I’m looking to buy a new laptop. I recently switched to Linux (Fedora) and would like to stay with it (Not necessarily Fedora though).
My most important requirement is that it has a great runtime. I honestly don’t want to deal with under-volting or anything like that. A “runs out of the box” approach would be best.
13-14", no dGPU, AMD/Intel.
edit: I realized that great runtime is very different for everyone. I wouldn’t consider 5-7 hours great. More like absolute minimum is 8. Better is 10-12. This sounds very unlikely though, apart from MacBooks with ARM CPU. Any recommendations?
Apple. Can run bare metal Linux now
Yeah but how is the experience? While I’m not a fan of MacOS the polish and integration with the hardware is excellent. Hmm… I may need to see if I can dual boot this machine and check it out myself.
Haven’t tried myself but looking at a Mac for next time. Seems to be great experience and hardware integration somewhat up to speed. GPU issue is tackled a while back. https://asahilinux.org/ https://macdailynews.com/2022/04/26/asahi-linux-on-an-apple-m1-mac-mini-is-unbelievably-fast/ the fedora version was launched a few months back so I assume there is a lot to do. But active development and usable
Do you mean battery life?
My daily driver is still a Dell XPS 13, 10th gen Intel i7, 16gb RAM and 500gb (nvm) SSD. I bought it referbed. I’m running Fedora 38 (Workstation) currently. Everything works but the fingerprint sensor (which I don’t care about). It runs for hours as long as I’m doing “normal” stuff like browsing and writing. It runs so long that I get tired before it does. The only time the runtime suffers is if I’m cranking the cores (encoding, compiling, etc). No voodoo required, it just runs this way out of the box. Even the onboard firmware gets updated by fwupd.
The only oddity (to me) is that it’s USB-C only (no A ports) so I carry a small dock if I need to plugin a normal USB device or network cable, but that’s rare for me.
No idea, but research to framework, pine64 and system76
There are some sweet used laptops with great runtime in the Lenovo ThinkPad series.
Not new though…
Edit: maybe new if you have the budget ofc
The T480 and T580 are some of the last ones they made with swapable batteries. Everything works out of the box in Linux except the fingerprint scanner which needs some additional configuration.
I have a T480 with an integrated GPU and the largest battery. It runs for a long time on a charge and there are lots of spare parts available.
Just curious, the 72WH battery? What’s a “long time?” I use the standard slim battery on my T480 and was only getting 3-4 hours on Pop (both brand new batteries). And forget about standby. It would regularly lose 20-30% overnight if not completely shut down. Wanted to make it work, but that alone made me boot back into Windows for the laptop.
I still get over 12 hours of web browsing or video playback with the backlight around 30% on mine even though my internal battery is down to 60% capacity and my external is around 90%. Standby drains about 10% overnight. I am running Linux Mint on mine and I set up TLP. Undervolting can increase the runtime quite a bit, but I haven’t bothered with that yet.
Why buy Lenovo even there are a bunch of vendors making Linux-first laptops these days? When you buy Lenovo you’re supporting Microsoft and a bunch of other shady companies (firmware vendors, etc).
Cause lenovo actually sell their laptop here. I do wish framework would expand out soon but seems quite unlikely for a few more years.
I’ve gotten both of my thinkpads used, so none of that money went to Lenovo or Microsoft. The laptops that come with Linux are expensive and are rarely available used.
And I’m out here ecstatic for getting 4 hours on my laptop 😂
i have the same requirements as you. i bought framework 13.
i’m still in the confuguration phase, for now it has a decent battery run of ~6/8h of installing stuff. i’m configuring nixos.
you have TLP configured?
yes but default config, i still need to look into it
Which CPU are you using? I’ve got the 11th gen i5 and battery life is just miserable, especially in standby.
i5-1340p
there is a kernel parameter to add to make standby better:
mem_sleep_default=deep.if you are on nixos you can import the framework hardware module from “nixos-hardware”. it also includes other fixes
bought a (used) t470 a few months ago, been happy with it - especially for the price.
