I am getting a new laptop next year. My requirements are the following:
ideally 14", but 15" is tolerable if not too large
matte screen, nothing fancy, 1920x1080 is enough
not too heavy (I travel a lot), but it does not have to be “slim”
32 Gb RAM (happy to upgrade myself)
should work with Linux, I am happy to do a bit of tweaking (get drivers etc) if necessary, fwupd support would be ideal
I am purchasing in the EU, <1000€ would be ideal, the less the better
I can swap out the SSD without voiding warranty
Many people here recommend frame.work laptops. I checked them and are not really good value IMO, Asus delivers the specs for 700€ that I get from frame.work for 1300€. Their warranty is 2 years in my location, Asus gives me 3 years. Custőmer experience is mixed.
Yes, repairability is nice, but it is my experience that it makes little economic sense to do some repairs and upgrades. Over 50–60% of the value of a laptop is the mainboard, and I had a few mainboard failures recently, so if the frame.work mainboard croaks the repair would cost almost as much as a new laptop from other brand.
I am unsure about which CPU family to get these days, Intel or AMD. I do a lot of computational work but once I write the code, I run it on a server/cluster. The only computationally demanding stuff I am doing is Darktable, and now that I am not using D&S at all everything is smooth enough on the CPU. Intel models come with Intel Arc, which seems to have good support in Darktable and OpenCL these days. AMD models come with their GPU variant, there my experience is mixed.
I am leaning towards Asus, especially their Expertbook line. I have good experience with Linux on Asus, their hardware last ages, 3 year mail-in warranty, fwupd support.
Hi,
When I was looking for a portable configuration for photography, Asus and Clevo were the two brands I had in mind. Asus is reliable; I used a laptop provided by my employer.
I gave up on the idea, as I no longer had any need for a portable device, and decided instead to have a very well-equipped desktop PC built for me.
One of my sources of inspiration was Luc Viatour, a Belgian professional photographer and Linux user. See his setup here. He uses FOSS for his work.
A few month ago I had a look for a laptop and the best I could find for 1000 € was a refurbished Lenovo ThinkPad P15 G1 (memory and SDD upgradeable!), i7, 32GB, 1TB SSD, nVidia RTX 5000.
Tried darktable, it works very fast, cooling is good, very quiet, I didn’t regret my choice. The only downside: not slim (this improves the cooling performance a little bit)
When I had a laptop, I had to add a cooling pad underneath it, with two fans. Otherwise, it would overheat during heavy processing.
My local retailer recommended a model designed for gamers.
One thing to note is that you probably want to get a new laptop soon. As I’m sure you’ve seen, RAM and storage prices are increasing rapidly due to AI companies buying up manufacturing time and resources at fabs. This will start to affect laptop prices soon, new and used.
I like AMD and the AMD APUs have great integrated graphics. However, on linux, AMD GPU compute support hasn’t been great, but it is getting better. On Fedora, I had to manually install the ROCm libraries from the repository for OpenCL to work properly in Darktable.
As for RAM, the trend is going towards soldering it onto the motherboard, mostly due to power and bandwidth constraints with expandable memory. This was especially true with AMD for a while; not sure what the situation now is. If the RAM is soldered on, then get the most you can afford, especially considering the current situation.
I think most laptops allow you to replace the SSD. Modern ones usually have a M.2 NVME drive. Larger laptops might have multiple M.2 slots or a slot for a SATA SSD.
For linux support, Lenovo is great and they have excellent fwupd support. In fact, I was having bios issues with my T14 under Windows. When I completely switched it to Fedora, a firmware update that I got through fwupd fixed the problem. Firmware support was actually better with linux!
Anyway, thought I would come out of the woodwork to answer this question. haha
