Comment by harshitaneja

Comment by harshitaneja 18 hours ago

11 replies

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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.

heavyset_go 18 hours ago

> 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.

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  • E39M5S62 17 hours ago

    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.

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  • harshitaneja 18 hours ago

    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?

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    • cycomanic 12 hours ago

      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.

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    • OGEnthusiast 13 hours ago

      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.

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benreesman 13 hours ago

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.

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  • christophilus 5 hours ago

    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.

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nextos 18 hours ago

> 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.

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seabrookmx 13 hours ago

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.

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elteto 17 hours ago

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.

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