Can I get a high performance Linux laptop with good battery life, fast graphics, that runs cool and silent?
And yes, everything works. On bleeding edge 2 month old hardware.
I even use thunderbolt 4 to connect my external displays and peripherals. Not only does it work, but it’s pleasant. KDE has a settings panel for thunderbolt. I can even change my monitor brightness in KDE settings. No OSD required!
But wait, there’s more! I’m running 2 1440p monitors at 240hz and the system never even hiccups.
But wait, there’s more more! The battery settings are really advanced so I can change the power profile, maximum charge, everything.
The only thing I’m unsure about in your comment is “low latency audio”. It seems low latency to me, but I’m not an audio engineer.
What's high performance for you?
I can certainly get a Framework (Fedora and Ubuntu officially supported), throw my prefered Bluefin-Framework image in and get working
Battery life around 7 hours is the average I see reported, Fast/Silent will depend on the model, but I don't see the issue really Upgradability and easeness of battery replacement are a plus
I just picked framework because they were first to come to mind, but I think Dell has a nice Linux story, Tuxedo also comes to mind
These are the typical reviews I see around the Framework
https://community.frame.work/t/fw-16-review-the-good-the-bad...
Poor battery life, heavy, runs hot, poor build quality, bad speakers, and decent but not great graphics.
This should not be an issue. I have hardware that varies a lot and I literally buy random wifi dongles for $1, $4, $5, Amazon, AliExpress, etc. and they have all just worked on first plugin. I can easily take my phone and tether it to my PC using USB-C and it appears in my Gnome network list and just starts using it for Internet.
> how well will it handle low latency audio
Pretty well you can use OBS to verify this. There are plenty of settings if you want to tune that.
> My graphics hardware?
Just ignore Nvidia and move on. Sure they might figure it out one day, I gave up a decade ago and I use Intel integrated or AMD dedicated for GPUs. Nvidia does "work" for most purposes but it will cause you a headache eventually and those are not worth $400 to me.
> How well will it handle power management?
I enjoy the basic controls that Gnome provides that give me a simple way to basically say "go all out" or "save some battery" etc. There are finer grain controls available and I have used commands in the past to push crappy hardware to it's limits before I chucked it (old Intel iGPUs)
> Can I get a high performance Linux laptop with good battery life, fast graphics, that runs cool and silent?
You can get ones that are specifically marketed for this purpose. Tuxedo is one that specializes in this and obviously System76 also do. These have a higher price point than a regular Dell system, which IMO is the better option in some ways. Dell sells more systems and has more users and it will "just work". They sold Linux systems for years and still do I believe.
Regarding "running silent" this is a gripe I have, not that it runs loud but some laptops have custom RGB crap and sometimes in Linux I don't have access to the extra functionality to customize my lighting or manually set my fans to ramp up etc. There are projects that aim to do this, but I have not looked into them beyond the most basic `fancontrol` built in command.