I will need to get a laptop in the foreseeable future, and I really want to stick to Linux. However, I may need to be out-of-home for 12+ hours straight in a day. After some research, it seems people are generally not that impressed with battery life on Linux?

The laptop does not need to do anything heavy duty, as I will remote back into my already very beefy desktop back home.

I guess a common solution to this light use case is M2 MacBook if one wants to completely throw battery concern out of the window. Well… let’s just say it’s a love-hate relationship.

  • Spectacle8011@lemmy.comfysnug.space
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    1 year ago

    Some good pointers, thanks! I imagine it’s mostly the 120Hz display that’s killing my battery life…which is a shame, but alas, sacrifices need to be made sometimes. I’ll have to give these things a try!

    Was it hard to find an AMD dGPU laptop? There are almost none where I’m based.

    • wim@lemmy.sdf.org
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      1 year ago

      Yes, it was slim pickings. I tried a couple last year and finally ended up keeping an all-AMD Asus Zephyrus G14.

      Others I tried:

      • MSI Delta 15: overall best performing of the bunch, returned it because of somewhat substandard machining and build quality. Linux worked perfectly out of the box.
      • Medion Erazer Major: Intel Arc laptop. Good performance but couldn’t get the battery life up to good standards
      • Lenovo Legion S7 16: just stopped booting after a week
      • Asus Zephyrus G14: small, light, excellent quality, but a little bit of tweaking getting everything working

      Today I would just preorder a Framework 16.

      • Spectacle8011@lemmy.comfysnug.space
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        1 year ago

        all-AMD Asus Zephyrus G14

        That was what I originally wanted! They were sold-out by the time I needed to buy one, so I went with an ASUS Scar something-something.

        Most of the laptops I own are Dell laptops which originally came with Windows, on account of the 5-year repair deal where they repair it wherever you are (making use of IBM’s network to do so). I didn’t get a chance to see how the latest one worked with Windows 11 because I wiped it immediately…

        I’ve heard good and bad things about Framework with Linux. I don’t know if I would end up buying it either way, as it seems like it would demand more experience than I have.

        • wim@lemmy.sdf.org
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          1 year ago

          I couldn’t find one locally either. Ended up ordering a returned product from Amazon abroad, a friend of mine then shipped it over. The stuff I do to avoid Nvidia…

          • Spectacle8011@lemmy.comfysnug.space
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            1 year ago

            I was buying a new laptop subsidized on 80% store credit, so I could only go for what they had in stock, unfortunately. I still haven’t had a single computer with an AMD GPU, but iGPU laptops give me a taste of what things could be like without NVIDIA…