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Comment by harshitaneja | Hacker News Reader

I have been on an M1 macbook pro since launch and while I love the hardware, easily my favourite device I have ever owned but MacOS has just always been the thing to be the faustian bargain coming from being a linux person. I spend a lot of time SSHed into more GPU capable linux machines for most of my work and thus get an escape but after driving a friend's linux machine I started looking for a way to daily drive a linux machine. I tried Asahi Linux and also tried to find some non apple machines including with Snapdragon X Elite ones but so far I haven't found anything with good battery life and a decent linux driver support. So far Asahi linux with the reduced battery life seems to be the best bet. I don't mind tinkering. I love tinkering. I am not looking for "just works" but something which I could get to work after putting in the hours. If someone has suggestions please share. Edit: Sorry to go somewhat off topic.

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> If someone has suggestions please share.

Stay away from ARM laptops and SoCs, they aren't there yet when it comes to Linux. If you like to tinker, go for it, but expect hardware to just not work, or worse, you'll get stuck on a kernel fork that never gets updated.

If you want a good Linux machine, buy one from a vendor that explicitly sells and supports machines with Linux on them.

IMO you can tinker as much as you want without forcing hardware compatibility issues upon yourself in order to have something to tinker with.

That seems to be the conclusion I have been avoiding to reach. With graviton and other arm based linux server machines being a good bulk of my work I hoped I wouldn't have to worry about multi architecture docker builds. Ah well.

Any suggestions for something well built but lightweight and that one could figure out how to get 8+ hours of actual daily usage battery life on?

I've had a great experience with my Framework 13 (AMD), although I usually get 4-5 hours of battery life, so not quite the full 8 hours you're looking for.

I have tried multiple framework devices as a partner firm uses them. Good devices, want to support what they are doing but yeah battery life is really lacking for my use case.

Others have mentioned thinkpads and in my experience the better ones all get 8h+, just stay away from the X1 carbon (my current work machine) with hybrid nvidia graphics. Those have problems of not turning off the external GPU and sucking the battery empty, but that isn't just a Linux problem it seems from lots of forum posts.

It has been a while since I daily drove one but my old laptop used to have an nvidia hybrid setup and it was possible to get power management to work decently with it but that might have been me being lucky with the configuration. Thanks for the headsup.

The Thinkpad x13s is more-or-less there. I've been using it as my primary machine (and laptop) for the last month, and it 'just works'. All day battery life, fanless so it's dead silent, and a crisp screen with decent DPI. KDE and Vivaldi run as fast as my i7-13700 desktop.

> If someone has suggestions please share

A recent ThinkPad with one of the latest AMD Ryzen U CPUs should have a very decent battery life. You just need some custom udev rules to set the right power saving states for different devices. Powertop should make this straightforward. IMHO, this is a great compromise, because you stay on x86_64 and Linux, you get within 3/4 of ARM's power efficiency, and hardware support is perfect. I've squeezed more than 11 hours from some models.

One thing that is often discounted is that Safari is marvel of power efficiency, which adds up to the efficiency of Apple M chips. IMHO, there should be dedicated Chromium and Firefox builds with compile flags and options that optimize efficiency. To counter that, running a barebones Linux setup is a good option. Keeping your CPU wakeups/s low lets you cross the 10 hour barrier.

I use chromium based browser and applications so don't get to enjoy the benefit of the power efficiency gains of safari sadly.

Geat to know this about your experience with thinkpads. Due to your familiarity with multiple such devices would you be able to recommend a starting point for someone who wants something light with budget not being a constraint?

The new x13 Gen 6 AMD with a U-series CPU and, ideally, configured with the 70Whr battery looks very nice. Should be less than 1 kg, similar to a MacBook Air.

I've used the previous generation, and it's possible to get 10 hours of use on battery with some tweaks.

It's a very popular model, so it's well tested and everything should just work with the latest kernel.

ASUD ProArt P16. I never want another machine. Slender, stiff, machined out of something expensive feeling. Everything works on 6.16, 4k OLED display, wonderful keyboard. Solid RDNA unit, NVIDIA card alongside.

With a clean hyprland setup, light as a feather, battery lasts forever unless you run it hard.

Makes M4 Macs feel bloated and cheap.

that looks really nice

How's the screen wobble, though. Every review I've seen of it, the wobble looks dramatic. My Dell XPS, on the other hand is rock solid.

Will try to procure one for testing. It's a bit on the larger side for me though. How much battery life do you get on your average daily workload and what kind of workload is it? If you feel comfortable sharing.

Agreed about macs feeling bloated. I will not get overdramatic by calling latency in many functions unbearable but it is certainly quite high.

The Framework 13 Linux support is fantastic, and the hardware is pretty great too.

Battery is good enough (5-6hrs) for me on the AMD model (Ryzen AI 5 340) but definitely not Macbook territory in that regard.

I run Fedora and have coworkers who run Ubuntu and Arch as well without issue.

I like Framework devices but yeah sadly haven't used one with battery life that works for me. I can get a bit more than 5hrs on macbook under Asahi fedora with my usual usage.

Framework is so close to having it all though.

x86 Thinkpads + Fedora work great. Hardware support out the box is almost perfect (I would say perfect because I don’t recall anything not working, but I may be missing something). In fact, Thinkpads used to have Fedora as an OS option, which is why I think the support is so good.

Outside that maybe something like system 76. They advertise 14h for one of their models.

x86 Thinkpads is what I am gravitating towards as well.

Regarding system76 I have heard really good things about their workstations but not about laptops. Have you used them? I recommend PopOS to anyone getting started with linux as the first distro though.

I have not used their laptops. You’ll find the usual complaints about their fit and finish on the web, mostly because they are rebranded cleo’s. But I think everything else considered they get positive reviews outside of that.

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