I'm looking for a new laptop and really don't know much about hardware these days (been running my old 2015 toshiba sattellite lol, I usually just have hand-me-downs), but I'm looking at getting something that doesn't make me sacrifice my firstborn to an eldritch being to change the goddamn battery. So far I have sys76 and framework on the list, are there any other manufacturers I should also look at? And any reasons I should or should not get a laptop from any of these companies (like this one above, which is a point for framework)?
I was doing a similar breakdown back when I bought my System76. The difference was upgradability. If I ever thought I might need more RAM I'd have to buy that up front on the MacBook air, putting its price over 1,700 off the shelf for the max ram. System76 cost close to the base MacBook air model, but I can add RAM and upgrades at my choosing, find the best price, and install them myself when I need them. That was worth it for me.
The issue is that the M1 (M2 and M3) chips are way more efficient than X86 chips and they gets really good battery life compared to standard PC hardware. So I can hate on the software, the price, the lack of expand-ability, and so much more but I can't get that efficiency anywhere else.
System76 doesn't have some massively efficient ARM chip and system to separate them from any other windows laptop maker I just put linux on. You buy System76 because you like System76. I can live with that and I am very willing to spend more for less in places I feel matter.
The awful screen is one big reason I don't use my System76 laptop more often. It's the worst laptop screen I've ever seen, has terrible light bleed, and has a pink tint. And this is the warranty replacement they tried to charge me for. The first one had the same awful screen, but kept freezing on me randomly.
And the damn thing STILL has hardware features that only work on Windows 10, five years later (like multi-finger trackpad gestures). I'll take System76 seriously when they start putting good screens in their laptops and get rid of nvidia.
I'm curious. What do you prefer, some larger res with resolution scaling? How's the scaling situation on DEs/WMs nowadays? Last I tried it, it was pretty abysmal. Admittedly it was years ago, but it used to be that mixed scaling wasn't possible, so if my laptop was higher DPI and needed scaling, I'd need to run any external monitor with display scaling as well. I've avoided high DPI/display scaling on purpose for a while at this point because of it, and tend to prioritize usable pixel real estate.
I'm using OpenSUSE Tumbleweed on a Dell XPS 13 9360 with a 3300x1800 13" screen and Wayland, and it works fine. There was one application (Sublime Merge) where I had to edit some scaling configuration settings, and there's one tray-based tool (Jetbrains Toolbox) that comes up tiny, but for everything else the global scaling setting in KDE has done a fine job. It also handles dual monitors with different resolutions.
I don't like 1080 screens because small text becomes unreadable more quickly on them. It's less of an issue with a small screen, but it still counts against a machine for me.
Also a great way to get more performance and increase battery life. On a laptop, most folks would be hard pressed to see the difference between 1080p and a higher resolution.
That's the odd part. I run Pop!_OS on a ThinkPad with a 4K touch screen at 175% scaling and it looks beautiful. The scaling on the DE is superb. I don't understand why they don't offer a HiDPI option on their laptops.
Yeah I mean I get C-states for things that idle a lot, like homeservers, but i still don’t see the reasoning for outright replacing traditional suspend on computers. Now you have to worry if some random pcie device is going to up your consumption by 5 watts during suspension. Well, at least that’s only a big issue on laptops.
Not 2k. Not 16:9. Probably doesn’t even cover DCI-P3 or decent color accuracy. Folks are gonna keep thinking Linux is a geeks-only thing if you have terrible panel that’s bad for content creation.
I have had 1080, 4k, & 2k laptops in my life. 1080 text is blurry. 4k is obviously overkill wasting battery on pixels you can’t see. 2k has crisp text without so much wasted density & you have to get unreasonably close to the panel to tell the difference.