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Best Linux laptop for 2023 (beehaw.org)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I’m in the market for a new Linux laptop. My current machine is a 2018 i7 with 64GB of RAM, a 4K screen, 1TB of storage, 2x USB-C and 1x USB-A.

I’m looking for something that can match my current specs but brings great battery life, modern Wi-Fi, and a fingerprint reader. I don’t have to have 4K, and may actually prefer lower resolution for the battery savings.

I’d love to hear some recommendations for a machine built within the past 12 months. Thanks in advance for your feedback!

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Note: This might not work for your needs if you NEED the core OS to be Linux. It's also not optimal if all the software you need to run is x86-only.

The Macbook Pro with M2 Max comes with up to 96 GB of RAM and a ridiculously high battery life. It comes at the price of... a very high price. And Asahi isn't all that ready IMO, you'd have to run your Linux stuff in a VM or docker container. But for the most part I've found that MacOS doesn't actually stop me from doing anything compared to Linux - the OS is less customizable, but software to run on the OS is still plentyful, especially if you use virtualization or containers (or containers + virtualization).

There's just no real competing ARM laptop out there right now. Not at this performance level. I wish there was, I'd love this kind of performance/power consumption ratio on Linux where I could also eke out more battery life by customizing my kernel. It would be especially awesome if it could be something like a Framework where you can swap out the board for one with a better SoC in 5 years. But for now, the best laptop processors are Apple's.

Thanks to Rosetta, I can also easily run AMD64 containers, so I have access to both ARM and x86 Linux software. The latter isn't as efficient of course. But overall, I feel like there's nothing I can't do on my two Apple Silicon Macs that I could (and need to) do on Linux.