Background: my needs have changed and I no longer want or need a power hungry gaming laptop.
Wants: an i7 or i9 (need them cores), 32 gb of RAM (not excessive I’ve used that doing homework before), big 'ol battery, Linux support (not a fan of windows), 15in screen.
Top contenders are the Lenovo p52s and the xps15.
If you have any ideas or comments, please share them any feedback will be greatly appreciated.
PS: this could be a video “mobile Linux workstation round up” or something to that affect.
I’d go with System76 Oryx Pro, but I’m biased because that’s what I’m currently considering for my next laptop. I think System76 charges a little bit of a premium, but for one you know it’s fully Linux compatible, and two MS doesn’t get a cut of the money.
Also, System76 is coming out with an “Open Hardware Laptop”. I’m curious to see what they mean by that. It’s part of the reason why I haven’t gotten the Oryx yet.
The last few laptops that I bought were gently used ThinkPads, but If I had the coin for something new, it would definitely be something from System76.
Jesus, the oryx looks great, pretty much exactly what I’m looking for but with battery life all over the place. Some people saying it’s an hour, some saying it’s 6. For that price tag…
How well do you guys think soldering on some more ram to a matebook x pro would go? Buy 32gb off of Ali Express and have at it. (Definitely at least half joking on that).
Alternatively I wonder if their pop os will have a better time running on the msi. The two look remarkably similar, similar options and configurations. I’m pretty sure msi laptops aren’t particularly unique, I think other companies rebrand and sell them too.
More testing needs to be done… Not looking forward to more disk imaging this weekend.
The GL702ZC is an interesting beast. IIRC the reports I’ve seen state that the touchpad is an issue. I may be wrong, but I think a recent kernel update fixed it.
It’s too expensive for my blood, but I’d love to have one. I don’t think it’s what the OP is looking for though; it’s a heavy 17" laptop with a gaming GPU and short battery life. Eight cores though…
EDIT: WIndows centric, but here’s a review of the GL702ZC:
While the xps is certainly s nice laptop the whole developer edition trend is nothing but a buzz word.
As for the recommendation on an ROG laptop… They can be shotty with Linux sometimes. To give you an idea, I still can’t get suspend working properly. The laptop resumes but the backlight doesn’t come on. The interesting thing is you can see part of the screen where the lights on the back glow… Really weird.
Is this the right name? When I google it, I only get literally one hit on google. And the link that is displayed does not even contain that model number.
Had identical dilemma almost two years back. Went with new Thinkpad T470. Super satisfied so far. I would suggest get additional charger when planning to carry it home<->work (removes extra weight from your backpack).
So system 76 has a respin of Ubuntu with Nvidia drivers. It works on the current msi laptop. There’s been a lot of tweaking to get it right. But this will work in the mean time.
