A few years ago I would have said ThinkPads but I think there are better options available now. At the end of last year I wanted to replace my T470, and wanted to upgrade to something with a more powerful (not U-series) CPU. The ThinkPad option that fitted my requirements was on back order for months, so I looked around...
The ASUS ROG line of gaming laptops had exactly what I wanted, although they look a bit garish, they are good value for what you get.
On Black Friday I got a G14 Zephyrus with a 8c16t Ryzen 9, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD and 14" FHD IPS screen. I think I paid £1300. There's a free RAM slot, so I upgraded to 32GB, I think it supports 48GB max. There are a couple of gotcha's mind you:
- It came with a WiFi chip with poor support for Linux (and it wasn't great on Windows). I got an Intel one from eBay for £10 and it took a few minutes to swap out.
- You need to restart X to switch from hybrid to integrated graphics, which you want to do on battery to save power.
- You need to restart X to switch from integrated to hybrid graphics, which you want to do when you get back to your desk so you can use a USB-C display.
- The default fan curves mean the fan turns on and off every few seconds. I changed the settings so it is off most of the time and it runs fine.
- The powerbrick that comes with it is heavy. I use a 65W USB-C brick and have no issues for working, but for gaming (it has a RTX 3060) it needs more power.
- The model I have has no webcam, that's fixed in this year's modem.
Everything else works great. Battery life is 5-6 hours as standard, but if you disable turbo boost and you can get closer to 10 hours.
I'm also on a G14! The wait time for a ThinkPad was 6 weeks when I needed a new laptop, so I just ended up buying a G14 because I couldn't wait.
WiFi seems okay for me, I've not had any problems. Restarting X is indeed annoying. Also only one of the USB-c ports has display port support, that took me a while to figure. I thought my usb-c monitor was broken until I took a closer look at the ports. No webcam is pretty annoying as well.
The Linux community for the laptop is actually pretty large. People have reverse-engineered a lot of the "nice to haves" [0].
Another happy user of G14 here. I'm running the 2021 version with Ryzen 5900HS, 32Gb of RAM and 1440p screen. The screen is good, the laptop is quite light at ~1.6kg, the keyboard is OK too, but I tend to use an external one when at my desk.
I love the battery life, which is great when running on integrated graphics.
The CPU is great too, I'm satisfied with autocomplete speed in my IDE. I think the 5900HS is also quite power-efficient, maybe the Intel versions are more power-hungry, not sure. Another benefit is that the laptop stays completely silent, and only whirrs up when gaming or doing heavier workloads.
The GPU in my version is "just" the 3060 Mobile, but it's good enough for me, and there are costlier version with better GPUs.
The ports are good enough for me. There's one USB-C 3.2 Gen2 which I used to connect to a DisplayPort screen, and there's an HDMI port, which I use to drive a 4k@120Hz monitor. I also use one of the USB 3.1 Gen 2 (10Gbps) ports with a hub to run all peripherals (mic, webcam, keyboard, mouse).
WiFi was giving me problems on Windows (I have the MediaTek card), but that was fixed at the end of 2021. Another smallish issue is that there's no webcam, but I use a standalone cam anyway.
If you're going for a Thinkpad, the T480 from a couple of years ago seems to be the gold standard. The current successor of that model is the T14, but I have no idea if it's as good. I got an X1 Extreme, which is a gorgeous machine, and very powerful, but it eats through its power like no laptop I've seen before. Battery charge rarely lasts more than 2 hours.
One big advantage of the high-end Thinkpads: they're spill resistant. I accidentally spilled an entire mug of tea over this one, and it had no ill effects whatsoever. You can't do that with most laptops.
I have a 2021 T14, upgraded from a T460p. It's a bit underwhelming if I'm being honest. Ubuntu seems to have more problems with it than with the T460p:
- Crashes more than before. This has only been 2 or 3 times, but it's still 2 or 3 times for than it should.
- Has random issues, like graphical glitches, with builtin and external 4K displays. Right now I keep the resolution at 1080 because it's annoying.
- Has more issues going into and out of sleep.
Those are all probably Ubuntu's issues though. Physically I don't have a gripe besides maybe the speakers are a bit quiet and it would be nice if there was a USB C port on the right side so I could charge from either side.
I think the T14 with Ryzen 5 was actually what I was after, but it was "6+ weeks" shipping with the configuration I wanted (maxing out the soldered RAM). I'm glad I went with the G14 as it has a much more powerful CPU and is actually smaller (but weighs a little more).
I doubt that's unique to the T14, though. Every recent laptop and desktop I know seems to have trouble sleeping lately. Either they refuse to go to sleep, or they do, but randomly wake up and then stay on. I don't know what's causing this PC insomnia epidemic.
The T480 that I got is the worst laptop purchase I have done in years. The m2 port is not bolt in but you will need to buy an adapter if you want to install a second drive if your configuration is only 1 drive. The USB-C charging port had problem quickly after a year where it don't receive charge unless you put it in the JUST the right position and pray to god that it will keep charging. And the USB-C card is part of the mobo so you are looking at $700-800 mobo swap to fix the problem.
I’m using a similar setup (G15) for “AI” dev on Linux, it works very well with the Asus-laptop utils.
To complement other points:
- you can put the nvidia card in “compute” or “hybrid” mode, which removes the need for X restarts. Compute is really nice, the computer runs on IGP (which is vey capable) and all cuda workloads seamlessly wake up the nvidia card, no question asked
- the above means that the pc is nearly silent, maybe helped by the AMD cpu, while being pretty capable with the 8 real zen3 cores
- no issues really on Linux, and the Asus-laptop tools allow you to switch off the leds or cap the battery charge. The wifi card was an issue initially, quickly fixed with a newer kernel
- the screen is 120Hz, and this is really appreciated actually
Second this. I run an Arch derived distro on my ASUS AMD Zen3 5900 with 8 cores/16 hw threads and the cpu benchmarks are close to the M1 macs for about half the price.
The Realtek WiFi device is a problem with hp laptops too. Works but needs a cold reboot after the hibernate wakes up.
Are you saying the intel WiFi chip is pin compatible with the Realtek? That’s an amazing find.
Unless the antennas are glued (annoying but can be worked around with a heatgun), your BIOS device locks your wifi card (like Lenovo did with some of their laptops), or you accidentally get a CRF module that can only be used in compatible Intel devices, most laptops use a standard sized M.2 E key or miniPCIe network card that are totally interchangeable. Intel AX200/AX210s are dirt cheap (like $10-20) and done immediate replacements in my past 3 laptops.
> Are you saying the intel WiFi chip is pin compatible with the Realtek? That’s an amazing find.
I thought that most laptops have the WiFi on a mini-PCI card these days (or really anything in the past 10 years) unless they are really trying for the ultra-slim, solder everything down look.
Oh, ok. Yeah, file that under "unless mobile uses a really confusing numbering scheme relative to desktop." On desktop, 5800x is 8C/16T and 5900x is 12C/24T.
I went with strix vs others because of power delivery. Apparently rtx 3080 is great and all but asus seriously fucked up because the laptops they put it in dont deliver it enough power and it gets similar performance to a 3060. So I just got the 3060, 300ms screen is mind blowing
I am comparing this to my case with my own laptop Dell G15 Ryzen edition. Linux seems to play quite well with it, however I am dealing with poor driver performance and limitations with switching displays and nVidia Optimus.
For that reason I tried installing Windows 10 after almost a decade lol. This amazing driver support was something I always missed and it made a lot of things simpler for me. All my hardware is now plug and play without having to restart the system. Not just that, some kernels made my system go haywire so I had to do a lot of housekeeping, which is not required with Windows 10 I believe.
Looking forward to get my hands on WSL and make the final decision.
For Linux to fix the WiFi card, you can use any distro with latest kernel. A lot of hardware support issues on Linux are due to slow release distros like Ubuntu (and a lot of people not knowing this assume it's due to lack of drivers in mainline Linux). I use fedora and everything works out of the box following the asus-fedora website.
I never figured out how to toggle graphics between intel integrated and nvidia gpu as I also want to use nvidia gpu fully for CUDA algorithms, is there an app or something to do that?
I don't know if this is what you're looking for, but I use the system76-power extension (https://github.com/pop-os/system76-power) to toggle between the integrated Intel Xe unit and the dedicated Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 in my Galago Pro. While at first glance it might seem that it's a System76 utility for a System76 distribution on System76 hardware, I'm currently using it on Fedora, and the hardware itself should be pretty standard despite the System76 branding. Using the glxgears graphics demo, I can invoke 'glxgears -info' to use the Intel GPU, or '__NV_PRIME_RENDER_OFFLOAD=1 __GLX_VENDOR_LIBRARY_NAME=nvidia glxgears -info' to force use of the dGPU. You don't get the fancy-shmancy menu that you do under Pop!_OS, but it has a perfectly workable CLI.
The ASUS ROG line of gaming laptops had exactly what I wanted, although they look a bit garish, they are good value for what you get.
On Black Friday I got a G14 Zephyrus with a 8c16t Ryzen 9, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD and 14" FHD IPS screen. I think I paid £1300. There's a free RAM slot, so I upgraded to 32GB, I think it supports 48GB max. There are a couple of gotcha's mind you:
- It came with a WiFi chip with poor support for Linux (and it wasn't great on Windows). I got an Intel one from eBay for £10 and it took a few minutes to swap out.
- You need to restart X to switch from hybrid to integrated graphics, which you want to do on battery to save power.
- You need to restart X to switch from integrated to hybrid graphics, which you want to do when you get back to your desk so you can use a USB-C display.
- The default fan curves mean the fan turns on and off every few seconds. I changed the settings so it is off most of the time and it runs fine.
- The powerbrick that comes with it is heavy. I use a 65W USB-C brick and have no issues for working, but for gaming (it has a RTX 3060) it needs more power.
- The model I have has no webcam, that's fixed in this year's modem.
Everything else works great. Battery life is 5-6 hours as standard, but if you disable turbo boost and you can get closer to 10 hours.