Ask HN: What’s a good laptop for software development at around $2k?
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.
812 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 371 ms ] thread>the Purism Librem 14: https://puri.sm/products/librem-14/
https://forums.puri.sm/t/no-nonsense-review-from-an-actual-u...
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/04/razer-designed-linux...
Then again, maybe they've improved since then. Mine was a 2019 model after all.
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.
Things get a bit fiddly if you want to use something like Manjaro or Fedora. But even then, it all just works.
[0] https://ubuntu.com/certified
There were some BIOS settings to change first to get the machine dual-boot ready, nothing fancy so as I don't even remember what it was. Getting a bootable USB stick was more challenging for me!
There are two reasons for this - Fedora ships a far more recent kernel than most distros (the only competitor being Arch), and Redhat does a lot of work on Thinkpad support. On my T430 at home literally everything worked out of the box with zero config, all the way down to fingerprint reader and keyboard backlight.
I would recommend PopOS over plain Ubuntu because they have some nice utilities for managing things like hidpi, and in my experience hardware "just works" more often, e.g. wifi.
Caveat, I didn't get the discrete GPU, those can be hell, and I made sure to get an Intel wifi chipset (same price) since it has the best Linux support.
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!
You get them decently refurbished on ebay as they are popular leasing models for companies which switch them out more or less on a fixed schedule. If you're lucky you get one that was sitting in a docking station for two years and is almost pristine, just the battery destroyed because it was on AC power uninterrupted.
I've stopped buying new laptops and now I use refurbished Thinkpad P50 with i7, 64GB RAM, 512 SSD for ~1100 USD.
If I need to do something really computing intensive, I rent a cloud VM ;-) Actually, I've one for each project I'm working on, and I scale them as/if needed.
Yet I almost see a fetishism around these machines I don't truly understand. 1080p, 60hz, 250nit, 16:9, 54% sRGB is the most common config you'll see and I really think on a 2 grand budget you shouldn't put up with it when purchasing new. This is also just a Lenovo thing, the Elitebook from the same year was 630nit 88% sRGB and the funny thing is that Lenovo probably only saved 10 or 20 bucks stocking this crap based on the price of replacement parts. On a 2 grand budget I'd spoil yourself with something better.
It's an alpha, and there are significant things that don't work yet including HDMI, displayport, thunderbolt, GPU acceleration, video acceleration, and sleep/deep idle.
https://asahilinux.org/2022/03/asahi-linux-alpha-release/
The only issue I have is that original Docking station sometimes fails to switch audio outputs (Ubuntu LTS).
I have an HP elitebook 8140p that works well with netflix, hbomax and youtube but seems to have lower framerates with other video streaming services. Not sure if it because it uses the nouveau driver or because it is just more than a decade old.
99.9% of what I do on Linux is command line (I usually don't even install a GUI, using an X server on another machine on those rare occasions I want to run a Linux app with a GUI), so I'm mostly curious about that case.
I'm now running the machine headless in the Parallels VM, and using VS Code on the host to Remote SSH into the machine. It's absolutely incredible and I highly recommend this workflow. My rationale is here [1].
Fair warning I haven't tried to get any OS other than NixOS installed. Not sure how usable Ubuntu ARM or others are.
[0]: https://github.com/mitchellh/nixos-config [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31101605
https://consumer.huawei.com/en/laptops/matebook-14-amd-2020/
Similar build and high power CPUs (not the mobile optimized/low power)
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).
- 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.
AFAIK it's not the balancing that needs to happen periodically, but the measurement of the voltage curve so that estimates are shown correctly. Balancing should happen all the time (and is, AFAIK, usually done by a low-level circuit, not a microprocessor) regardless of how far you charge or discharge. But if you know more, feel free to correct me.
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.
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)...)
Would be still more performant than most of intel laptops in 2000$ range.
You can’t really do that, yet. Asahi is making good strides so that you can run Linux on the M1, but it’s not there yet for a daily driver.
However, one of the non-moving parts does wear out: the SSD. It is not clear to me from the AppleCare+ TOS if an SSD failing due to reaching its write limits would be covered. The TOS says it does not cover wear and tear, but I'm not sure if SSD wear falls under that or not.
I like to keep computers a long time. I kept my 2008 Mac Pro until 2017, and only switched then because something I needed required the latest MacOS and 2017 was the year when the 2008 Mac Pro stopped getting the new major MacOS releases. I'm now only considering replacing the 2017 iMac i got then because the display has developed a vertical line of bad pixels. If not for that I'd be staying on it for another few years at least.
The SSD in my iMac is still around 98% after over 4 years and so seems like wear won't be a problem, and it is replaceable with some difficulty (OWC calls it an "advanced" repair and suggests having a pro do it).
But I've got 64 GB in the iMac. I don't think I've ever seen it touch the SSD for swap/paging [2]. I'm worried that on many of the M1 Macs that would not be the case. All of them except the Studio and the 14/16" MacBook Pros top out at 16 MB, and I've noticed on my iMac that I'm usually using between 16 GB and 28 GB.
I've watched quite a few reviews on YouTube of people testing the M1 machines under heavy load in quite a few different configurations, and one thing that has stood out is that there is surprising little performance difference in a lot of these tests between maxed out memory and minimal memory configurations. These tests do show significant swap usage on the low memory machines.
Similar thing in a lot of the comments on HN from developers using M1. Great performance with a lot less memory than I expect a machine used for heavy development to need.
I think what is going on is that there is so much bandwidth to internal SSDs now that on recent machines if you are hitting swap for task switching the I/O is so fast that it won't noticeably limit performance. It would only be when you are dealing with data structures big enough that you need to hit swap during random data structure access in a single task that you'd start really noticing a slowdown.
My concern then is that with the M1 Macs that have 16 GB or less RAM they may be making enough use of swap that they won't work out when it comes to longevity. Most people's needs grow over time as software becomes ever more bloated, so I'm worried that even if they aren't touching swap much now they will be in 3 or 4 years.
[1] In case anyone else missed this a year or so ago like I did, Apple changed the way AppleCare works. It used to be a one time purchase that extended your warranty to 3 years and then ended. They changed it so that you can buy it as an annual subscription that you can keep renewing indefinitely.
[2] Hah! In the middle of typing this post, my swap usage went to 99.0 MB. Kind of weird. I didn't manage to get any swap usage when I purposefully tried doing several large things trying to see how much memory I actually needed, and now I'm just sitting here with everything idle except the browser and I get swap.
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.
Be very careful. They are very good laptops, and Dell's customer support for businesses is stellar, but the XPS machines play VERY bad with Linux. There are some XPS machines that are shipped with linux, so they should be fine. But most of them have wifi/bluetooth chips that have no support at all, or very bad support.
I’ve always run distributions with kernel releases that aren’t months or years behind upstream, which might have helped as far as hardware support goes.
Their compatibility is not as good as they say (it needs a couple of tweaks, one of which is crucial, otherwise the machine eats batteries while on standby), but it's still decent. Definitely not "VERY bad".
It's possible that Arch ships with the workaround/fix by default.
On my 9343 bluetooth did not work initially, and on the 9370 the fingerprint reader is not available (no driver available), but apart from that linux is just working - and I'm not particular fond of spending time on setting things up.
Much more of an issue is that the xps, as every non apple computer does not support s3 sleep anymore. So just closing the lid and putting it in a bag can lead to overheating and battery drain.
Honestly I don't get, why we can't have decent power management unless you buy a mac.
That's good to hear for you, but I'm not just making this up. I have the XPS 13 9310 which mostly comes with the AX500 chip for wifi and bluetooth.
- For about half a year it had NO support in Ubuntu (non-existent drivers)
- Then it finally got drivers, but it was extremely unstable. After an automatic update from ubuntu, the wifi no longer worked and it took several weeks for it to be fixed.
- The bluetooth VERY often won't turn on after a reboot, requiring me to reboot about 5 times before it finally works.
- Same for wifi, even on the latest drivers it often can't find any networks.
- Some networks can't be found by the linux drivers. No problems at all under windows, with the same laptop.
- Crashes or freezes of the whole OS as a result of these drivers.
There's probably a ton more issues that I'm forgetting...
Oh and make sure you configure the nvme to AHCI in the bios. The intel raid stuff is trash and causes major battery / suspend issues in my experience.
https://github.com/kvalo/ath11k-firmware/tree/master/QCA6390
http://h2.jaguarpaw.co.uk/posts/how-i-use-debian-dell-xps-13...
Unless you plan to put them into a bag or backpack suspended:
With regards to transporting your laptop in a bag or backpack, safety should be your primary concern. You should always turn the laptop OFF [...] Under no circumstances should you leave a laptop powered on and in any sleep/hibernate/standby mode when placed in a bag, backpack, or in an overhead bin. The laptop will overheat as a result of that action.
https://www.dell.com/community/XPS/FAQ-Modern-Standby/td-p/7...
https://www.reddit.com/r/System76/comments/k0fm7z/system76_l...
Great points, though. Especially brightness -- even if you don't need all those nits for day-to-day use, they're great to have as an option when you do! Don't skimp on the screen specs that matter to you.
It is an excellent laptop, but more on the side of a workstation than on the side of mobility
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.
The battery on the m1 was to enticing. I went back and forth between a ThinkPad x1 with Linux and this MacBook air. It's impressive and I have no regrets. When there's an arm laptop released with similar performance and battery life I can run Linux on, I'll definitely be picking one up
For me, the 16GB RAM limit on the MacBook Air is the principal reason not to get one, otherwise I would have already. As soon as you go to 32GB or more with M1, it's a big price jump to the Pro range, not sub $2000 any more.
I have been looking at the M1 MBPs, but the price makes it need justification, and the 2.5 months lead time even at Apple stores for the higher models, has kept me from committing. And when I tried the MBP keyboard in store, it felt not as good as the old <= 2015 keyboards.
Firefox in daily use is constantly swapping on my older MBP that has 16GB RAM, and when I used Safari, it wasn't any better. (It was the trigger that made me go back to Firefox, as it used less memory than Safari when I switched). It quickly rises from 10GB to using 30GB after a little browsing; I've seen it go up to 67GB. Some sites will do that with just one tab open. It took me a long time to realise that's why browsing was so janky and pausing a lot, and back when I used Safari everything else paused often too. So I'd not be eager to buy a new laptop with the same problem.
Perhaps the Linux dev VM and several Electron-based communication apps that have to be running constantly add up, but it always seems to be the browser that grows to use much more memory than there is available.
With Firefox it seems to be a fixable software problem, because when it's triggered to release memory it will drop as fast as it can swap in, with no apparent affect except a long pause. I expect it's all cache. The memory statistics fluctuate very rapidly sometimes, gaining several GB in seconds, even when just clicking around text-only sites like HN.
But it's not realistically going to be fixed, so I think it best to get at least 32GB RAM for the next machine, whether it's a Macbook or not.
I'm on M1 since it came out and couldn't be happier
With the numbers I'm seeing, think it's too risky to commit to 16GB non-upgradeable RAM for a laptop that must last many years to justify the cost. The ask HN author wants their sub-$2000 laptop to last for a long time, and I'd worry that even if browsing is smooth in 2022 brand new, what about 2025 and 2028, with more dev and comms apps running as well?
Usually it climbs to 20-30GB or so then triggers the flushing, with many annoying freezes on the way, but yes I've wondered if there's really an upper limit. Given any amount of RAM, will it use all of it and then try to swap even more? Could more RAM even be worse due to some accounting-ratio bug? (67GB is rare, only seen with Telegram which does have a severe leak.)
Like you I'm auto-suspending inactive tabs, and their size certainly isn't a problem after restarting.
Yet I see large RAM fluctuation even on text-only HN tabs. Just now, a new HN tab used 2.5GB more RAM in a few seconds before settling down to 1.2GB. Later the flush event happened and dropped 9GB. The new tab is still open. It wouldn't be a problem if it was just vm stats, but it does cause too many annoying freezes.
So what I think I'm seeing is that bloat has accrued over time, and optimising memory, or perhaps doing it right on MacOS, is not a priority for FF devs (or Safari in my experience with many tabs or windows), and won't be any time soon. If someone has usage similar to me, they should at least look whether RAM usage is borderline now before assuming 16GB (non-upgradable) will be enough over the years they want to keep using the laptop.
My basic $600 acer laptop from 2017 has better trackpad than my ThinkPad from work and was expandable enough to cover my needs with a quick Ram and SSD upgrade and it has a really good, large track pad still working to this day.
I got everything working again except for the webcam, which kind of sucks.
However, I've heard that the keyboards on the recent models are not as good. It's the only thing stopping me from getting a Nano...
Edit: Linux support is stellar on the X1 Carbon, which is no surprise since RedHat issues its employees with business Lenovo laptops.
In early 2020 it got stolen (full disk encryption with a strong passphrase luckily). I got a X1C 7th and expected it would be as good as the previous one. The first bad surpirse was the HiDPI screen. Xubuntu did not work well with it, it required a lot of fiddling. Well and then I run some non-Xubuntu app here and there and it required extra fiddling. In the end I gave up and just reduced the screen resolution to some "classical" value and everything was fine again. Have not noticed that my code is worse because of slightly less smooth fonts... (Some distros might be easier in that aspect, Wayland is reportedly better, and to my suprise even i3 seems to work rather well.)
Even worse the battery life is significantly worse than on the previous model. To my understanding higher resolution displays require more energy, there is nothing you can do. Have not checked whether the newer CPU could also have an impact. A full working day on battery is hardly possible anymore, even with little playing of videos or similar.
Finally my current X1C 7th came with a 4G modem that has no Linux driver at all. Not a big deal for me because I have only 1 SIM anyway and my phone has good data rates to share.
More on the anecdotal side: A firmware update was broken recently. I guess bugs happen everwhere. What I liked that Lenovo guys where active on github and a fix came quickly. Couldn't resist thinking: Like in the IBM days when Thinkpads got good support.
I don't recommend it for the given price point. I included all extra options such as insurance and the extra disk space.
I found it isn't fast enough in general usage. Had problems running a serverless javascript project. External monitors with scaling will bring the iGPU to its knees. The display itself is too small to effectively program on it, and the CPU is not powerful enough to run a multitude of unittests or compile more complicated programs on.
I use my X1 with an eGPU and two 4K monitors. Webdevelopment happens in VSCode with heavy usage of the VSCode remote docker plugin. This enables me to run unittests and development tasks on a beefy PC.
Taken all together this raises the price quite a bit.
Is this indeed the case, and likely to continue for the foreseeable future? If so, that is really disappointing. I came in to recommend the Surface Laptop 4. You get the choice of an AMD or Intel processor, excellent build quality, and a 200dpi 3:2 touchscreen. And if you choose the "business" version, you can spec it with up to 32GB memory.
My wife is a die-hard ThinkPad user, but I can't stand the widescreen nature of them. I love how the notch on my MBP gives me that little extra bit of vertical real estate. But that screen on the Surface Laptop! My kids and a niece have them, they are amazing.
If a 3:2 screen is something you really want, I think getting a Framework is a better option, but if you can settle for 16:10, you'll have a lot more options now/in the near future.
> But that screen on the Surface Laptop!
I've been considering the Surface Laptop for the 3:2, high PPI screen. According to this [0] so long as you have a recent stock kernel, the only things that don't work are pen and touchscreen (touch screen requires kernel patches on Intel arch, AMD doesn't support at all). I can live without both.
[0] https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface/wiki/Supporte...
[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...
https://github.com/tuxedocomputers
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've had several HPs over the years, including ZBooks, and every single one got very hot and blasts the fans all the feckin time :/
They were all company machines, but it's put me off ever buying one myself.
The 840 G3 was similar in this respect (that's how I discovered the Elitebook, the lab had an agreement with HP at the time), except I had to turn off the secondary HDD I chose to take when tweaking the configuration with hdparm -Y.
Though the ZBook seems more focused on performance than the Elitebook, so maybe the Elitebook will not cut it if you expect similar performance.
The ThinkPad actually spins its fans more easily than the HP I think, but it is also more powerful. The HP's noise when the fan do spin is also less annoying than the ThinkPad, it's a soft blow.
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.
Honestly, I don't even know what to get in case it would break. I even have a spare mainboard just because it was 30 bucks on eBay. But in case it would fail completely, I don't know how to replace it.
Most other devices would be a major downgrade in repairability, which I meanwhile value so much that getting yet another Ultrabook that runs 2 years would be no option for me. The framework laptop and the System76 devices look nice, and either of those would probably win in that case, depending on which system is more easily repairable.
But still, they're by far not as easily repairable when components break down.
I’m currently using a T470 [1] with 16 GB DDR-3 3200MHz RAM [2], a 2 TB NVMe SSD [3], a Wi-Fi 6AX card [4], the Innolux N140HCG-GQ2 1080p 100% sRGB 8-bit 400 nits panel [5] (based on the T14 / T490 display), and the Lenovo 61++ battery [6].
The result is a laptop that can hold 17 hours of battery (95Wh), supports a Thunderbolt 3 dock and the old Lenovo dock, supports USB-C PD charging and the old Lenovo charging port and is the perfect mix of performance, repairability, and compatibility.
You can build this laptop yourself, depending on how the pricing is where you are, for about 600 €.
----------------
[1] https://www.afbshop.de/notebooks/20668/lenovo-thinkpad-t470-... [2] https://www.amazon.de/dp/B08LQG2SDS/ [3] https://www.amazon.de/dp/B07MLJD32L/ [4] https://www.amazon.de/dp/B087WVLPXW/ [5] https://www.xelent-store.de/Innolux-N140HCG-GQ2-400cd-Low-Po... [6] https://www.amazon.de/dp/B06WGMPFCD
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.
Also, I get the feeling that the Framework isn't your typical first product. It's built to be upgradable, so unless you find something fundamentally off-putting about the shape of the board, I'm not sure if you get much by waiting for the next generation. If they release a slimmer case, better keyboard, touch screen, or whatever, then you should be able to retrofit the new thing onto an old machine. Of course, the product is still young. Time will tell if this actually pans out.
That's a killer - it's 2022 and Apple are still the only company who can get that right. I'd switch over to a Framework in an instant (for dual-boot Linux/Windows) if they could fix that.
It sounds like you might be using 'shallow' or 's2idle' (suspend to idle) sleep mode? You might need to write 'deep' to /sys/power/mem_sleep. (But don't listen to me, mine segfaults!)
AMD still supports S3 sleep on their Ryzen processors, but you'll need to check user feedback to make sure that the vendor did their job implementing it properly. In S3 sleep, the UEFI/BIOS is responsible for suspending and resuming hardware state. If not implemented correctly, you'll have high battery drain (components not suspended) or bugs on resume. Lenovo had dropped the ball on that front repeatedly, with the last two gens of T14 requiring BIOS updates to fix issues.
Wait what? How is that allowed?? What is the replacement?
Looks like they can get away with it ¯\_O_/¯
> What is the replacement?
S0ix sleep (named s2idle in Linux), where the OS is responsible for suspending / resuming all non-essential functions. Work is ongoing on the Kernel and drivers to improve it, but there is a long way to go (yay Monday mornings with an empty battery because the power draw is still > 1W).
Even Windows is unable to make it correctly work without killing the battery overnight, so they now default to hibernating to disk after a couple of hours. This strategy is also possible with Linux, but making it work alongside full disk encryption is tricky: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Dm-crypt/Swap_encryption#Wi...
There can be lots of EC/BIOS issues for suspending, IMO it's one of the best arguments for going for a Linux-first vendor (Tuxedo, System 76, Slimbook, etc), as you know that their top priority should be to get basic stuff working on Linux.
I bought a XPS end of 2019 and had a very bad experience forcing windows to use s3 mode. Actually I eventually stopped bothering with windows standby and let it suspend to ram now because 95% the time I use linux anyways and there s3 works fine.
I was several times greeted with a very hot notebook at the morning, because windows decided to boot up and do system updates during the night while the notebook was supposed to sleep.
Not particularly helpful to you necessarily, but I was able to solve the battery drain on windows by tweaking the deep sleep and hibernation settings and I'm now reasonably confident that if I close the lid on the laptop for the night it'll have a similar level of battery left when I open it in the morning.
I think everything defaults to intel's "not actually sleep" sleep mode which destroys the battery like nobody's business
When I originally setup this laptop, I found that if I left the intel raid storage crap enabled, the mvd module would prevent s0ix/suspend. Switching to AHCI in the bios resolved this.
https://01.org/blogs/qwang59/2018/how-achieve-s0ix-states-li...
I'm definitely very keen to use Asahi once it's more stable and has support for more of the hardware though. For now I have an Arch Linux ARM VM that I keep running for some things (Haskell development on M1 is still a bit of a mess) and I can VNC into a Linux desktop over 2.5 gigabit LAN when I really yearn for my old workflows.
Concerning battery life: There are various tools like TLP[1] that help you optimize your energy consumption without much configuration. I get more than 6 hours of my machine when I'm coding on the go. However, I only have a few terminals with Vim and a web browser open. Some IDEs might need more power.
[1] https://linrunner.de/tlp/
I like the idea of Framework/what they're doing, but honestly, the lack of proper suspend is definitely an instant disqualifier, and their inability to fix it or even AFAICT properly acknowledge/address this after a year doesn't really inspire much confidence.
I get that they're a smaller company, but Framework is also much lower on my list because they're still selling their last-gen Tiger Lake 11th gen laptops, when 12th gen Alder Lake is a big improvement, and of course, that I (and I think many people) would much prefer AMD Ryzen 6000 (or heck, even 5000 series) that would give better perf/watt.
I really like the keyboard and touchpad, more so than on a Mac (but that's very personal). The RAM can be upgraded to 40 GB, and there is a second M.2 slot if you want disk mirroring or striping.
I run Fedora and have zero problems. (I generally upgrade 3 months after a release.)
The model that I have has a 72 Wh battery and newer 17 and 16 inch models now come with an 80 Wh battery. Mine is 3 years old now and it's aged much better than I expected. I can watch a 4K movie over a network CephFS mount and after 2 hours, my battery is at 80%.
I bought it on a whim at Costco, and I seriously think I'll get another one next time (maybe a 16"). Costco drops the prices to $350-$400 off every few months, and they're a steal for what you get.
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.
WiFi seems okay for me, I've not had any problems. Restarting X is indeed annoying. Also only one of the USB-c ports has display port support, that took me a while to figure. I thought my usb-c monitor was broken until I took a closer look at the ports. No webcam is pretty annoying as well.
The Linux community for the laptop is actually pretty large. People have reverse-engineered a lot of the "nice to haves" [0].
[0] https://asus-linux.org/
2022 rog strix 12th gen i9 + rtx 3060
10/10 must Buy
I went with strix vs others because of power delivery. Apparently rtx 3080 is great and all but asus seriously fucked up because the laptops they put it in dont deliver it enough power and it gets similar performance to a 3060. So I just got the 3060, 300ms screen is mind blowing
The Realtek WiFi device is a problem with hp laptops too. Works but needs a cold reboot after the hibernate wakes up.
Are you saying the intel WiFi chip is pin compatible with the Realtek? That’s an amazing find.
I thought that most laptops have the WiFi on a mini-PCI card these days (or really anything in the past 10 years) unless they are really trying for the ultra-slim, solder everything down look.
# of CPU Cores 8 # of Threads 16 Default TDP 45+W
AMD really knocked it out the park with zen3
Have my 2020 G14 since almost two years now and it's absolutely fabulous running arch as my daily driver.
I love the battery life, which is great when running on integrated graphics.
The CPU is great too, I'm satisfied with autocomplete speed in my IDE. I think the 5900HS is also quite power-efficient, maybe the Intel versions are more power-hungry, not sure. Another benefit is that the laptop stays completely silent, and only whirrs up when gaming or doing heavier workloads.
The GPU in my version is "just" the 3060 Mobile, but it's good enough for me, and there are costlier version with better GPUs.
The ports are good enough for me. There's one USB-C 3.2 Gen2 which I used to connect to a DisplayPort screen, and there's an HDMI port, which I use to drive a 4k@120Hz monitor. I also use one of the USB 3.1 Gen 2 (10Gbps) ports with a hub to run all peripherals (mic, webcam, keyboard, mouse).
WiFi was giving me problems on Windows (I have the MediaTek card), but that was fixed at the end of 2021. Another smallish issue is that there's no webcam, but I use a standalone cam anyway.
Otherwise the G14 would have made my list. The reviews I read on HN suggested it would be worth a look.
Edit: saw that the parent post says that that has been fixed in this year's model. Will take a look. Thanks both!
One big advantage of the high-end Thinkpads: they're spill resistant. I accidentally spilled an entire mug of tea over this one, and it had no ill effects whatsoever. You can't do that with most laptops.
- Crashes more than before. This has only been 2 or 3 times, but it's still 2 or 3 times for than it should.
- Has random issues, like graphical glitches, with builtin and external 4K displays. Right now I keep the resolution at 1080 because it's annoying.
- Has more issues going into and out of sleep.
Those are all probably Ubuntu's issues though. Physically I don't have a gripe besides maybe the speakers are a bit quiet and it would be nice if there was a USB C port on the right side so I could charge from either side.
I doubt that's unique to the T14, though. Every recent laptop and desktop I know seems to have trouble sleeping lately. Either they refuse to go to sleep, or they do, but randomly wake up and then stay on. I don't know what's causing this PC insomnia epidemic.
Nothing today even comes close, and never will.
To complement other points:
- you can put the nvidia card in “compute” or “hybrid” mode, which removes the need for X restarts. Compute is really nice, the computer runs on IGP (which is vey capable) and all cuda workloads seamlessly wake up the nvidia card, no question asked
- the above means that the pc is nearly silent, maybe helped by the AMD cpu, while being pretty capable with the 8 real zen3 cores
- no issues really on Linux, and the Asus-laptop tools allow you to switch off the leds or cap the battery charge. The wifi card was an issue initially, quickly fixed with a newer kernel
- the screen is 120Hz, and this is really appreciated actually
I would buy a newer version in a pinch
This is my setup, so a bit different from yours though:
The only issue I have is the touchpad location and style (no explicit buttons). It's not centered at laptop middle, but instead at text part of keyboard middle, but I mostly only use keyboard. Works ok as long as I reconfigure it to count middle button presses as left-click, otherwise I tend to misclick.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.
No complaints so far about any keys stopping from working or feeling odd switching between it and my full-size more clicky keyboard.