I’m in the market for a new Linux laptop. My current machine is a 2018 i7 with 64GB of RAM, a 4K screen, 1TB of storage, 2x USB-C and 1x USB-A.

I’m looking for something that can match my current specs but brings great battery life, modern Wi-Fi, and a fingerprint reader. I don’t have to have 4K, and may actually prefer lower resolution for the battery savings.

I’d love to hear some recommendations for a machine built within the past 12 months. Thanks in advance for your feedback!

  • doclerEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    I have a gen4 with Nvidia 3050, and with the newer cards/drivers the support for power states is actually decent. On arch I don’t need any of the trickery you used to have to do to power off the card, if the card is not used for some time (less than a minute) it properly shut downs, and powertop reports something around 9w of power usage if you don’t fire up the CPU for compilation or such. When a program needs it, it powers back on. You still have some of the Linux/Nvidia headaches (with Wayland etc.) but it’s much better than it used to be

    • drdnl@programming.devEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Interesting, thanks. I’ve been avoiding dual gpu stuff for a couple years now for this reason (mostly buying amd only)

      • doclerEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        I bought mine in a moment of low supply from lenovo, so I couldn’t configure any laptop and I just had to buy what they had in stock, and this was the only one meeting my requirements. I like it much more than my previous XPS15, and it’s a great laptop, but I’d still go with AMD if I had the choice. Intel’s processors heat up a lot under heavy load, I don’t really need the nvidia graphics card (but the intel’s integrated one is not really good), and as I said things are better with linux, but still not great. Modern ryzens should solve all of those problems.