Ask HN: A good Linux laptop below 1000€
Hello HN,
I have recently got rid of my Macbook pro and I am looking for a replacement. I thought, HN is the best place to ask, as there are many people here use linux laptops as their daily drivers.
I am looking for a good linux laptop for development purposes, with proper support from the manufacturer (e.g. officially supported).
The ideal price would be less than 1000€, but it is flexible.
Let me know of your suggestions, and thank you in advance!
Edit: My definition of good: A good CPU and good battery life. The integrated graphics card should be just fine, as long as it can drive a 4k screen.
78 comments
[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 277 ms ] threadThough it seems they might be harder to find these days.
This also looks more then decent: https://outlet.bluelink.nl/product/20HJS0XA07?path=NOTEBOOK/
In any case, I do fire that up when needed, with its own X session.
Battery is quite variable, but can be decent, depending on what you're doing. I use i3wm on mine, and powertop will show configuration settings that are non-optimal, as well as power-hog applications.
Of course Lenovo ruined Thinkpad for me a little, but still their x220i that I bought 10 years ago still running even after being tortured constatly and dropped so many times. So yeah best laptops for the price.
The only reason that I gifted it away is because M1 Macbook was simply way superior than anything I ever seen before. Otherwise I would still use that X1 for my daily needs.
It's a great laptop, the only drawback is the fact that the memory is soldered on the Mainboard along with the CPU, so if it breaks or you want to upgrade, you'll be out of luck. My memory did fail after 2 years and 10 months, but I still had 2 months warranty with on-site replacement, which was great. I think they lowered it to 2 years now, and no on-site support, so keep that in mind. It's a real trade-off.
Weight is 2.4lbs, 0.4 less than the Macbook Air. Some other people are recommending the T4xx series. My impression is those are a better deal if you don't care about the weight.
X-1 Carbons are good but avoid the touchbar (think it was gen 2), you want physical Fn keys.
I have an X-1 Carbon and a W520, W520 has a gorgeous keyboard, X-1s have chiclet keyboard which isn't as good as old school Thinkpads but still a step up from most laptops.
Thinkpads all good for Linux in terms of hardware. Probably avoid dedicated graphics cards on older models because they're not worth the hassle.
Just watch the screen resolutions and make sure there's no BIOS password problems when trawling eBay.
Also look for promo codes there. Never buy a thinkpad at MSRP, you can usually get them heavily discounted through various promotions (but still add on first party warranty and on site support if you need).
Their hardware quality isn't always the best but their support is good. Last time my screen hinge broke (a early foldable tablet thinkpad) and someone came out the next day to my house in a rural area and fixed it on the spot while I watched.
They're proper business / dev machines with a legacy going back to the IBM days.
Dell Latitude line is a close imitator/competitor also worth considering.
Razer gets you a lot of power but with tradeoffs in heat management and noise. If you don't need a GPU there isn't a good reason to choose them IMO. They are like MacBook wannabes but tailored for gamers.
I'd personally stay away from consumer laptops if I were you.
If I had to pick one, it would be the ThinkPad X1 Carbon.
The dGPU is useless with Fedora, my preferred distribution. (nvidia something or other) This isn't Lenovo's fault per se, but an AMD GPU would have Just Worked. The integrated Intel graphics are simply not performant enough to drive the 4K display.
Battery life is abysmal. I get less than 2 hours on a full charge.
The screen arrived with an obvious defect and Lenovo ignored my complaints about it.
The SSD's performance is worse than the one I have in my X1 Carbon, which is older. I find this bizarre and frustrating.
My opinion on laptops and Linux: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17656645
I get it, I got so frustrated with Linux on laptops* -- one literally set my kitchen table on fire and melted the glass when the fan drivers didn't work -- but, to be fair, this thread IS "A good Linux laptop below 1000 euro".
I don't think there is going to be a perfect Linux on a laptop experience anywhere. The manufacturer-supported Linux variants might be better (dunno, never tried), or a Chromebook, but short of that it's mostly shared components by a few OEMs anyhow.
*Recently bought a Mac, reluctantly, after 30 years of Windows on the desktop and decades of Linux on the server. It's a godsend not having to deal with WSL/Multipass/Docker/Lando etc. just to do some quick dev work AND never having to worry about drivers. The UI is fine, if a bit keyboard-unfriendly compared to Linux and Windows. I don't like Apple as an evil monopolist company, but macOS is admittedly pretty darned nice.
The fact of the matter is that the X1 Extreme suffers the same disease as many other Intel ultrabooks. It doesn't have sufficient heat dissipation for the processor, or battery capacity to service its power hunger. And it comes with synaptics touch pad.
I can't wait for the X1 Extreme Gen 4 later this year and I am set to buy one at Black Friday if it comes at a reasonable price. I would even get the P1G4 if the RTX 3070 version can be had for anything even remotely reasonable but I have a bad suspicion it won't be. (4lbs 16" screen 16:10 resolution, two M.2 drives.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17656645
Stop disparaging ThinkPads just because you are a Linux user.
System76 makes nice gear and I've heard good things about the Galaga Pro, but hardly any of their models are currently available.
I've been looking into this too. I'm running Ubuntu 20.04 on an older MacBook Pro and apart from the occasional kernel update sending CPU use through the roof, the experience has been good. But it looks like a less appealing option on the newer models with the touchbar sadly. I wish Apple would include regular hardware function keys as well as the touchbar. It would make the touchbar 10x more useful on macos also.
It runs openSuse Tumbleweed, and I am very happy with it. Bluetooth is a tiny bit flaky sometimes, and the backlight for the keyboard doesn't work on Linux, but otherwise it works well. Battery life is not quite extremely good, but I've gotten six hours out of it, having done no special tuning to optimize for that.
The touch pad is a wee bit too large for my taste, I sometimes touch it by accident with my palm when typing, but it can be disabled/enabled easily and has not been a serious problem.
It has no builtin Ethernet, but a USB-to-Ethernet adapter was included.
The serviceability is great, Google “thinkpad x280 hardware service manual” gives excellent doc, from the vendor ! (In fairness the same true for most thinkpads I think).
I got a used X280 - very happy running Ubuntu on it. But the exact model I got had a bit bleak LCD screen and 8GB ram - via AliExpress I first upgraded the screen to bright IPS FHD screen (replacement part cost ~60 euro, half an hour and no tools needed to replace);
Then I got brave and got a 16GB RAM motherboard (vs the 8GB that it had). Was about 400 euro, and also relatively easy, though required a bit of gentle disassembly.
And then I wondered “rather than throwing away the old parts, how hard would it be to get all the missing bits and build yet another x280 laptop from scratch ?” - I grabbed the hardware manual and went shopping… I think the overall list turned out about 250-300 euro. Still awaiting for some bits, but based on my motherboard replacement experience the assembly shouldn’t be a big deal of a project.
https://laptopwithlinux.com/tongfang-pf5nu1g-amd-ryzen-is-no... sells a version under $800 USD.
There are many other companies selling rebranded TongFangs with various configurations and prices; spend some time finding a good one.
An even better option is to buy used/refurbished. Used ThinkPads are a solid bet. See if you can find someone selling laptops nearby, in your area; you'll be able to hold/inspect/use/open it before you buy.
If you're not using Windows/macOS then avoid Nvidia. Handling their driver issues is a nightmare. With Intel and AMD, you basically never have to think about drivers.
For good official support, Lenovo officially supports upstream Fedora on some of its laptops. System76 and Slimbook are other good options for "official Linux support", but System76 can be pricey. TongFang laptops have a community of Linux users to help, but you won't get much "official" support.
For a very low-budget ARM laptop, the Pinebook Pro is a great option with lots of community support. Don't expect to play 1080p video on it without a few framedrops, though.
One of the biggest battery hogs is video decoding/encoding. If you plan on watching online video, your device should ideally support good hardware-accelerated VP9 decoding. AV1 might also be popular in a few years. That would mean that Braswell-and-older Intel chips are out.
Anyway. I wonder why they don't advertise them like their offerings for Clevo.
My Razer laptop works fine with Linux, but their warranty specifically states it holds for OS it came installed with. Multiple people reported Razer support demanding payment once they discover they had duel-booted Linux.
So either buy a laptop with Linux pre-installed, or be prepared to be "on your own".
https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/overview/cp/linuxsystem...
Fantastic machines we easy access to everything inside.
And I've heard the same stories from people with XPS. Same widespread coil whine, probably the same weird docking stations.
Yes, I can hear the fan when it's working hard. I have experienced the need to occasionally plug monitors back in after resume as well.
Outside of that though, none of the other issues that writeup mentions.