HACKER Q&A
📣 deterministic

Best Laptop for Development?


I am in the market for a new laptop development PC. I typically use Windows as the host OS (for games etc.) and Linux VM’s for development work. Price and battery is less important (I usually go to places with power sockets). What do you guys recommend?

  👤 belter Accepted Answer ✓
What I have been doing for years is getting something like buying Lenovo Thinkpads W520 or W530 or better the P50. Older but powerful models. The P50 get you Intel Core i7 6820HQ you can get the in the refurnished market, with 32 GB. Upgrade them to 512 or 1 TB SSDs. You get a NVIDIA Quadro M1000M at least.

Keyboard is great, robust and the critical thing is: As you buy them in the refurnished market, the budget you allocate for what would be a new laptop allows you to buy 3 or 4. It's great because you always then have a spare ready to go in case of hardware issues. You can keep one with Linux and another with Windows if you need it, instead of dual booting.

There is also another important advantage. These have no issues with thermal management and don't get hot. Something all my other colleagues with other brands and powerful laptops always seem to complain about. I guess Apple of course would be the exception, but I am not into the Apple ecosystem.

👤 bradwood
I have a Dell Precision 5540 and it's a nice bit of kit. Fast, fully Linux compatible, good for gaming and dev with a decent onboard GPU.

It's a bit pricy though.

👤 john_the_writer
Need to tell us what kind of dev.

Mac is great for web dev. Not for gaming.