Best Linux laptop for 2023

ede@beehaw.org to Technology@beehaw.org – 84 points –

I’m in the market for a new Linux laptop. My current machine is a 2018 i7 with 64GB of RAM, a 4K screen, 1TB of storage, 2x USB-C and 1x USB-A.

I’m looking for something that can match my current specs but brings great battery life, modern Wi-Fi, and a fingerprint reader. I don’t have to have 4K, and may actually prefer lower resolution for the battery savings.

I’d love to hear some recommendations for a machine built within the past 12 months. Thanks in advance for your feedback!

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That seems quite top of the line even today.

For battery life, the screen, the screen, the GPU (seems you use an IGP), the size of the screen, and the CPU are the main culprits.

64GB RAM will use some battery do you really need that much?

Hopefully your 1TB is an SSD otherwise an SSD is a nice upgrade.

There are also fat fat powerbanks for power users far away from a 110/220volt line!

I Am curious, most often power hungry laptops are gaming ones... What do you do with yours?

I’m in DevSecOps, and do a lot of heavy development and testing, as well as PoCs. Ideally, I’d have 128GB of RAM but laptops aren’t quite there yet. The HD is a Samsung SSD.

I usually have the GPU set to integrated graphics unless I’m doing some heavy load in which case I’ll switch over to the nvidia GPU. I also switch between power modes depending on my use case at the time.

There’s not a lot I can do with the CPU other than the optimizations I’ve done thus far. It’s actually one of the main reasons I’m looking to upgrade so I can have better performance per watt and take advantage of various cores depending on workload.

What OS are you primarily using? I'd imagine Kali for pentesting if you do that, but what do you use everyday?

I tend to stick to Debian derivatives for the most part, but I do a lot of work across multiple flavors depending on what I’m working on at any given time. Sometimes I’m in RHEL, sometimes SLED, sometimes Ubuntu, etc.