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Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

I see very disparate use cases for these laptops, so the competition is not really that fair.

- Fastest CPU + GPU + battery life, x64 not needed, money no object: M1 MBP.

- Reliable, serviceable, upgradeable, fashion-despising: T14 / T480 / T490.

- Serviceable, upgradable, but sort of new kids on the block, and less fashion-oblivious: Star Labs Starfighter, Framework, System 76 Oryx Pro.

- Sleek-looking at the expense of everything soldered and glued down: Thinkpad X1, MBP 2019.

- Open-source loving, more things under user's control: System 76 Oryx Pro, Star Labs Starfighter, partly Framework.

Star Labs Starfighter looks incredible BTW, thanks to bringing it to my attention. I sorely miss a trackpoint though.

No idea about others. I'd like to like HP Dev One, but I don't trust HP to make reliable things any more :(

I wonder why no model from the Dell Latitude line made it here; I thought some of them have good Linux support.

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Even though M1 MBP runs Linux, it has a very basic GPU driver, no hardware acceleration for video decoding/encoding. The "Fastest CPU + GPU + battery life" probably will not be true if using Linux on it. Would be great if Asahi users could provide regular benchmarks between MacOS and Linux on M1, to see how it is progressing.

When it comes to Thinkpads and other similar laptops - get one without the dedicated Nvidia GPU. That is just a nightmare on Linux.

> When it comes to Thinkpads and other similar laptops - get one without the dedicated Nvidia GPU. That is just a nightmare on Linux.

Second this. I got a Thinkpad P1 off eBay (basically the X1C with a dedicated GPU) from a similar recommendation thread on HN somewhere and actually have gotten it to work but this aspect has been difficult to sort out.

Using Oryx Pro with Nvidia, and it is a breeze. Depends on your manufacturer supporting your hardware, I guess.

P1 is based on X1 extreme, not X1 carbon, just FYI

Thirded. As an owner of Thinkpad X1 Extreme with Nvidia GPU, I'm never going to buy another laptop with Nvidia inside.

What problems have you been having?

I shared some in my comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34183088

I have 4 ThinkPads with Nvidia GPUs on my desk now and none had driver issues in Ubuntu, they all work out of the box.

They do "work", but the dynamic GPU switching is problematic, especially with Wayland. Especially when using external monitors. I could not have decent performance and heat/noise using external monitors.

You can (and really have to) stick to using X but multi-dpi monitor mixing there is problematic.

Also the KMS and tty management seems a bit buggy with Nvidia (even with early KMS).

And then even after you get all of this working "fine" with X or Wayland expect some random crashes of the desktop environment.

Then if you somehow survive the crashes, sleep mode is extremely unreliable, even when using the correct nvidia systemd hooks.

Not all of these are "driver" issues, but those are real life issues when trying to use multi-gpu laptops with Linux, when one of those GPU's come from Nvidia.

I also have Linux computers with Intel and AMD GPU's and that is a completely different story.

This is usually because the video outputs are often connected only to the discrete gpu, while the laptop screen is only connected to the integrated GPU, meaning you have to use both if you want monitors. On desktop, NVIDIA mostly works if you stick to X11 and deal with their proprietary driver. However, the hybrid graphics switching presents a lot of problems. Some ThinkPads actually can behave like desktops and disable the iGPU entirely, since they have a mux that can connect the dGPU to the laptop screen directly, without using any render offload shenanigans, though at a great cost of battery life.

Noveau or Nvidia's proprietary? How's battery life when you're not using the GPU heavily (normal desktop work)?

Nvidia proprietary. Never was interested in battery life to be honest. However my Thinkpad P1 gen3 does last coding over 4h flights, can tell you that.

I voted for the Dell XPS, but really wanted to vote for the Dell Latitude.

I recently upgraded to a refurbished 8th gen (KBL, top of the line i7 model with NVMe and Thunderbolt) Latitude 7390, and everything "just works", including BIOS updates via LVFS/fwupd with only a few days lag over the announcement on Dell's site. With this level of support I finally feel like a first class citizen running Linux.

Oh, and it has a proper selection of ports, including wired LAN.

I, meanwhile, have a Dell Precision 5570 and on the latest LTS Ubuntu it suffers from intermittent trackpad lag; crashing when moving from one docking station to another when suspended; the fans sometimes running when suspended; poor audio quality from the built-in microphone; it intermittently becomes unresponsive to mouse and keyboard; and it exclusively has USB C ports.

I very much do not feel like a first class citizen running Linux :(

I have a Dell Latitude at work and a Dell XPS at home, both running Windows and both have always and constantly had issues with docking stations and also sleep. I have to hibernate them instead of sleeping to avoid random crashes, and I power up each laptop and log in before connecting to the docking station. Kinda dumb that I have to deal with this in 2022 on flagship laptops running the vendor's chosen OS.

> crashing when moving from one docking station to another when suspended;

That is a thing? To be honest not sonething I'd expect to work reliably under any OS, the low-level complexities involved are mind-boggling.

The rest do seem like legit complaints, that's a shame.

Given the docking station is basically a USB peripheral that supplies power? Being able to unplug and replug USB peripherals while asleep seems like a reasonable expectation to me.

No it's not. Assuming the OP means something vaguely modern, it'll be a Thunderbolt dock that shares PCIe devices to the host. Try and work out the complexity of a PCIe device disappearing while you're "asleep" in your head. Trust me, you don't want to go there.

The latest LTS is 22.04, right? Maybe you'd have more luck with a newer non-LTS version; might have more driver improvements.

Update touchpad firmware to get rid of the intermittent lag.

> I'd like to like HP Dev One, but I don't trust HP to make reliable things any more :(

I second this. And even while they do work, build quality is atrocious and you can never really say they're "good". The worst offender is by far the screen. The quality is so unbelievably, absurdly, ridiculously bad for a laptop that costs the same as an MBP (32 GB RAM / 512 GB SSD).

You also better not be bothered by coil whine and an unbalanced fan fresh out of the box (but at least it doesn't spin that often).

Since the keyboard is pretty nasty, you probably won't use it that often, so you won't notice that it doesn't lay flat on the table and, therefore, it creaks.

It just feels an all-round cheap imitation of a macbook.

But, to the point of this post, Linux runs perfectly on it. Every last piece of hardware is supported, which hasn't been the case on Windows until a few weeks ago (no webcam on my amd model, and wonky dp-passhtrough through a hp (!) dock on my intel model).

These impressions are based on multiple generations of Elitebooks. The dev one seems similar, but actually cheaper, so it may be a better deal.

> - Sleek-looking at the expense of everything soldered and glued down: Thinkpad X1, MBP 2019.

Thinkpad X1 Extreme doesn't have soldered/glued down setup (well, except the battery): both RAM and SSD are user replaceable. Though one might argue that it is essentially a P-series machine...

Sorry; that was my extrapolation from other X1 Carbons.

Wow that StarFighter looks awesome! Too bad about the lack of trackpoint though.

I wonder if they'll come out with an ARM model. Open source OS's are in a good position to take advantage of alternate CPU architectures.

Has anyone actually received one yet, though? I can't seem to find any actual reviews.

If you configure a StarFighter model on their website, it says it will ship in "4-5 months" and have a production run of 1000 units. So not out yet.

They also offer a more moderately priced StarBook model which ships in "4-5 weeks". Fossbytes gave this laptop a generally positive, though not outstanding review: https://fossbytes.com/starbook-mk-v-from-star-labs-review/

I would add the System 76 Lemur for an open-source, under-user-control, thin, and light laptop.

Agree, as long as you use a v6 kernel. I have had many months of hard lockups and reboots on v5 installs, all of which disappeared on kernel upgrade.

Besides that, I love my Lemur Pro

> - Reliable, serviceable, upgradeable, fashion-despising: T14 / T480 / T490.

I got motivated to buy the T14 as my next machine until I saw that the RAM is not upgradable. Only SSD and the extra M.2 slot. :(

EDIT: At least the gen 3

EDIT 2: And the AMD version.

Another happy Dell user here. I'm actually not using a laptop any more, but I started with an Inspirion in 2007 and that ran at the time Fedora Core with no problems everything worked out of the box. I've since stuck with Dells and have been very happy.

I just wanted to add that the M1 has a limitation on the number of display outputs iirc 2 for the MBP, 1 for the MBA (but > 0 solutions exist, each with their own limitations).

> but > 0 solutions exist, each with their own limitations

What are you trying to say with this “> 0” syntax? That solutions exist?

it was meant to be > 1, indicating that it’s multiple, ie more than 1.

While the M1 MBP is indeed the most efficient CPU/GPU combo, it is not the fastest overall.

Why leave HP out of the equation? I have an EliteBook, it has two RAM slots, serviceable SSD, battery, etc. Linux works with literally 0 issues.

HP, from my experience, has a number of pretty good ideas, but I was unimpressed by the mechanical unreliability of the result :(

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