So i have my main system, i have been running NixOS on for over a year. It has been a pleasure to daily drive. And ive recently been playing with gentoo and funtoo. And althought alot of information, which is somewhat overwhelming but is slowly growing on me and making me appreatate linux as a whole. So i was wondring what other software users run, and what hardware they run it on. Ive also been looking into replacing my lenovo W540 because the Nvidia K110m is royal pain and kills my battery life. Ive been looking at lenovos t480, t480s t440p. And cant decide, i really would like at least 4 cores, good linux support and long battery life aswell as repairablility. The laptop is going to mostly be a web browsing machine aswell as trying out gentoo and new distros. If you have any suggestions on a laptop id very be much grateful.
Cheers,
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Honestly I just use Fedora and Debian. Distros don’t matter when you have flatpak and distrobox
Framework 13 AMD.
My personal laptop is whatever the first gen Framework is called. After many, many years doing the “cool” distros, I’ve settled on Mint and don’t really have any motivation to do anything else… I have real work I need to do and can’t be bothered to deal with figuring out weird shit. I just need it to work.
TBH, the only things I use my laptop for anymore is a browser, vim, git, and kubernetes tooling… I barely have any interest in running Linux on a workstation at this point. The only things that really interest me anymore are being run in distributed clusters. Desktop Linux is kinda boring and tedious for me.
Linux Mint Debian Edition is what I’m using on my Mac Mini. Before that it was the Ubuntu Linux Mint.
I have a 2015 MacBook Pro they was running opensuse Leap but it won’t boot or charge now. I need to take it to an Apple repair shop for troubleshooting.
If I were looking for a new laptop I’d look at some of the recent ThinkPad’s like the X1. Or I’d like for a good deal on a new AMD Ryzen 5 or 7 equipped laptop .
But if you’re just going to watch YouTube, you could easily get a Celeron based 13 inch laptop from the past 2 years and is should work fine for that.
I got a T480s for approx. 350USD. Battery life is fine and parts are cheap. Can’t really fault it… I guess the screen could be brighter? Great little machine.
Good choice.
My daily driver is a 3600 ARM core kubernetes cluster in Oracle cloud running on Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel.
On my desk I have an M2 Mac, lol!
I started to read and was like “is this guy like an arm developer or somthing?”
Actually, before this I was a Kernel developer at Qualcomm, so… Yes
Yo thats super cool!
It was fun and interesting and challenging. 🌝 My team was amazing, my leadership was amazing, I wish the company hadn’t gone to shit.
I got a Framework 16 ordered with no GPU. It’s pricy, but it is the only laptop that has an upgradable GPU. I’m looking forward to a 7900S mobile GPU upgrade wherever that drops.
I’m currently using LMDE on Thinkpad W530 for work. Pretty much stationary, with second monitor and all. I got a more mobile X230 with 9 cell battery (same OS) for when I need to be on the move.
That i7 on the W540 would be very useful if you want to have good compilation time for your system.
Running the Fedora Asahi Linux on my sweet sweet MacBook M1 :P
How long, any crashes?
More than a month now, and no crashes. All the issues I had, were my fault. Although in some very specific situations it seems to get in a memory filling cycle until the swap gets filled and there’s a crash
Is that because u have less ram?
I don’t think so. I’ve opened htop during one such event and swap space was getting filled despite the ram being mostly empty. Even after closing everything, the swap occupied continued to increase
Have you uploaded this issue to Asahi team? Maybe they or the internet could shed light on this.
I’m on their IRC and have reported bugs a few times. However, I haven’t been able to replicate it yet, so I’m not too worried
It’s one of those, i find them while making games in Godot Engine, that one in a million bug. What do you think, a user issue, or OS issue?
Pretty happy with my Dell precision 5520 with nixos. Except that the oem batteries swell up, but a lower capacity 3rd party battery is fine. I’m going to be looking at the snapdragon x elite laptops when they come out next year
Linux Mint and a used thinkpad t480s.
It works great, and cost me the fraction of a new one.
If you want to try Gentoo (you shouldn’t) you need the fastest processor and most memory you can get.
I have a T440p I am happy with, but I run Endeavour and only use a terminal and a browser.
Opensuse tumbleweed on a lenovo X1 gen 7. Software wise - KDE desktop and VS Code, Dbeaver, Kate and Firefox. Oh, and the usual command line tools - git, npm, terraform… This is a work laptop, but I find tumbleweed to be extremely stable, considering it’s a rolling release. If it does go south, there is a fantastic snapper support to roll back to the previous state.
i have been on manjaro kde for a couple years, the hardware changed during the years. right now i’m on a 2700x with a 3060 and 32gb of ram.
i’m planning to wipe it for pure arch / nix / silverblue kde (sorry i don’t remember the name)
not because is unstable or anything, i just want to do some cleanup and maybe change my workflow a bit
my current workflow is kde + bismuth for tiling, almost everything controlled by the extra buttons on the mouse
for a more detailed description: https://lemm.ee/comment/6503411
i’m very open to suggestions!
I have a T480 and the battery will last me 2 days on a charge for my typical use. Since it has two batteries, I can swap the external one without having to plug in or shut down. There are lots of parts available and you can find used or refurbished laptops at a reasonable price.
The downside with the T480 is a lack of PCIe lanes. The thunderbolt only has 2 lanes, which is not so good for an external GPU. The NVMe SSD is also only 2 lanes, but I still get around 1.5GB/s, which is plenty fast for me.
