Re: laptop recommendations

Though I'm currently on a ThinkPad, I like Dell Latitude as well. I prefer their corporate line over XPS, mostly because if you break something, say a keyboard, they have service manuals and parts.

https://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/70/campaigns/xps-vs-latitude-hea

I bought my last Dell Latitude from their refurb store. It was a full blown ATG cop car notebook. Over a thousand nits of illumination. It was also a full kilobuck off of list and from what I could tell, brand new. What happened is someone configured it oddly. The drive was small and it had very little ram. I put in a SSD and maxed out the RAM. Very simple to do when you have service manuals. The problem I had with the Dell was Intel just screwed up the GPU driver. Now with Linux, you can run on open source drivers, but they were dog slow. The notebook still lives but if you can't Google Earth (or other graphics), it is no good.

However my point still stands in that these Latitude notebooks can last longer because they are designed to be repaired. Break a keyboard, not problem. I actually added a second SSD to it because you could pull the optical drive and replace it with another hard drive. The Latitudes tend to be thicker, having bigger fans.

Now I am currently on a ThinkPad. This is basically Lenovo corporate instead of Dell corporate. You get a full service manual and a source for parts. The big advantage is AMD graphics. I am using a T495 on opensuse 15.1, soon to upgrade to 15.2. With Dell your GPU choice is Intel or Nvidia. Nvidia graphics can be trouble on Linux. With AMD Ryzen, the open source driver for the GPU is pretty good. You don't have to use the closed source driver which is the case with Nvidia and thus Dell. You do have the option of using the AMD closed source drivers as well.

I bought the T495 with just the upgraded display as my only special option. It is only 400 nits but suitable for outdoor use. The stock display was 200 nits I think. I got the smallest ram and SSD. I put in a 16GByte ram module for way less than Lenovo would charge, taking it up to 24Gbytes of RAM. I replace the SSD with a rather expensive Samsung high endurance 1Tbyte nvme2 SSD. You can dual boot the notebook but you need a special version of grub suitable for EFI.

Note Linus himself has gone AMD.

https://www.theregister.com/2020/05/24/linus_torvalds_adopts_amd_threadripper/

I have no issues with Intel CPUs, but I don't want to use their GPUs and absolutely don't want Nvidia. You may recall Linus commenting on Nvidia with his middle finger.

From:	lists
Subject:	Re: laptop recommendations
Date:	Wed, 22 Jul 2020 16:13:01 -0700