I’m in the market for a new laptop. Preferably under $2000 and have good specs. 16 GB ram minimum and 500 GB SSD minimum. What recommendations does Lemmy have? If more details are needed please specify what and I’ll answer
EDIT: thank you everyone for the answers 🙂 I do not need anymore suggestions
Lenovo Thinkpad T14s AMD. Runs Linux perfectly, is fast, has a great keyboard, has a great trackpoint, and has good battery life.
If it doesn’t run Linux, I don’t buy the laptop.
There are computers that can’t run Linux?
A lot of laptops have proprietary drivers that are Windows only. Wi-fi/touchpads not working is a common issue
Linux support for Apple Silicon is still early stages, for example.
My hp laptop has some bang & Olufsen speaker in it, and on Linux it sounds faint no matter what I try. Mic also very low volume.
None of the new removed laptops can run it really well at least. It’s being reverse-engineered by a small team, so maybe everything works in a few years. You can buy a Dell or Lenovo with Linux pre-installed and all the hardware works. Not so with removed.
The Thinkpad E series AMD ones are also really good. I use one daily at work to run 2 monitors and its own (for 3 total). It doesn’t hiccup at all on an AMD 5000 chip with Ryzen mobile. Battery life is fabulous when running just its own screen. I routinely get 8 hours of web/office suite work done.
I’ve had good luck with Lenovo over the years. A job just got me an HP and I’m missing my last Lenovo.
Thank you for the recommendation I’ll look into it
What are you going to use it for? You have to give us more details, a vague question will lead to generic answers that will probably not be the best choice for you.
Framework 13
I recently ordered one and had some issues with it so I returned it. Would prefer one from another brand as I did not have a good experience with Framework.
Can I ask what issues you had? I have one on order.
So I ordered the DIY edition and when it arrived the screw to input the SSD was stripped and wouldn’t budge. I emailed their support and they said they would replace the motherboard, and when that arrived it had the exact same stripped screw. I told them about it and they said to ship to their repair center so I did. I didnt receive further details about it for a week so I just decided to refund because it had already been more than a month since i first got it. Of course I could’ve waited a few more weeks for it but I urgently need a laptop now and don’t think I could have waited that long.
The exact same thing happening twice seems somewhat unlikely… You sure you knew what you were looking at? I bought 3 Frameworks for different members of my family, DIY and preassembled, and had no problems.
Apparently there was a batch of laptops/mainboards that had this problem and I got really unlucky to get both from that batch
Damn, did you consider buying it used? Should be faster than what you any through and cheaper. And considering the modularity, less risk if the laptpp wasn’t treated well.
$2000 should get you something pretty nice. Do you have anything specific in mind that you’re planning to do with it? Important stuff to keep in mind up front, in no particular order: do you play games? How big should the screen be? How long do you want to use it on battery? Any operating system preferences?
Hi thanks for the questions. I plan to just generally use for browsing the web, watching YouTube and of course Lemmy lol. I’d also like to use it for school work and coding. I was hoping to play some games on it yes. The screen should be around 13" as I’ll be carrying it out a lot and need it to be portable. Above that its too big for me. I’d like a pretty good battery life around 7+ hour, enough to last an average day of use. No preferences on operating systems but I’ve only ever used windows and a tiny bit of Linux.
If your gaming is eSports, your battery life would benefit from an AMD iGPU rather than an NVIDIA GPU.
7840U for the CPU which is integrated graphics.
A thinkpad. You just can’t go wrong imho
Do you have any specific one in mind?
This really depends on your use case and your screen size/portability/power requirements. Laptops with AMD processors tend to be the better choice in terms of power/battery life. I would probably skip Z series, E series, and ThinkBooks.
And skip the L series. They’re budget variants and it shows in the quality.
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Have a Look at https://frame.work
It definitely doesn’t have all the deals, but I’ve had luck using www.lappylist.com to compare some options. Good luck!
I’m a Mac guy so my goto answer would always be something from Apple. If I was looking for non-apple hardware though I would look at Framework laptops because lack of upgradability is my biggest peeve about Apple gear.
I’m eyeing the M1/M2 macs with asahi, but I’m going to let it mature more for a bit before I take the plunge.
This is like year 3. How much more you think they’re gonna mature?
The distro (asahi) is still in very early development, gpu acceleration was just recently added. That along with a esoteric architecture, will cause headaches for the uninitiated.
The macs themselves hardware wise are quite mature, but I can’t for the life of me use MacOS.
If your a Apple ecosystem user then a macbook, a framework If your a windows user, or a system76 Laptop for linux. Macbooks are good for the ecosystem, if you can afford the 500gb version than good for you.
Frameworks are good if you want to upgrade to a 1tb or a better laptop CPU GPU screen ect in the future if you can follow upgrade instructions.
System76 laptops are affordable and come with Linux rather than windows without half the function keys not working. (And has better integration as it runs pop-os system76s Linux distro)
With a 2k budget you basicly can buy anything and maybe be specific based on OS preference, brand preference, and what your gonna use the laptop for. (E.g my laptop is >200£ is only used for web browsing and word processing therefore its a Linux machine with low end specs from lenovo)Look into a ThinkPad.
If you don’t care about gaming, just get a macbook tbh.
the new M1 ones are insane.
if you want to game on it, I got a Lenovo Legion that I really like.
For the Apple ecosystem nothing is better than an M1. Just outstanding laptops that raise the bar for the entire industry. If they need to run Windows though …
I’m not even in the Apple ecosystem and if I didn’t care about gaming I’d grab one myself.
If you’re not opposed to messing around in the terminal, Apple’s Game Porting Toolkit, which is pretty much just repackaged Wine with some added graphics translation layers, similar to Valve’s Proton, works pretty well for the Windows games I’ve tried with it (usually for more demanding games, like recently I’ve tried Baldur’s Gate 3 before the full Mac release, the issue is that my base model MacBook M2 doesn’t have enough memory). It really brings back that 2016 Linux gaming feeling.
Obviously YMMV, depending on what type of game you play. I tend to play old or indie singleplayer titles, they usually don’t do any weird shit.
The Asus ROG Flow X13 is super portable and decent for gaming! I have the 2021 3050ti version but I’d recommend getting one with more than 4gb VRAM if you can swing it 😅 it really depends on what you want out of a laptop as to what people will suggest
Look into certified refurbished laptops on eBay, you could maybe snag a good deal on what you’re already honing in on.
More details are needed.
What do you need specifically?
I had a similar issue recently and ended up going for a HP Pavilion. It’s a versatile machine, you can do pretty much anything on it, it’s in a metal case so sturdy to carry about, and you can get a bigger screen so you can multitask. I feel like you get quite a bit of laptop for your money.
I was also considering a macbook, I use them for work a lot so I’m used to them, but I felt like specs wise I was looking at lower specs and a lot more money.
