
Ask HN: Whats the most kick-ass Linux laptop these days? - bradwood
Something portable, but well spec&#x27;d. Suitable for Dev&#x2F;DevOps work as well as normal usage? And perhaps with good GPU support for gaming&#x2F;AI?<p>And what distro would you recommend for it?
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cnasc
Dell developer edition laptops are built for Linux. As usual with laptops
there’s a tradeoff between portable and powerful.

Switchable graphics are a pain (anywhere, not just on Linux). I’d recommend
getting a machine with passable integrated graphics, and doing any gaming on a
desktop.

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BasicObject
I had an XPS 13 DE 9360. Nicest laptop I've ever used at first anyway. Fast
(enough), thin, light, pre-installed gnu/linux, all day battery life,
beautiful 3k screen. But something really annoyed me. After awhile the rubber
strips on the bottom of it started to peel off and the glue leaked onto the
table, desk or my lap! There was also an issue with firmware updates where the
screen would black out after a firmware update. This happened a few times and
was eventually why I quit using it. I didn't want to play roulette on my main
machine so I had to find something different. Sad because that was one amazing
laptop.

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malux85
Could you just not do firmware updates? or were they automatic?

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BasicObject
Sorry for the delayed response. I'm fairly sure firmware updates happened
automatically through update-manager. But at the time I had it set up so I had
to initiate all updates so it wouldn't be fully automatic. You can turn them
off. That firmware is issue currently resolved. I had to use an external
monitor for months. But that glue problem is still there.

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sgillen
Not sure if this works for you but I'm a big fan of having a very powerful
desktop that I remote into from a cheap laptop. Especially if you're serious
about AI (or gaming, if you can live with not gaming on the go).

I do this with a custom built ryzen + GTX machine running ubuntu 16.04, which
I access from an old mac book. Once you get comfortable with your remote dev
environment It's a really nice experience.

~~~
epiphanitus
That's an interesting setup. Is there a specific reason why you run your big
experiments on your own machine instead of AWSs machines?

I'm very interested in the field myself, but I haven't yet reached the point
yet where my Sagemaker bill has broken the bank.

~~~
sgillen
Well I already have the machine and the electricity is free. That's the only
reason though, haven't needed to mess around with AWS much.

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chrisbennet
I use a X1 Carbon as my Linux machine running Ubuntu.

I think that the X1 Extreme might be the “kick ass” machine though. I have a
2017 or 2018 version but I use it with Windows 10.

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croo
I have a 6th gen x1 carbon and I cannot recommend for Linux(Ubuntu). It got
all kinds of overheating problems which had to be addressed by playing with
the voltage, errors with the trackpoint/touchpads, and difficulties with going
to sleep... It was definitely not a Linux certified laptop at the beginning of
this summer.

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z_open
Not going to answer OP's question that well but I just got a Lenovo V330
because I wanted a cheap and good AMD laptop and it's a good choice for
something that works out of the box. Other laptops with Ryzen CPU's may
require special kernel parameters to boot but this was painless.

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kls
I just went thru this and settled on a Sager, It's a gaming laptop but is a
well built platform based on one of the Clevo systems. It's basically a
desktop system packed into a laptop form factor, which is perfect for me as I
really don't go anywhere where I don't have a plug-in and in the car I just
use an inverter. Battery life is only about 2-3 hours, but it's an i-9 system
with 64GB of ram.

I tend to buy the top of the line model when I get a new system and run it
into the ground before I replace it, I tend to get about 5-7 years out of a
laptop. I generally find that this is more cost effective for me than to
replace every 2-3 years a mid-line system.

I tend to need a lot of HP because for one of our clients we use VM's to
emulate all kinds of devices that run in a mesh and having the whole topology
on a single system reduces a lot of noise when debugging.

My previous two laptops where Dell's and I had a really unhappy experience
with them, I got about 3 years out of the first until it died and only about a
year out of the second. But the straw that broke the camels back for me with
them, is the add a 5v line to their charger, if the laptop does not detect
this, it pops the thermal protection API and basically cuts your CPU in half.
So if you don't replace their crappy chargers that always seem to burn out,
with another official Dell charger, you have to hack the thermal API to get it
to actually run proper.

Before that I had Mac Book Pro's I liked them but they have just been too slow
in offering large ram capacity laptops, I moved on when they held at 16GB for
so long. I lost some love for them when they discontinued the 17 line, I
understand it, it was just not a volume seller, but I prefer a 17 inch screen
as I work on the road a bit and a second monitor is not an option in those
cases. But it was really when I could not virtualize the entire network on
16GB that I moved on.

Most of the gaming laptops have solid builds and last, I tend to look at those
systems when I look for a developers system, as there is a large overlap in
needs. Also gamers tend to be fairly critical of hardware build quality so
most game level laptops are of good build quality.

I don't think you can go wrong with a gaming setup from Sager, MSI, Asus or
Acer.

All seem to run linux well after some bios tweeks, like turning off secure
boot.

Note: I run a Sager NP9176-G3 with Fedora 30 as my base OS, with VMWare
Workstation and a host of other OS's as VM's.

~~~
zamadatix
I have a higher end Clevo (not rebranded) from late 2017 and I was never able
to figure out why the keyboard would drop an input or two every couple dozen
seconds. I ended up running various Linux installs as VMs which was fine just
not what I was hoping for.

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gesman
MSI GT-76

I have it in Windows version for high res image editing. It'll fly with Linux.

(i9-9900K, 128GB RAM, 3 x 1TB Samsung 970PRO nVME)

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srijanshetty
Dell XPS 13 developer edition, I've been using the 2018 model and haven't
looked back.

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skinney6
I like ThinkPads. Gen 3 X1 Carbon is my work machine, kicks ass. A ThinkPad
T440s is my personal. It too kicks ass.

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brudgers
_GPU support for gaming /AI?_

YAGNI.

