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?
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).
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.
Cause lenovo actually sell their laptop here. I do wish framework would expand out soon but seems quite unlikely for a few more years.