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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   2836 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 17, 2023

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I'm in need of a new laptop, any recommendations?

I use mine for officework, schoolwork, watching movies/TV, websurfing, and the occasional teleconference. I'll almost certainly wipe the OS and install Mint instead, and I don't really want to be a part of the Apple ecosystem.

HP business-line laptops such as the Elitebook typically have very good Linux compatibility, and if you're diligent you can occasionally find some screaming deals on their web store. For example, my daily driver of over a year is a 14-core i7-1280P Elitebook with 1920x1200 display, 64GB of RAM, and a 1TB NVME that was marked down on sale from almost $4000 to about $1300, and I used a 10% coupon code to further reduce it.

I think you have to start by deciding on the OS.

If you want Windows, you have a bazillion options. Windows 10 is pretty decent IMO, though I don't have much experience with 11.

If you want MacOS, then your options are obviously constrained to Apple hardware, where the choices are pretty easy. I don't think you really need to be a part of Apple's online ecosystem, even though they highly encourage it. The hardware is certainly nice, though it isn't cheap.

If you want Linux, then you probably should check carefully for good hardware compatibility before you spend money on anything, as near as I can tell, good-quality drivers are still extremely hit or miss, especially with regard to webcams, microphones, wifi, bluetooth, video cards, efficiency and battery life, etc.

I often speak up for ChromeOS on these things - I use it for my primary personal laptop. Not many people think of it as their first choice, but it can do everything you mentioned just fine, and runs quite well if you buy decent spec hardware. Local OS security is top-notch, and there's a built-in and officially supported Linux that runs command line and X Windows apps. Google is probably tracking you, but at least they're the only ones.

I switched from using a pretty beefy "custom" Linux laptop from System76 to a shitty $300 Chromebook (old laptop was ~4 years old and I started having some trouble with the charging port and headphone jack) and while my expectations were low, I was pleasantly surprised: the experience is much better than expected.

The key thing is, I think, I mostly use my laptop for reading the internet and watching videos in the living room or in bed, or rarely when I go out. I have a top of the line desktop PC for gaming and coding, and Windows 11 has solid SSH and SMB support built right in so with barely any configuration I can access all my files, run whatever (CLI) programs I want, etc. Battery life is much, much better than my old laptop, something like 16+ hours of active use, and, while I'm sure this goes for most recent laptops, USB-C charging is great, because it simplifies cable management so much -- I can charge my phone, laptop, tablet, ereader, all with a single cable (and charge them off of each other if the power's out or whatever).

Probably my only complaint is the default out of the box ChromeOS Linux distro of choice is Debian (and an ancient release, at that), so I've run into some package issues when I try to do anything too interesting. Coming from Arch, Debian feels positively unusable, so I mostly just SSH in to either my VPS or my Windows PC if I need to do anything "serious".

I wouldn't be able to use a Chromebook as my only PC. But as, basically, a web browser/YouTube machine with a keyboard, it's great. I'm not sure what black magic optimization they've done to get Chrome with a hundred tabs running about as well as it does on my 13900k desktop, on this piddly i3-10110U chip, but it works. Best part is the price: I basically do not give a shit if it breaks or gets stolen or whatever, as I could easily get a replacement for 1/4 the cost of a decent mid-range laptop.

I don't think I could use a ChromeOS device as my only PC either. But I've been surprised that the list of things I want to do on a primary PC that I can't do on it is pretty short. Web browsing is nice of course, but so is programming in any language I've used, messing with Docker images and K8s admin, most CLI and Linux tools work fine, etc.

The $300-range practical devices can be nice, but personally, I'm too turned off by the low quality screens and performance compromises. I got a somewhat pricier one with a nice screen and pretty decent performance. But at least there are plenty of options at all levels of performance and quality now.

The combo of first-party desktop environment with officially supported everything and best-in-class security, plus an officially supported full Linux environment where everything works, is pretty competitive in the current laptop market.

I've always had good luck with corporate lease-returns on this -- a two y.o. lenovo, hp, dell, whatever with mid-spec should do you just fine and is usually ~1/3 the price of brand new.

Any recommendations for vendors of these?

I've used ebay in the distant past (look for sellers selling more than a dozen of the same model), a local reseller, and just recently found https://pcserverandparts.com/ but haven't used (they have good ratings as a seller on Newegg).

If you mean literally new, I couldn't suggest anything with a price tag that doesn't shock the conscience, and that's mostly out of my wheelhouse anyway. But none of the tasks you've listed have appreciable performance requirements other than perhaps hardware accelerated AV1 decoding.

So what you can do is find a used Dell/HP/Lenovo business (not consumer!) laptop with an i5-1135g7 (barely slower than the i7 and considerably cheaper) and at least one user-replaceable RAM slot, such as this Thinkpad, and upgrade the RAM to 16 GiB. I think^1 you should be able to drop in a single 8 GiB SO-DIMM to get dual channel. The i5 was usually paired with only 8 GiB which is too little unless you have extremely minimalist browser tab hygiene, and also OEMs have an unfortunate habit of leaving 1 memory channel unpopulated, which halves your memory bandwidth. But buying laptop RAM on the open market is way cheaper than the price difference between i5 and i7 models.

  1. Just linked for the documentation. Buying RAM 1st party is pointless and expensive. Probably should go 1st party for batteries, though.

Probably should go 1st party for batteries, though

I'm almost certain this is the proximate cause of me needing a new laptop. Lesson learned.

Any random laptop will work, I would go to the Linux Mint wiki if they have one and look for the most compatible laptop model. I think Dell and Thinkpad laptops are usually a safe bet, but double-check specific model to be sure.

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