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.
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I’ve been using Thinkpads since the late nineties… I’ve only ever had Thinkpads. I’m using my latest as a Steam Deck (Steam OS, AMD throughout) as I’m still using the X260 as a daily driver though I reaaally wish I had maxed out the RAM while it was possible. The old one runs KDE Neon.
The old ones are better than the new ones but the new ones you can charge with USB-C.
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’ve had a galago pro and the build quality on system76 seems to be better than average, but well below the competition at their price points – they are all clevo/tongfeng rebadges.
however the build quality on the ultra high end models does mirror the build quality and this probably matters to you since you’re considering framework, which also has a high price point.
system76 makes sense if you’re doing for the support as well as the capabilities like the ones you’re looking for (coreboot mattered for me back then) and my experience was overall positive w them; but i learned recently that their support made things so easy for me that it made my linux skills get antiquated.
Sounds like you should buy another mac.
You want build quality and performance and code, game and use llms. That’s a mac use case. If the games you want run on it.
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 $500. Got it, replaced the CMOS battery and laughed all the way to the bank ;)
They is such a nice laptop for that$
It was a gamble, but I had already wanted one that I could slowly upgrade and figured at worst it would be still slightly cheaper than new.
all this talk about buying laptops…you guys can afford laptops right now?
Refurbished and Used can become quite affordable
If you aren’t running anything more than Minecraft for games you can get old Dell Latitudes for next to nothing. The downfall is that SSDs are $$$ now.
Since you didn’t list a budget, allow me to recommend the ASUS Flow Z13. That’s what I have, and if you get the model with 128gb of unified memory, you can safely dedicate 96gb of that to the GPU for use with local models, allowing you to very easily run models that are too large for people with two 5090s to run. technically you could use more, but you want to keep a fair amount restricted to use as RAM so the system doesn’t run out of memory. best of all, since the machine overclocked has a maximum of 90w for power usage, even under full load it uses less power than most people’s gaming rigs do when idle. I know from experience that it is possible to run this device off of a small solar panel. when you are doing something low power, like browsing fedi, the power usage drops to around 5-10w on cachyos, meaning you get 6-8 hours of use per charge for low-power tasks. that drops to 1 hour when gaming, since it has a 70wh battery and the system normally uses 70w under load, but like most gaming laptops you will likely be plugged in when gaming so you get the full performance power.
for gaming, it’s pretty good too. the AMD RYZEN AI MAX+ 395 in it has a Radeon™ 8060S built in, giving it about the performance of a 3060, except that it has potentially 96gb of VRAM. meaning you will have no issues setting textures to the absolute maximum in any game. I get good frames in most games, easily reaching over 100fps in most of the titles I play, like Dune: Awakening. you can use G-Helper for linux to do things like control fan and power profiles, if you want to really optimize things.
the biggest issue with this device is the price. it was never cheap, since it launched after the RAM shortage started, and things have obviously gotten worse since then. it’s a serious investment. but as far as laptops for use with local AI go, I don’t think there’s currently a better option, all things considered.
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!
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.
never get L or E series, only get T/P/X series
panasonic letsnote (not the toughbook) is actually also quite decent. but it’s hard to get unless you’re in japan
Other than needing more RAM, I think it will last a while. The 16GB I got was as much as I could afford.
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.
Can confirm, the P14s is really nice
I dunno about ThinkPads but I got a Yoga Flex Pro from Craigslist and it’s crazy nice…
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.
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.
I’m surprised to read that; I would have expected substandard build quality, not problems with Linux.
The laptop BIOS did see updates and now works fine running Cachy, but for over a year it was terible. A whole list of cryptic kerner boot arguments would make it boot, but then touchpad and keyboard issues would remain, and if it ever went to sleep it would hard lock again, not ideal on a laptop. I personally didn’t contact support, but on the official forum there was a thread with a tonne of comments about how support would say Linux is not officially supported on this model and people giving up and returning it. I couldn’t because I ordered from overseas, specifically because I heard Thinkpads worked great with Linux. Needless to say I was royally disappointed. At least it works now, and works better than with Windows.
I guess then I would add to my advice that people should do a quick check to see whether others are having good results with a given model before purchase. I thought we were past that with Thinkpads.
Where do you check?
Yeah, that and avoid very new things when using Linux are the morals of my story. But I can’t help it, I am a human and hate all Thinkpads now :P
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 😂
At least at launch it was a total mess, Linux would instantly hard freeze at boot time. They did eventually release BIOS updates that fixed them more than a year later, so mine is currently running Cachy, but just google for E484/E585 Linux issues, there’s a tonne of people complaining back in the day, and I was one of those early birds >_<
From what I remember, there was a similar-ish laptop a tier above which had received a BIOS update pretty fast, but even though the symptops were pretty much the same, Lenovo dragged their feet on this one.
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.
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 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.
The snapdragon X elite chips don’t have driver support for linux. From my research, it will not work. I also want a thin and light laptop with good battery life and would have loved the A14 if Qualcomm had not butchered linux support.
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
seconded. the Flow Z13 with 128gb of unified memory is a beast for both gaming and local AI.
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.
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.
But don’t you already have a MBP M1?
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!
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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.
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.
