I had bought an MSI laptop from Costco. Even though I was happy with the performance and with CachyOS I had to return it. Lucky for me that Costco has such a generous return window, 90 days. My main issues were that it lacked adequate cooling for the X7 358H, had no UEFI support from MSI on their website, and the build quality was atrocious.
I was looking at the System76 Lemur Pro, but I can’t seem to find any reviews on the newer models. Build quality and performance is really important to me as my daily driver for the last several years has been a MBP14 with an M1 Pro.
I’m not buying anything from Frame.Work as I’ve had two issues with them already which prompted me to cancel both orders, once for the desktop and once for the 13 Pro. Their customer service is lacking in my humble opinion.
EDIT: I mostly use my rig to code, game, and to tinker with private local models. In the US currently.
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Instead of contributing to (fascist) US companies I’d love to see people looking at alternative to the big companies we have right not.
We should look at manufacter are actually trying to be better, more considerate with people (all the people not just the west) and the environment.
In the tech space no one cares or no one dares to raise their voice against the big companies, their anti-consumer policies, their green-washing and definitely their genocidal fascist ideology.
Yes probably thinkpad are good laptops. If you’re on a budget just do whatever you can, if you buy System76 you are not “on a budget”.
2 companies I know of that seems to go on a better path than most I see in comments here are slimbook (https://slimbook.com/) and maybe Tuxedo (https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/).
We should be better than this.
T490 has been good to me with Linux despite my abuse, Im on my third lcd panel and going strong, no real llm capabilities in mine though.
I recently grabbed a Framework 13 on eBay that “needed to be plugged in to boot and probably needed to have the mb replaced” for $500. Got it, replaced the CMOS battery and laughed all the way to the bank ;)
They is such a nice laptop for that$
It was a gamble, but I had already wanted one that I could slowly upgrade and figured at worst it would be still slightly cheaper than new.
There’s a reason Linux on a Thinkpad is a meme.
You haven’t said much concrete about your requirements, use case, or budget, so I don’t have a recommendation much beyond whatever Thinkpad meets your requirements. The “serious” models in the T, P, and X series tend to be preferable to the others.
I love mine!
Woah I have the same laptop stand arm at work
Linux on an old T480 is a meme. I’m not sure about the quality of newer models.
My newer model can kernel panic as well as any model!
I had a T470 previously, and the mechanical build quality and materials of the P14s III are superior.
The model is important! I had gotten an E series Ryzen gen 1 years ago and the Linux support on it was atrocious! I swore to never buy a Thinkpad again.
I’m surprised to read that; I would have expected substandard build quality, not problems with Linux.
The laptop BIOS did see updates and now works fine running Cachy, but for over a year it was terible. A whole list of cryptic kerner boot arguments would make it boot, but then touchpad and keyboard issues would remain, and if it ever went to sleep it would hard lock again, not ideal on a laptop. I personally didn’t contact support, but on the official forum there was a thread with a tonne of comments about how support would say Linux is not officially supported on this model and people giving up and returning it. I couldn’t because I ordered from overseas, specifically because I heard Thinkpads worked great with Linux. Needless to say I was royally disappointed. At least it works now, and works better than with Windows.
I guess then I would add to my advice that people should do a quick check to see whether others are having good results with a given model before purchase. I thought we were past that with Thinkpads.
Yeah, that and avoid very new things when using Linux are the morals of my story. But I can’t help it, I am a human and hate all Thinkpads now :P
System 76 is a boutique laptop company. I bought two laptops from them and both needed service and repair several times.
So to be clear, you aren’t recommending them.
My employer also tried them for desktops. Every machine we got from them, has needed service and had major issues.
I recently got a refurbished Thinkpad x13 for 500 CAD, and it’s great with cachy OS on it.
HP Zbooks, Dell precision & latitude, thinkpad T/X series.
I was looking at the System76 Lemur Pro, but I can’t seem to find any reviews on the newer models. Build quality and performance is really important to me as my daily driver for the last several years has been a MBP14 with an M1 Pro.
i’ve had a galago pro and the build quality on system76 seems to be better than average, but well below the competition at their price points – they are all clevo/tongfeng rebadges.
however the build quality on the ultra high end models does mirror the build quality and this probably matters to you since you’re considering framework, which also has a high price point.
system76 makes sense if you’re doing for the support as well as the capabilities like the ones you’re looking for (coreboot mattered for me back then) and my experience was overall positive w them; but i learned recently that their support made things so easy for me that it made my linux skills get antiquated.
I can’t give any firsthand recs at the moment, but I’ve had my eye on the ASUS Zenbook A16.
I’m a weirdo who likes ARM Linux, and this is the first non-Apple ARM SoC that has a decent memory bandwidth for LLMs. Not exactly blazing, but should be usable.
What are you looking for? What are your requirements? I mean, gaming? Programming (if “yes”, do your projects require lots of running services/containers?)? Which country are you in?
In Europe, I like using PCSpecialist a lot. They offer thorough customization of the hardware, and their prices are good (they start low, and it gets even lower because they allow you cutting Windows out of the bill). In the US I’ve bought a ThinkPenguin and was happy with it. I didn’t really like my custom-configured Toshiba back in the day. It had weak cooling and was thus very noisy, and it wasn’t done well, deteriorated with time a bit too much.
ThinkPenguin hardware is extremely outdated. Would definitely consider PCSpecialist if it was an option.
Sounds like you should buy another mac.
You want build quality and performance and code, game and use llms. That’s a mac use case. If the games you want run on it.
