I had bought an MSI laptop from Costco. Even though I was happy with the performance and with CachyOS I had to return it. Lucky for me that Costco has such a generous return window, 90 days. My main issues were that it lacked adequate cooling for the X7 358H, had no UEFI support from MSI on their website, and the build quality was atrocious.
I was looking at the System76 Lemur Pro, but I can’t seem to find any reviews on the newer models. Build quality and performance is really important to me as my daily driver for the last several years has been a MBP14 with an M1 Pro.
I’m not buying anything from Frame.Work as I’ve had two issues with them already which prompted me to cancel both orders, once for the desktop and once for the 13 Pro. Their customer service is lacking in my humble opinion.
EDIT: I mostly use my rig to code, game, and to tinker with private local models. In the US currently.
You must log in or register to comment.
I recently grabbed a Framework 13 on eBay that “needed to be plugged in to boot and probably needed to have the mb replaced” for $500. Got it, replaced the CMOS battery and laughed all the way to the bank ;)
all this talk about buying laptops…you guys can afford laptops right now?
I can’t give any firsthand recs at the moment, but I’ve had my eye on the ASUS Zenbook A16.
I’m a weirdo who likes ARM Linux, and this is the first non-Apple ARM SoC that has a decent memory bandwidth for LLMs. Not exactly blazing, but should be usable.
There’s a reason Linux on a Thinkpad is a meme.
You haven’t said much concrete about your requirements, use case, or budget, so I don’t have a recommendation much beyond whatever Thinkpad meets your requirements. The “serious” models in the T, P, and X series tend to be preferable to the others.
I love mine!
The model is important! I had gotten an E series Ryzen gen 1 years ago and the Linux support on it was atrocious! I swore to never buy a Thinkpad again.
There’s definitely differences between models, but the best Linux experience I’ve ever had is on my e14 gen5 with fedora. That thing is flawless. If you don’t mind the plastic chassis.
Bro the E485 was bomb for linux. My job at the time purchased a dozen of them for infosec dev, we had gentoo built and deployable for them in about a day. Shit I still have one in the basement acting as a cluster head 😂
Linux on an old T480 is a meme. I’m not sure about the quality of newer models.
I bought a new T series Thinkpad last year. As long as you’re not using it as a hammer or a jack stand, it will hold up pretty well. Supports Linux well. Good build quality.
If you do need that level of build quality I would look at the Panasonic Toughbooks. Just don’t drop one one the floor. It may break. The floor, not the laptop. The laptop will be fine.
I don’t need crazy build quality, I just need it to not be shit so it’ll last me a few years.
Other than needing more RAM, I think it will last a while. The 16GB I got was as much as I could afford.
I dunno about ThinkPads but I got a Yoga Flex Pro from Craigslist and it’s crazy nice…
My newer model can kernel panic as well as any model!
I had a T470 previously, and the mechanical build quality and materials of the P14s III are superior.
X13 here, I can’t recommend it enough.
Same here, I got a Gen 1 X13 for 120€, it’s not powerful by any means but perfect for running Linux and browsing, coding, writing and so on.
Are there versions of the keyboard where the function key isn’t in the bottom left corner? Ctrl should be there imo.
Ctrl should be on the key that says “CapsLock”, and for me, it is.
You can swap Ctrl and Fn in the BIOS.
I was also skeptical with newer ThinkPads, but at the end I accepted the risk and bought one last year: T14s Gen 6, the one with AMD CPU. It is perfect IMO except for one small issue that affected me in the first few months and got resolved with a firmware update: battery drain during sleep was significant. It lost around 15-20% charge overnight. After the updates it loses at most 5% in the same duration.
And yeah it can update its firmware on Linux, just like Windows. Pretty rare thing to see. It has official support for Ubuntu and Fedora. I myself tried Arch and it works perfectly as well.
I recently got a last gen HP Omnibook ultra flip. Macbook level build quality but with a flip touchscreen, pen and oled screen. Really happy with it and everything works in fedora.
Something with an amd 395 ai max + maybe
I have a Asus flow z13 and very much enjoy it, but the form factor is not for everyone
T480 and upgrade ram, storage and wireless nic.
What are you looking for? What are your requirements? I mean, gaming? Programming (if “yes”, do your projects require lots of running services/containers?)? Which country are you in?
In Europe, I like using PCSpecialist a lot. They offer thorough customization of the hardware, and their prices are good (they start low, and it gets even lower because they allow you cutting Windows out of the bill). In the US I’ve bought a ThinkPenguin and was happy with it. I didn’t really like my custom-configured Toshiba back in the day. It had weak cooling and was thus very noisy, and it wasn’t done well, deteriorated with time a bit too much.
ThinkPenguin hardware is extremely outdated. Would definitely consider PCSpecialist if it was an option.
deleted by creator
Pick one at refurbed.de or .nl - dead easy to find any type of hardware at a good price.
Not in the EU unfortunately. Hopefully one day.
Use your MacBook and install Asahi on it ?
that was the first thing I looked into, but Asahi is very much still in alpha and barely hanging on. If I could install properly supported linux on a MBP I would be all over that. I would not mind paying the Apple tax if I could get the performance, build quality, and battery life without using macOS.
I’ve been daily driving my Asahibook for over a year (as in “I’ve not booted MacOS except one time for demonstrating something”). Other than DP-over-USBC not working, it’s as been as stable as any other computer I’ve used. Even the DP stuff is working on test branch, and I did try it, and it worked almost flawlessly.
I second that, I’ve been running an M2 for almost a year as my main (and only) PC. Standby battery life is not great and DP over USB C would be nice, but there’s an HDMI port.
OP, if you already have the hardware, I would at least give it a try. Linux on Apple hardware is a great combo IMO.
I’m willing to give it a shot, but have you gotten Steam to run on it without issues?
I don’t game on my laptop, can’t help you there!
