Hi all,
After years of research, I gave up on laptops.
The prices were too high for demanding photographic use, with a limited lifespan and uncertain repairability.
As I no longer needed to carry my photo workstation around with me, choosing a desktop was the most logical option. For half the price of a high-end laptop, I got a tower that was far more powerful (see my profile). The difference paid for my 27" Eizo, which came with a Calibrite probe.
I think it all depends on what you want to do. When I travel, I mostly want to cull my images, crop them, and maybe correct exposure. Basically any laptop will do that. When I get home, I plug in the 27" screen with reasonable color reproduction, do the fine tuning and further selection.
I could imagine a workflow where I just set up a profile I like, and apply that 99% of the time, for that I would not need a good screen at all. Or a travel blogger who wants to post spectacular, meticulously developed photos while on a trip, which would require a portable but reasonably good screen and a powerful CPU/GPU.
Maybe this will help someone.
I found a model thatâs perfect for me when traveling.
HP Pavilion Plus, model 14-ew1256ng.
CPU Intel Core Ultra 5 125H
14" IPS LED Display, 100% RGB, 300 nits, Intel Arc Graphics, 2560x1600
RAM 16GB.
Available here in Germany for approximately âŹ590.
Anyone experience with the new framework 13 pro and darktable?
I eventually got a laptop but forgot to get back here: it is the Asus Vivobook S14. Ticks all the boxes, except for the matter screen, and it was a bit above 1000⏠because RAM prices have gone crazy.
It has a 36 month warranty, a really premium finish, excellent tactile keyboard, and screen, two PD USB-C ports (the most common point of failure with recent computers), a beefy i7 CPU, 14" at 1.3kg. I am really enjoying it, it works like a charm with Linux.
Do you have OpenCl support with the Intel Arc GPU on Linux?
I can check if you give me a specific command to run on the terminal. Or is it about Darktable?
Indeed if darktable uses it with that
Gpu.
If you start darktable from the command line with:
darktable -d perf -d opencl
you will see something like:
darktable 5.6.0
Copyright (C) 2012-2026 Johannes Hanika and other contributors.
Compile options:
Bit depth -> 64 bit
[...]
[dt starting] as : darktable -d perf -d opencl
[opencl_init] opencl library 'libOpenCL' found on your system and loaded, preference 'default path'
[opencl_init] found 1 platform
[opencl_init] found 1 device
DEVICE: 0: 'gfx1030'
CONF KEY: cldevice_v6_amdacceleratedparallelprocessinggfx1030
PLATFORM, VENDOR & ID: AMD Accelerated Parallel Processing, Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., ID=4098
CANONICAL NAME: amdacceleratedparallelprocessinggfx1030
DRIVER VERSION: 3649.0 (HSA1.1,LC)
DEVICE VERSION: OpenCL 2.0 API=300
DEVICE_TYPE: GPU, dedicated mem
[...]
[opencl_init] 0 'AMD Accelerated Parallel Processing gfx1030'
[opencl_init] FINALLY: opencl PREFERENCE=YES is AVAILABLE and ENABLED
[...]
These relate to my GPU; Iâve omitted most of the logs, but generally speaking, what you should see is the GPU device details and, most importantly:
[opencl_init] FINALLY: opencl PREFERENCE=YES is AVAILABLE and ENABLED
which shows that dartable is using it.
You can also view OpenCL information using the clinfo command.
I bought an âoldâ Dell Latitude 5430 laptop with 1TB storage and 32GB RAM for around 400 euroâs. Although not as fast as my M4 mac mini, Darktable runs great.
Oh dang, now Iâm close to ordering the T14 Gen 7 with an Intel Core Ultra 5 325. Even ships with Fedora.
Should work with vkdt even if itâs âjust integrated graphicsâ, @hanatos?
They have two screen options:
100% sRGB naturally sounds like the better option (and is only about 75 euro more), but are there any drawbacks to getting a touchscreen? I will never use the touch functionality. Battery draw? Can touch be disabled in Feodra so that there is no power draw?
âworkâ yes, but some features might be disabled. i didnât check that particular GPU, floating point atomics would be a nice feature (but vkdt will work around it mostly and intel is usually good with that). iâm guessing you wonât care about ray tracing, that would rule out some modules, and, more related to image processing, intel is special when it comes to tensor cores/cooperative matrices. the neural denoise/demosaic modules have some support for B580 now (thanks to community effort), but iâm almost certain the integrated GPUs would have to fall back to a generic (scalar) code path that takes something like a 6x perf hit. not much fun using the neural stuff on integrated.
vkdt has received a nice PR from @niklasiivari recently that makes working on low-end devices much smoother.
Yeah can confirm the neural stuff is not working on my Intel laptop right now either. Needs some work, and I wasnât able to get it to the point of actually working last time I tried. Probably need to compile the shaders for this specific platform. But it would honestly be pretty slow on an integrated card even with all the optimisations in place, so shouldnât probably care too much about this.
In general about vkdt on a laptop with igpu, I am currently quite happy with the performance and especially with a basic pipeline itâs very fast.
Filmsim is still a bit slow but definitely still completely useable (even with my cameraâs massive 40mp files).
Disclaimer: mine has the intel core ultra 258v which has a quite beefy gpu when integrated ones are considered. Would perhaps look into getting something from the panther lake / lunar lake lineups with the arc-series igpus if you want some more graphics performance!
Thanks for the feedback @hanatos and @niklasiivari!
If I get the Panther Lake Ultra 5 325 machine I could perhaps be your test subject. 
Sorry, was perhaps a bit unclear but I tried to say that this platform doesnât have the better Arc-branded GPU, but instead âIntel graphicsâ.
If you want great graphics performance I would perhaps recommend looking into something else. This chip doesnât look all tha great for the price point of the laptop tbh.
If you are thinking of doing any kind of ai or ml stuff locally, I would also put quite a large priority in getting something with on-package memory.
Also, I really think those ThinkPad screens will not be a great experience for photo editing.
On the touch screen: I have really enjoyed having one on mine even though I also thought I wouldnât need it for anything when I did not have one. I would really hesitate buying anything without a touch screen going forward. Of course use cases and patterns differ.
Just throwing these opinions out here, in case itâs useful!
Was just about to hit the order button when I saw your message. Youâre making this harder. 
Wouldnât buy it primarily for the photo editing, I have a desktop machine with a discrete GPU for that (6700 XT), but it would be nice to be able to edit on the run. I really value repair-ability. Iâll be getting the 100% sRGB version, which should hopefully be enough for editing on the run.
Lenovo LOQ Essential 15IRX11 with 8 GB RTX 5060 and 16 GB of RAM is actually a few hundred euros cheaper, but it doesnât seem to be so well thought out. Itâs not very portable and battery time seems to be terrible.
If this wouldnât be your main machine I perhaps wouldnât be as worried then!
I myself wouldnât get a laptop with a discrete GPU exactly because of the terrible battery life, the heat and the increased weight 
.
âŚand the messing about with Linux switching between the two. But I guess that has largely been mitigated by Universal Blue project images like Bazzite. I got the T14 Gen 7 with Panther Lake Ultra 5 325 in case you ever need someone for some testing. 
Wait, I can change order to a T14 with AMD Ryzen AI 7 PRO 450 processor for almost the same price. Better or worse for vkdt? Would be super thankful for swift reply @niklasiivari and @hanatos
Hi, the AMD seems better quite a bit better gpu-wise!