Hacker News Reader

Comment by adamweld | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone recommend a laptop that gets great battery life on Linux and has a good keyboard?

I've been thinking about selling my current beefy laptop (razer blade 15) since I end up doing all my MCAD/ECAD work on my desktop anyway, and moving back to Manjaro on my laptop which only really gets used for software/firmware anyway.

But, I read so many horror stories about linux firmware glitchyness and poor battery life that I gave up on the idea. If I can just by a used thinkpad from a few generations ago that might be perfect.

View on HN

My ThinkPad x270 runs perfectly on Linux out of the box (including Bluetooth, webcam, etc.), and with the larger 9-cell battery (+ the smaller internal battery it comes with) it ran almost 20 hours for normal coding usage when new (less with other usage, and of course it's gone down a bit since, but can still work a full day on it).

It should be said I run a pretty minimal system (dwm, st, Vim, stuff like that) and usually throttle the system to "powersave", mostly because the fans will never spin up with it. It's a bit slower, but still plenty fast enough for me.

I get decent but not amazing battery life on my XPS 15, running Pop_OS. About 5-6 hours of actual use time. No major firmware issues but it is using Nvidia.

XPS 15 laptops appear to have an unresolved mouse lag issue that is noticeable under linux (but seems to happen in Windows too). Seems to not happen with external mice. Annoying but not a big deal. There is an open issue for it but no patch yet.

had one. It died. Battery swelled up, I replaced it. It died forever because, I think. I closed the lid and put it in my bag. Doing exactly that is what makes a laptop a laptop. It was a couple of months out of warranty and you can't even contact Dell to say "Is this your quality? Is this acceptable to you that your laptop is this bad?" You need to plug in serial numbers on their website and they just tell you to get lost. Can't email them. Can't do anything.

So yes. The Dell. I do NOT recommend. They are garbage quality devices and their support is utterly terrible. Wildly overpriced for what you actually get.

Avoid.

I've had great battery life and overall experience with my System76 Lemur Pro. However, I have only used their PopOS and don't know if Manjaro would fare differently.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com