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!
If your OK with arm I’d say the macbooks and especially the macbook air are ready with asahi for daily use. I’m personally considering getting to run linux on as daily driver.
That’s an interesting point. I could buy my wife a new Air and update her M1 to run Linux. Thanks for the suggestion!
Check the status of Asahi Linux, they’re making a lot of progress on Apple silicon, but it’s very early. I wouldn’t recommend it, at this point.
Do you actually need 64GB of RAM? The Thinkpad T16 AMD would be a good choice, but the T14s AMD has just stupidly low fan noise in Notebookcheck’s review. You definitely want to focus on AMD, Intel’s efficiency is… not great right now. As an added benefit, you get AMD graphics from the APU, so none of the Nvidia driver fuckery, and better performance than Intel.
Personally, I’m waiting for the T14s Gen 4 AMD. The 7840u is zen 4, GCN 3, and TSMC 4nm over the 6850u’s zen 3, GCN2, and TSMC 6nm. The T14 and T16 just hit Lenovo’s model database ‘psref’ earlier this week, so I’d expect them out in the next couple months. The T14s hasn’t been seen yet, I’d guess it hits psref in the next couple weeks. But, I’m prepared to wait into Q4, if need be, and some think I will be.
Yeah, the RAM is a hard requirement. I’d like more if I could. My desktop is AMD so I’m not against using them at all if it makes sense to do so. I’ve also enjoyed Lenovo in the past but couldn’t find a well enough equipped unit for my liking.
What are you doing that makes having 64gb ram useful?
They already answered this:
I’m in DevSecOps, and do a lot of heavy development and testing, as well as PoCs. Ideally, I’d have 128GB of RAM but laptops aren’t quite there yet. The HD is a Samsung SSD.
I can’t see your comment about heavy dev and testing.
I’m curious about what exactly is chewing up that much RAM. Do you have a ridiculous amount of containers running? Or a big ram disk or something?
It’s not my comment. You are talking to the completely wrong person. Go look at their comments.
Ah, I think to get 64GB from a Thinkpad you’d have to move up to a P series, and even the P16s and P14s that are based on the T16 and T14 will be significantly warmer and louder than those others. They’re very much tuned for performance. Unfortunately, Lenovo is soldering RAM far more on their AMD models than the Intel models, so you won’t be able to run above spec.
Asahi is kinda unfinished, you’d need to run MacOS on it to get that sweet 10-25hour battery life probably. Many things don’t work yet either.
To add, while I still enjoy my laptop, my biggest issues are battery life and heat. This thing could fry an egg when it’s under load. At best, I get 3 hours of usage on battery even with a lower resolution, low brightness, power management utilities optimizing performance, and running on my integrated GPU vs the nvidia GPU.
With specs like those, have you considered buying a desktop or server PC and setting up Sunshine/Moonlight? That way you can use a thin client laptop and have amazing battery life.
System76 makes their own distro called PopOS. Their laptops right now are rebadged, but I’m sure they support them well. They are in the process of designing their own and I’m waiting to see how it compares to something like Framework.
That seems quite top of the line even today.
For battery life, the screen, the screen, the GPU (seems you use an IGP), the size of the screen, and the CPU are the main culprits.
64GB RAM will use some battery do you really need that much?
Hopefully your 1TB is an SSD otherwise an SSD is a nice upgrade.
There are also fat fat powerbanks for power users far away from a 110/220volt line!
I Am curious, most often power hungry laptops are gaming ones… What do you do with yours?
I’m in DevSecOps, and do a lot of heavy development and testing, as well as PoCs. Ideally, I’d have 128GB of RAM but laptops aren’t quite there yet. The HD is a Samsung SSD.
I usually have the GPU set to integrated graphics unless I’m doing some heavy load in which case I’ll switch over to the nvidia GPU. I also switch between power modes depending on my use case at the time.
There’s not a lot I can do with the CPU other than the optimizations I’ve done thus far. It’s actually one of the main reasons I’m looking to upgrade so I can have better performance per watt and take advantage of various cores depending on workload.
Interesting, thanks for sharing!
Note: This might not work for your needs if you NEED the core OS to be Linux. It’s also not optimal if all the software you need to run is x86-only.
The Macbook Pro with M2 Max comes with up to 96 GB of RAM and a ridiculously high battery life. It comes at the price of… a very high price. And Asahi isn’t all that ready IMO, you’d have to run your Linux stuff in a VM or docker container. But for the most part I’ve found that MacOS doesn’t actually stop me from doing anything compared to Linux - the OS is less customizable, but software to run on the OS is still plentyful, especially if you use virtualization or containers (or containers + virtualization).
There’s just no real competing ARM laptop out there right now. Not at this performance level. I wish there was, I’d love this kind of performance/power consumption ratio on Linux where I could also eke out more battery life by customizing my kernel. It would be especially awesome if it could be something like a Framework where you can swap out the board for one with a better SoC in 5 years. But for now, the best laptop processors are Apple’s.
Thanks to Rosetta, I can also easily run AMD64 containers, so I have access to both ARM and x86 Linux software. The latter isn’t as efficient of course. But overall, I feel like there’s nothing I can’t do on my two Apple Silicon Macs that I could (and need to) do on Linux.
No sure about 64gb, but for performance/watt and reliable Linux I can really recommend the Amd p16s and t16(s?) machines from Lenovo. Have about seven in the office and they are excellent.
I too, as someone in devops, am wondering what you need that much memory for. Do you simply really like VMs? :)
Also, have you considered doing the really heavy stuff remotely? Whenever I need desktop type power (16 physical cores and 128gb memory) I simply wake the desktop, ssh into it and do it there.
Look up any model you are considering on the following websites and if it’s listed it should tell you everything you need to know about Linux support. I’d say you’d be safe with most laptops these days though.
You try’na sell that laptop whenyour get the other one?
I’m keeping it as I still need more machines for testing. Sorry!
Just got a new gigabyte. The bootloader is shit combined with shitvidia to make a terrible combination to avoid. I expect most companies are doing the same bullshit with TPM/Secure boot. Everything proprietary is criminal theft.
