB [Type-A] 10GBps ports.
10) MSI laptops of this size usually sport two NVMe slots, for expansion. You could even use one slot for a Google Coral. Furthermore, the included NVMes from MSI that I've had have been "top-tier" in terms of throughput.
>the Purism Librem 14: https://puri.sm/products/librem-14/
https://forums.puri.sm/t/no-nonsense-review-from-an-actual-u...
Next is discrete graphics. If you just need multiple monitors, an Intel G CPU will usually do it. If you need discrete GPU, again you're going to sacrifice on battery.
For longevity, you might want to consider a Xeon laptop. Lenovo has these, so they're one option.
One measure of how much sustained performance a laptop can take is the charger wattage, usually buried in the spec sheet. In my experience chargers are rated only slightly higher than the wattage necessary to keep the machine going at top performance. A laptop with a low wattage charger is unlikely to sustain top performance for long. But it depends on your definition of "sustain". 10 minutes? Half an hour? Constant load of 60, 70, 80%? The charger heuristic just weeds out low power though. There's less of a guarantee that a higher wattage charger == higher sustained performance.
Are there good "movable" laptops that run cool and quiet yet have high perf, and achieve this by actually making the laptop larger?
I want something with good build quality (not a plasticky gaming rig). I want something using recent CPUs (intel 12th gen, or recent Ryzen). High power (35W and up) that can run for hours without throttling. I have tried various Dell models (precisions) but the thermals are abysmal because it's only half the thickness it needs to have in order to manage that kind of power.
Just to throw one more out I haven't seen mentioned is Razer. I haven't purchased one but have played around with them in person.
The Razer Blade laptops in particular seem really nice to me, with nice build, screen and very nice touchpad, in a good form factor and nice specs. The MacBook Pro is maybe the closest thing I've seen to them. There's apparently a version of a Razer released by second company with linux on it (blessed by Razer), targeted at development, although the "regular" Razer laptops can be had for much less cost, more in your range. I used to think of Razer laptop as a "desktop gaming alternative" but some of the newer ones seem like they could be used for development. I've seen the Blades in AMD and Intel form.
1. I have heard only good things about Framework. If I were getting a laptop today, that would be on my short-list
2. I have had an HP zBook 15 G3 for many years now, so no issue with durability there. However, I just tried to price one and the price has gone way up, so it's out of the $2k range for anything reasonably configured for developer use.
3. Battery life; if it's going to be mostly plugged in, select the option in the BIOS for that; it will stop charging the battery sooner to increase longevity of the battery. If it's going to be use unplugged a lot, try to keep it above 20%. Ignore any advice about fully draining the battery to prevent "memory effect" that was dubious advice even for NiCd batteries that could potentially suffer from memory effect and was never true for LiIon chemistries.
Battery life erodes over time but a new battery will fix it right up.
It depends what kind of development you're doing, of course. I am not sure what intensive computer usage means to you, but I would say I use it intensively! But I am not doing anything that requires a GPU nor am I re-compiling kernels every day. But for my humble needs I've found it's a cost-effective solution that holds up quite well.
https://www.mikekasberg.com/blog/2021/08/12/dell-latitudes-a...
Would be still more performant than most of intel laptops in 2000$ range.
Or just go on with Windows + WSL.
While I know there are a few suggestions for gaming oriented laptops, but I'd suggest you are careful going down that route as some of the cheaper models feel very flimsy and if you end up working on this for longer periods of time, things such as sharp edges, sub-par (rattly) keyboard, bad screen or hell, even weak hinges, can be very frustrating. There is also the issue that Linux support might not be as good.
I had an E460 and it worked fine for 6 years (I dropped it a few times and someone spilled coffee on it) but even 4-5-6 years down the line I could find replacement keyboard, replacement battery and even replacement case for it. When I gave it to be used by someone else, I had swapped these parts out, paid probably 60$ for them but I knew that the laptop will keep running fine for a few more years. I don't think I could find replacement case/keyboard for some gaming laptop 6 years down the line...? Or maybe I could and I just haven't had the chance to look.
To sum up, get an older Thinkpad or maybe even an older Dell Precision.
I recently purchased a ThinkPad E14 gen 3.
It has a 6 core 12 thread Ryzen 5 5600U, with 24 GB of memory (8 GB soldered + 16 GB I installed later).
I run Linux exclusively. No Windows or dual boot or anything like that.
I currently run the latest Fedora 36 Beta. On this particular OS I have none of the usual Linux problems.
- Wifi works on both 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz.
- Bluetooth works seamlessly. Picks up my wireless mouse and headphones right after boot/wakeup. Couldn't say the same about my older Linux laptops.
- Sleep/suspend/wakeup etc works.
- Camera works. Btw it has a shutter.
- Screen resolution is full HD.
- Battery life of about 6 to 7 hours on moderate usage. I think you might be able to customise your order with a bigger battery and faster charger.
What doesn't work: - Fingerprint sensor
Note that I did not have to do any workarounds on my machine with Fedora 36 Beta. YMMV.
Some general thoughts on the ThinkPad E14:
- Material quality of the E series is definitely not as great as the T, P, and X series of ThinkPad. But then again, it was much much cheaper, and I think the quality is okay for the price.
- You can upgrade memory, storage, and a few other things by opening up the bottom panel.
- Keyboard is great. Trackpad isn't as good as the ones on the Mac. I personally like the 3 physical buttons above the trackpad.
- Choose your display wisely. There are TN displays as well as better quality displays.
------
My friend has the same laptop, except it's on Ryzen 3, memory is only 8 GB, and Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. On his machine, there are the following two problems:
- Display always goes to full brightness on boot.
- Memory shows only 6.2 GB (usually it shows 7.7 on other Ubuntu laptops with 8 gb; on my Fedora it shows the full 24 GB).
However, these are OS specific problems and workarounds exist. Also, I'm hoping things would be sorted out in the newer versions of the Linux kernel.
I use it with triple monitor setup, all 32 inch 2K (I find 2K better for programming) and use it with the Hp 120W dock.
I even upgraded its memory to 64GB myself from Amazon for much improved quality of life (I give Intellij 24G alone; have at it!)
Cons:
The touchpad is acceptible, but middling. (I am a stickler for touchpads.)
The battery drains in suspend mode out of the box. Supposedly, there are fixes, but people have mixed reports of their stability.
You'll want a separate device for music streaming and zoom.
Anyway, I have one, and it is perfect for my use cases.
System76 has some decent laptop options for Linux, but all are FHD.If I had to purchase a new laptop today, I'd look at System 76's Lemur Pro or Purism's Librem 14.
The T-series Thinkpads are excellent. They're rugged and designed for falls, spills, and travelling. There are still manufacturers producing extended battery packs and chargers for them. They're designed to be upgraded and modified.
Bonus: you'll save some silicon from reaching a landfill for a few more years. And they're cheap. If one bites the dust you can replicate your setup to a new one and get going again without breaking bank for another $2k.
Unless you're planning on doing bleeding-edge real-time 3D graphics work, the likelihood that you need a big, expensive machine is pretty low. Depending on the software stack you intend to work on you might not even need that much RAM (though if you're doing stuff in bleeding edge C++, Rust, or Haskell I'd recommend >16GB).
I ditched my 2019 MBP for development. I used a desktop with Linux and couldn't be happier.
For email, zoom, etc. I used the MBP. Linux dev experience is still far superior than Mac OS for me, and I tend to prefer big screens, mechanical keyboards and a work-desk env for long programming or video editing sessions.
What really holds me back though is the damn keyboards on modern laptops - they all suck. The old keyboard on my Thinkpad T420 I love in comparison. There are people that are actually replacing the whole innards (you can even buy them premade and shipped from China) of I believe the Thinkpad X301 or similar with modern CPU, modern screen, etc etc. And on the plus side anyone who sees your laptop at a cafe is going to think its an old POS and not even think about stealing it!
I have been using one since December and it has been fairly reliable. Linux support is quite good as is the community they've built. It's also cool that the Embedded Controller firmware is public and they have some community members' threads showing how to customize it as well.
They had some teething issues with power drain from the expansion ports while suspended - an upcoming BIOS update is supposed to fix those. The battery lasts around 6 hours, so if you can live with that I would highly recommend this for your needs.
On maintaining battery life, they have a feature to limit the battery charge level to a customizable limit (usually people like to set this at 80%). Other than this, the fact that this is easily user-replaceable should help.
https://consumer.huawei.com/en/laptops/matebook-14-amd-2020/
Similar build and high power CPUs (not the mobile optimized/low power)
I get about 3-4 hours of battery life (meh), with iGPU (AMD). Very light. Good keyboard, and trackpad. Everything works under linux, though sometimes the BT vanishes (I think I need to reseat that, but I was lazy and installed a $10 USB BT5.1 adapter). I do heavy development/builds/testing on it.
I run windows in a kvm instance window if I need it (less than once per quarter at this point). Came w/o OS. Bought it on Amazon late 2020 for about $1850 or so.
The laptop it replaced (though still alive) is a Sager 4c/8t Intel with GTX 1060 ish dGPU, Intel iGPU, 64 GB ram, and 1.5 TB SSD. Very capable machine, though battery life is abysmal. Maybe an hour. Its my current living room machine. Came pre-installed with Windows, but I installed 2 SSDs, and bumped the memory from 16GB to 64GB. Reworked the boot and virtualized windows (windows should never touch physin government's Federal Ministry of Education and Research.cal hardware). Bought in 2018 for about $2200. It is heavy, bulky, good workhorse, but older Intel CPU.
I also have a Sager I bought in 2010. Still works, 16GB ram, 4c/8t, 500GB SSD, GTX 560m graphics. Its my basement lab machine.
All 3 run Linux Mint 20.2. All function well (even the old machine). I expect I won't need to replace the new machine for quite some time.
That said, work laptop is finally a Mac, having been stuck on horrible Windows machines from Dell. Had many driver/OS problems with windows, machines crashed regularly. BSOD and others.
Newer M1 Pro now. Far more stable than windows, almost ... almost as good a UX as linux. CPUs are fast, though even with Homebrew, I can't build everything. This one ran the company about $3500 or so.
YMMV, but the HP Omen series is nice.
I stick to the thin-n-light XPS 13/15/17 or the Precision 5570 or 5770. Rock solid build quality.
Note: if you call Dell they’ll give you a couple hundred bucks off the price on the website, and can do custom builds
My experience: Ubuntu and Fedora "just work" on almost any machine. If your hardware is super new use the newest version or beta for the first release cycle.
I used to have a ThinkPad, now have an Acer Swift 3, both "just worked". Dells seem to be good. System76 of course. Razer sells a dev machine these days. And so on.
Tip on maintaining battery life: charge from 20% to 90% and don't leave it plugged in, use appropriate brightness, realize that GPU heavy stuff, multiple monitors, etc... all use more battery. Stay away from discrete GPUs unless you know you need/want them, integrated is fine for most gaming these days.
My dev hardware is an external SSD (USB3) running Debian. I virtualized my dev environment using qemu/kvm.
I have several old laptops with no hard drives stationed at various offices. I just plug in, boot from the SSD and off to the races.
If I need a laptop while traveling, I just pull from the old laptops pile and remove it's hard drive. Good to go.
I do have minimum specs for the hardware: 1TB Samsung SSD (be sure the cable supports TRIM!) 16GB Memory (Virtualization) nVidia graphics (hard to find those non-hybrid types) decent screen size.
In addition to normal backups of the host & VM, I do a weekly image of the VM. This helps greatly against damage/loss of the SSD.
Hope this helps
Then I disabled secure boot and now everything I have tested works out of the box.
I am running the latest edition of Ubuntu Desktop. I usually try to avoid HP but the new ZBook line works perfectly on linux with good support. Altough it uses Nvidia which is kind of cranky with the drivers and I also think the battery drain is a bit too heavy on linux.
I am happy with it tho. I got a great keyboard, trackpad, screen and is plenty fast for me and my use case. I think I got it for around the price you wanted it and I even think they ship Ubuntu pre-installed in the US.
Now I make do with a Mac M1 and a companion samsung book pro, a machine that I choose because I wanted a very light (in physical weight) intel evo as a companion mobile machine running linux for when I feel that using linux is better than using Mac OS.
I run fedora on it, and other than the fingerprint sensor that doesn't work (at least out of the box, never cared enough to figure out if I could find a workaround).
I find it great that there are all those niche sellers out there, but I don't think going this route is cost-effective for most people.
https://skinflint.co.uk/?cat=nb&asuch=&bpmin=&bpmax=1533&v=k...
Next step would be to add technical specifications, perhaps limit the list to vendors with generally well linux support, or set the OS to no-os/FreeDOS/Linux-preinstalled.
Is something like that available for north america, since the request was in dollars?
[0]: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-ThinkPad-P14s-G2-AMD-la...
Speaking of big brands, the Dell XPS developer edition is on paper very Linux compatible, although in pratice, it's (insulting) marketing fluff (I've had one). I second the Thinkpads compatibility (I had several, I think they were T/W).
https://www.ebay.com/itm/325032670333?epid=28035701461&hash=...
There's one with 16GB and a 4K screen. Get yourself a portable external monitor and you should be very productive.
'
Maybe I was unlucky. Also, the 14 may be more reliable.
After that, I almost bought a Librem 14, but I took a chance on the Framework. The only real problem is battery life/suspend, but it's annoying enough that I can't bring myself to use it as a daily driver.
Just check the hardware compatibility lists to make sure certain things like the WiFi chips have Linux support.
However, I'd recommend a DELL or Samsung with a high-res OLED display. Those are gorgeous and have great color and luminance contrast for text.
OTOH, I am more than happy with my Dell laptop. A slightly older Latitude. Everything works out of the box (I run Manjaro on it), even the WWAN, keyboard lights, card reader, etc. And you can get replacement parts (battery, screen, keyboard) for years since those laptops are so common.
The touchpad, at least on my model from a few years back, was horribly sensitive to palm touches. There were some config changes I made that may or may not have done anything, and I don't notice it anymore but definitely type a bit differently.
The other aspect is a 13'' screen is a bit small for dev work.
A purism is next on my list fwiw.
I also have a Thinkpad X1 Xtreme and it's solid, but nothing to write home about. If going for that, I'd compare (in person) with the latest Dell stuff. Otherwise, I'd go Samsung for me.
Battery life is somewhat lower due to the size and higher performance components. But seemed like a good trade-off in the end for the better coding experience.
I've been doing dev on recent Thinkpads for the past couple years, and honestly they're the least hassle of any laptop I've used in the past decade. I've run Arch, Ubuntu, whatever. work great, reasonably priced, excellent support.
Full disclosure: I'm a co-founder in a business that provides cloud environments for software dev.
One of my cofounders used to code daily from his ipad. I switch between my gaming pc and my mac. The flexibility and peace of mind is unbeatable for me. Plus its great for intensive computing usage since you can scale up and down.
That said, if Linux is your general purpose OS of choice (in addition to programming), than I completely get it :)
I develop on the laptop with vscode and docker. This is intensive computing for me, but I don't do npm installs. Can you unpack what's intensive computing for you?
The Framework hardware is easily my favorite laptop hardware (aside from Apple, but really they're a different category than Framework).
1. Installed Ubuntu on it, never had any driver issues 2. Keyboard was pretty nice 3. Screen wasn’t very good, although I did appreciate it having a matte finish. Not in the same ballpark as a MacBook screen.
My only annoyance, which seems to cross brands, is that none of the newer laptops support the deeper sleep modes.
Also, recent ThinkPads do not come with good Linux support unless they are explicitly sold with Linux OS. Lenovo has different firmware for Windows vs Linux now. I recently got a Lenovo P15v Gen 2i that does not work with Linux (I ended up returning after a failed installation).
Lenovo has a >4 month backlog on Linux laptops at the moment. So we will have to make do with something else.
They offer fully customisable laptop where each pieces can be replace.
Ps: I've just bought mine and tested it for few days so should take my view with a pinch of salt but so far the laptop is inline with my expectations.
You can check some reviews on YouTube as well.
Ignore MSRP on Lenovo websites: discounts ranging from 30 to 50+ percent are active more often than not.
https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/Linux-Hardware/Linux-Note...
Cons - Mouse pad is kind of sensitive - I would trigger it by accident while typing.
Before that I had another thinkpad that served me well for 5 years. It was actually still going strong but I figured out I wanted to upgrade before the coming Taiwan crisis just in case. Now I plan to own this laptop for hopefully a decade
The build quality is also surprisingly good, and you’re supporting a special purpose company that fights for the user!
Maybe if the Lenovo X13s (ARM) is out and reviews are good, that might be an alternative.
When 13 is a bit small, you could go for Lenovo T14s...
But honestly, if you just wanna use this machine for development, a used Lenovo T480s with 24GB RAM and HiDPI display would be more than enough and costs about 500 bucks.
It's built for linux (as others that you mentioned) and they contribute to KDE and others open source projects so as you can expect if you have any issue they will reply to your queries.
On the other hand purism probably is the worst you mentioned.
- Run it in by fully charge it 2-3 times, (deplete it with normal use)
- Normal use keep it between 20-80%, write yourself a script or something to stop charging manually/automatically
- Deplete/fully charge it quarterly or twice a year to give the bms a change to balance the cells.
Do you have a habit of modifying your wifi drivers and recompiling the source? I am big on open source but have never felt my life was improved chasing dependencies vs just brew install ... I have never had a satisfactory battery + sleep/standby experience on a linux machine, vs a Mac I can leave unplugged for weeks and it wakes back up where I left off, battery still holding charge, so I'm just curious what is worth the tradeoff, especially when your priorities are battery life, computational performance, and hardware longevity (I get a new MacBook every ~5 years)
I've tried Fedora and Ubuntu on it, but I use Arch Linux daily on it (EndeavorOS at the moment), and its great for web development.
I think it was ~ $1600 USD when new
They're cheap, Like 27 inch 4K *2, cost like $400, don't have to be fancy gaming monitors, I run 3.
Look at Lenovo and Dell
Everything works OOTB on Linux. Battery life is around 9 hours or 5-6 with my full stack running and everything always feels snappy (I use 16 workspaces, so I typically have a TON open). Keyboard feels amazing, the chassis is probably the sturdiest one I've ever had (might be metal but doesn't get hot), and I prefer the touchpad over the mac one, which everyone seems to hold as a gold standard for some reason.
Personally, I buy refurbed or upgraded Thinkpads from Ebay from years ago and slap Linux on them.
I find their track pad similar to the macbook pro.
Their performance is good enough and they are pretty durable.
Asus is also nice but i think it’s really hit or miss with them.
It has official ubuntu support, and you can get under the hood to add ram/ssd later.
Laptops are cattle, not pets.
- Good linux support, only had to manually install one driver.
- Good durability. I'm very careless with my devices, all my laptops have broken at the hinges at least once. This one has held up after multiple hard drops.
- Very quiet, fan noise barely noticeable even under load.
- You can upgrade the memory
- Easy to take apart and service as a user, which is great since I'm going to break something and have to service it eventually. Dell XPSs have always been the best for this IMO, at least of the mainstream laptops I've used.
TLDR: Good combo of linux+repairable+quality+rugged
They're quite heavy but that's not an issue for me. Best bang for the buck I ever spent.
Bought it around 2015 in used condition for around 250EUR, then upgraded CPU, RAM, batteries (2x as of now), got a bigger SSD and HDD (512GB+4TB) and got an IPS display and a touchpad of the T480 which fits in there.
I just love that laptop. Superb linux support once you figured out how to setup the synaptics driver configs with synclient.
Oh and it's also the last generation (afaik) that can run coreboot as a BIOS.
Overall I probably spent around 800EUR on it, but considering its lifetime (sold in 2013-today) I say it's definitely worth it. So many "Ultrabooks" and Macbook Pros died on me before, because I always overstressed their GPUs.
There's a German Thinkpad wiki that contains all kinds of quirks and potential problems you can get, it's an amazing resource.
The tldr is you should update the BIOS first and update the firmware of your dockingstation with windows running, and then install linux to be safe. [1]
[1] https://thinkwiki.de/ThinkPad-Modelle
edit: Oh and I used an external m.2 adapter to PCI-e occasionally when I have to do ML related work when I'm not at home on my tower. It kinda works but performance is limited to somewhat PCI-e 4x speed even when it says 8x mode is being used.
This is not me, but the comment was too good not to share it again on HN.
This is from the self-post here, titled `Is Linux more private and secure than Mac OS?` https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/u6ws24/is_linux_mo...
Worth considering security when about to buy a daily-driver laptop!
-----------------
Linux is not more secure than macOS. Infact, it is not even remotely nearly as secure as macOS.
Linux for the most part lacks access control for apps. Flatpak and portal reduce some of this problem, but flatpak lacks granular control and no one is enforcing the usage of portals. As an example, controlling audio recording permission with Flatpak is a mess, as most things will just use the PulseAudio socket directly and you cannot deny them audio recording permission. You can revoke the PulseAudio socket, but that will deny both audio in and out. And this is only limited to apps which you install via Flatpak - any apps that you install via your package managers are not restricted whatsoever unless you spend hours and hours making an SELinux policy or AppArmor/Bubblewrap profile for each of them.
The X11 server on Linux is also a huge problem. Any X11 window can snoop on any other X11 window and keylog + screen record you. Nested X11 is not great for performance at all and its hard to enforce it system wide. Wayland solves this problem, but not all apps work with it yet, and XWayland windows can still snoop on each other.
None of the issues I described above exist on macOS. Unless you give an app elevated privileges, they all have to play by the rules with the permission system.
Linux also lacks the concept of verified boot or system integrity verification. In fact, most distros don't even do UEFI Secure Boot right - the verification ends at the kernel and the initrd is left unverified, unencrypted and vulnerable to evil maid attacks. There is no protection against persistent malware whatsoever too, even if you manage to protect the initrd, because there is no verification that extends to /usr, /bin, /sbin, and various other directories. macOS on the other hand has proper verified boot from the firmware to the system volume, protecting it from both evil maid attacks and persistent malware. Beyond verified boot, it also has system integrity protection, limiting what the root user can do.
There are also various miscellaneous things that macOS has such as system-wide umask setting (as opposed to just the shell), app signature verification, and so on.
Telemetry on macOS, for the mot part, is optional. Unless someone can prove otherwise (by capturing it on the network or something), any claim about invasive telemetry will not hold. Also, remember that being open source doesn't imply being trustworthy. You are still placing complete trust in whoever distributing the compiled version of your software (which will be your OS vendor most of the time if you use a traditional Linux desktop distribution) to not add nasty code in there and screw you over.
Some of Apple's apps do have mandatory telemetry or lack E2EE sync, but that is about it - you can simply not use them. One annoying aspect about macOS is that they really want you to make an apple account to do a major macOS version upgrade via the App Store (though you can still obtain the installer via their CDN if you know where to look) and that they collect hardware IDs.
In short, macOS has superior security when compared to Linux, and privacy wise it is still a great option as it has great protection against the third party software that you install. It is not great for threat models where you require anonymity, but most people don't have such threat models to begin with.
Some people will say Linux is targeted less and is therefore safer, but that is simply not true. Irrelevance != security. ReactOS is even less targeted than Linux, macOS or Windows because no one uses it, does that make it a secure operating system? And remember, malware for Linux does exist, and it's not hard to make one either. The security model is so bad that it's basically "if you execute bad code, you are screwed". There is not even a need for an OS exploit to compromise your system if the app you are running is malicious. The OS itself doesn't protect you from anything.
And before anyone jumping in accusing me of being an Apple shill - I am a Linux system administrator, and most of the systems I use daily (both on my servers and personal laptop) are Red Hat systems, not Apple ones. As much as I want to say that Linux desktop is better than macOS - that is simply not the reality, I'd be lying to you if I say so.
personally, i use an xps15/windows/WSL, mainly because i also use the laptop for video games and so on.
Un-socketable, solder-on BIOS chip.
---- MORE: Librems looked pretty cool. I might get one next.
But I've been running my T480s since 2018 and it is still going strong, I don't imagine I'll replace it unless I drop it on hard ground... wait I've done that. or spill coffee on it... wait I did that too. Did I mention they were durable as heck?
For software: I run PopOS for ubuntu-easy software and compatbility with a Regolith PPA because i3 window managers are amazing. Since its a thinkpad, you can swap out and replace most parts easily including the battery when it eventually wears out (literally takes <10 minutes).
Asus rog strix
You'll thank me later
You’ll only find that with a MacBook. All other laptops have terrible battery life. But since you don’t want a MacBook… looks like your shit out of luck.
If there is any leeway here, I would seriously recommend switching. You cannot beat the M1 MacBooks and macOS is close enough to Linux anyway.