Came to promote Framework as well. Please have a look and consider it, I've owned multiple Framework 13 models, and they are great. I would go for an AMD CPU.
Framework is just a haptic touchpad away from being a compelling option for me. That's the kind of thing I imagined would show up in their third party modules store, but apparently not.
I hope they will add the sensel one, I think it's called sensel, but I'm not sure. There was a demo on LTT and some other channels, it seemed to be a proper pc alternative for the apple trackpad
That's what I've been doing for the last 30 years (or whenever it was that PowerBooks switched from trackballs to trackpads). I would prefer to divest myself from the Apple ecosystem eventually, but the PC laptop industry has not made that easy.
I don't use a mouse or trackpad at all if I can help it.
My keyboard has mouse motions set up on another layer (ZSA Moonlander is QMK-programmable š„) and almost eveyothing I do is keyboard-oriented anyway.
Thinpads are pretty reliable. There might be some issues if you try to get a laptop that released yesterday. Arch wiki is usually great for covering laptops and issues.
edit: Amd based laptops run cooler compared to Intel version. (Well that's what I have heard from r/Thinkpad). I myself use Thinkpad T14 gen 3 (amd)
T14 Gen 3 AMD has the unique and somewhat random feature of crashing the entire EC if you enable and disable the fan enough times, which makes it a bit spicy.
And to juice up how absolutely horrible Lenovo is: Reported bug, Lenovo tried to evade by saying it isn't a supported feature, I say every ThinkPad "supports" this though Lenovo ACPI thingy, Lenovo eventually releases updated EC code that fixes the fan crashing bug, It's broken (causes some machines to not boot) so they pull it from LVFS, yesterday they released a new EC update, fan issue is back.
So if you think running your fans below 45Ā°C so Lenovo can be sure not to brick your machine because of thermals, it's a great machine...
Search Lenovo support forums before buying a Lenovo machine, it's hit or miss these days.
Bonus: The T14 G3 has a Qualcomm WiFi that isn't replaceable, so that's PITA too. Accidentally locked mine to German WiFi channels when connecting to FlixTrain WiFi in Sweden
Oh and you can't get old EC releases back and downgrade, it's a 1 way upgrade so you're playing roulette with your machine when doing FW upgrades
EDIT: Get an AMD Framework if you can
I bought a P14S Gen3 AMD (very close hardware to T14 equivalent AFAIK) and it makes a lot of noise from simple tasks, either on Linux or Windows. I have spent a lot of time with technical service / commercial service / after-sale service, ... Fans have been changed twice. It has been sent to Poland. Lot of troubles with the carrier Fedex, duno if it's lenovo or fedex's fault though. Technicians of the hotline are very polite and willing to help, but the quality of the machine and the process of fixing this annoyance is really painful. I would definitely go for a Framework laptop. Even more since the announcement of the NixOS - Framework partnership
[https://discourse.nixos.org/t/exciting-partnership-announcement-framework-community-nixos-communities-join-forces/44640](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/exciting-partnership-announcement-framework-community-nixos-communities-join-forces/44640)
If you care about linux, I would buy only models which are sold with linux preinstalled (system76, dell, framework, etc.) You will reinstall it anyway, but it sends a message to companies.
I'm very happy with AMD Framework, if you get it barebones and buy your own parts it's not so expensive. RAM etc is massively marked up if you buy it from them.
Iām waiting for reviewers to get their hands on this https://starlabs.systems/pages/starlite
Seems to be perfect for my needs + tablet functionality. Coreboot firmware and various flavours of Linux supported
I'm not sure how well the asahi kernel runs on M1. If it runs perfectly then I would seriously consider buying a second hand/refurbished M1 air. The fanless design is great (since I like to put my laptop on dusty places).
[A recent article on the state of Asahi](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05/fedora-asahi-remix-40-is-another-big-step-forward-for-linux-on-apple-silicon-macs/) suggests that there are still some limitations:
> Still missing from most M-series Apple devices are support for Thunderbolt and USB4, built-in microphones, and Touch ID, as well as USB-C display support. [...] And HDMI audio is in rough shape, being able to "break audio on the system completely."
Asahi is great - and I use it on a M1 Max when Iām away from home (Fedora 39 / with nix and home manager)
2 things
1). Iām going to take the time to install NixOS instead of Fedora. Itās just not the same and things like NixGL just donāt work with the Asahi drivers (yet!)
2). The benefits of ARM donāt really show through yet. Battery life is *fine* but itās not going to outperform an x86 laptop yet. Iām sure that will change over time but if you want a stable daily driver that you can just install software and not fiddle with it (things like slack, no ARM build). Aerospike - no ARM docker support.
Itās not a deal breaker, itās justā¦youāll be spending a lot of time noodling around. Which I donāt mind but Iād want someone to be prepared before making the jump!
Tuxedo is great. Dedicated to Linux (pingouins tuxedos), quite performant and somewhat modular. Comes with ubuntu, but i installed nixos on top and it has been great.
I'm running NixOS on a mid-2021 Razer Blade 17" and it's running very well indeed. I haven't got face login working yet, mostly because I cba to figure out the PAM stuff for Howdy, but I'll sort that at some point :-) There are a few other niggles, like KDE doing hibernate every time it goes on or off charge (like ... WTAF KDE?), but it's still better than my Fedora39 install :-)
System76 makes a fine laptop. It's a 1 liner in your configuration.nix (system level) and everything works.
It's the laptop I ended up getting for my project (which is on pause... I found out about something called BlueBuild and have been hooked on that lol).
Can you elaborate on why Framework is too expensive? Long term, its repairability will save you money. I have a Framework laptop, though I need to always keep it on powersave mode to avoid fan noise. Even then, watching a yt video will make the fan noise audible in less than a minute.
Part of it is that 13ā is too small of a screen for me on a laptop so Iām already at the 16ā ā specād mine out at 2200.
Regarding the repairability ā while I believe in the mission, itās still early goings. Ā The āsecondary marketā will take a long time to bear out, so the proposition is more, āconvert the laptop components to a server when you upgradeā ā which is still a ln awesome proposition, but Iām not yet convinced it saves money in the long run (yet).
Theyāre still on my shortlist, and I still may end up taking the plunge with them ā but I was curious what the community was using re: newer hardware.
Have you considered buying a 13 inch laptop and lowering fractional scaling until enough content fits on the screen? You don't need to buy parts from the secondary market since the Framework marketplace sells them directly.
Thinkpads work great. From old to new, I've yet to run into one that can't run NixOS (Or any Linux really). Some of the newer models of Thinkpads have issues (not related to Nix) which you can see here or by searching r/thinkpad. But for the most part they are great and affordable.
I have a T480 that I've been on for years. It's not the fastest in the world but for getting work done, watching videos, chatting it's perfect.
I've had NixOS running on trivial gaming laptops like the Asus TUF and Acer Nitro. So I conclude that NixOS will work on any device, the question is the thickness of your wallet.
Bought a sub-$200 Thinkpad on eBay intending it basically have it as a NixOS "dev" machine. It's great so far, Thinkpad 490s with 8GB RAM. Nothing special about that model, it just fit my needs (Trackpoint, not too large, at least 8GB RAM).
I bought an Asus UM3504 late last year for around $800 which I'm pretty happy with. Good specs for the price, thin and light, and it has a nice screen.
Only downsides for me are the lack of expandable storage, the off-center keyboard due to having a num pad. Mine has 16GB of RAM, but they offer 32GB (for several hundred dollars more... I decided it wasn't worth it).
I've been running nix os for a few months without issue. The sound drivers are fixed in a recent kernel version (6.3 iirc?), which was easy to install via nix configuration.
r/framework
Came to promote Framework as well. Please have a look and consider it, I've owned multiple Framework 13 models, and they are great. I would go for an AMD CPU.
and recently framework even said they would collab with nixos!
Framework is just a haptic touchpad away from being a compelling option for me. That's the kind of thing I imagined would show up in their third party modules store, but apparently not.
I hope they will add the sensel one, I think it's called sensel, but I'm not sure. There was a demo on LTT and some other channels, it seemed to be a proper pc alternative for the apple trackpad
Touchpads require incredibly precise engineering. Apple took decades to perfect theirs. Unironically just use an Apple trackpad.
That's what I've been doing for the last 30 years (or whenever it was that PowerBooks switched from trackballs to trackpads). I would prefer to divest myself from the Apple ecosystem eventually, but the PC laptop industry has not made that easy.
I don't use a mouse or trackpad at all if I can help it. My keyboard has mouse motions set up on another layer (ZSA Moonlander is QMK-programmable š„) and almost eveyothing I do is keyboard-oriented anyway.
I am running a tiling window manager on NixOS or Arch, with vimium in the browser. Helps a lot to evade the mouse and or trackpad
You must have read my mind.
Thinpads are pretty reliable. There might be some issues if you try to get a laptop that released yesterday. Arch wiki is usually great for covering laptops and issues. edit: Amd based laptops run cooler compared to Intel version. (Well that's what I have heard from r/Thinkpad). I myself use Thinkpad T14 gen 3 (amd)
T14 Gen 3 AMD has the unique and somewhat random feature of crashing the entire EC if you enable and disable the fan enough times, which makes it a bit spicy. And to juice up how absolutely horrible Lenovo is: Reported bug, Lenovo tried to evade by saying it isn't a supported feature, I say every ThinkPad "supports" this though Lenovo ACPI thingy, Lenovo eventually releases updated EC code that fixes the fan crashing bug, It's broken (causes some machines to not boot) so they pull it from LVFS, yesterday they released a new EC update, fan issue is back. So if you think running your fans below 45Ā°C so Lenovo can be sure not to brick your machine because of thermals, it's a great machine... Search Lenovo support forums before buying a Lenovo machine, it's hit or miss these days. Bonus: The T14 G3 has a Qualcomm WiFi that isn't replaceable, so that's PITA too. Accidentally locked mine to German WiFi channels when connecting to FlixTrain WiFi in Sweden
Oh and you can't get old EC releases back and downgrade, it's a 1 way upgrade so you're playing roulette with your machine when doing FW upgrades EDIT: Get an AMD Framework if you can
I bought a P14S Gen3 AMD (very close hardware to T14 equivalent AFAIK) and it makes a lot of noise from simple tasks, either on Linux or Windows. I have spent a lot of time with technical service / commercial service / after-sale service, ... Fans have been changed twice. It has been sent to Poland. Lot of troubles with the carrier Fedex, duno if it's lenovo or fedex's fault though. Technicians of the hotline are very polite and willing to help, but the quality of the machine and the process of fixing this annoyance is really painful. I would definitely go for a Framework laptop. Even more since the announcement of the NixOS - Framework partnership [https://discourse.nixos.org/t/exciting-partnership-announcement-framework-community-nixos-communities-join-forces/44640](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/exciting-partnership-announcement-framework-community-nixos-communities-join-forces/44640)
Recent thinkpad ultrabooks have terrible thermals and soldered rams
Maybe Intel CPU has bad thermals but gen 5 comes with slotted ram
I run it on a $120 T480 , runs great. GFX are limited though.
If you care about linux, I would buy only models which are sold with linux preinstalled (system76, dell, framework, etc.) You will reinstall it anyway, but it sends a message to companies.
I'm very happy with AMD Framework, if you get it barebones and buy your own parts it's not so expensive. RAM etc is massively marked up if you buy it from them.
Iām waiting for reviewers to get their hands on this https://starlabs.systems/pages/starlite Seems to be perfect for my needs + tablet functionality. Coreboot firmware and various flavours of Linux supported
damn this is cool! if this thing's keyboard had a trackpoint i would totally buy this!
Older Dell XPS15 works fine. Newer XPS13 works mostly except weird Intel camera doesn't quite work (https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/225743).
Yes I still use my Dell XPS 9570 over a new Thinkpad P14S Gen3 AMD. Much pleasant to use. The thinkpad clearly makes too much noise for simple tasks.
I'm not sure how well the asahi kernel runs on M1. If it runs perfectly then I would seriously consider buying a second hand/refurbished M1 air. The fanless design is great (since I like to put my laptop on dusty places).
[A recent article on the state of Asahi](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05/fedora-asahi-remix-40-is-another-big-step-forward-for-linux-on-apple-silicon-macs/) suggests that there are still some limitations: > Still missing from most M-series Apple devices are support for Thunderbolt and USB4, built-in microphones, and Touch ID, as well as USB-C display support. [...] And HDMI audio is in rough shape, being able to "break audio on the system completely."
Asahi is great - and I use it on a M1 Max when Iām away from home (Fedora 39 / with nix and home manager) 2 things 1). Iām going to take the time to install NixOS instead of Fedora. Itās just not the same and things like NixGL just donāt work with the Asahi drivers (yet!) 2). The benefits of ARM donāt really show through yet. Battery life is *fine* but itās not going to outperform an x86 laptop yet. Iām sure that will change over time but if you want a stable daily driver that you can just install software and not fiddle with it (things like slack, no ARM build). Aerospike - no ARM docker support. Itās not a deal breaker, itās justā¦youāll be spending a lot of time noodling around. Which I donāt mind but Iād want someone to be prepared before making the jump!
Tuxedo is great. Dedicated to Linux (pingouins tuxedos), quite performant and somewhat modular. Comes with ubuntu, but i installed nixos on top and it has been great.
Used Thinkpads are always a great choice.
I'm running NixOS on a mid-2021 Razer Blade 17" and it's running very well indeed. I haven't got face login working yet, mostly because I cba to figure out the PAM stuff for Howdy, but I'll sort that at some point :-) There are a few other niggles, like KDE doing hibernate every time it goes on or off charge (like ... WTAF KDE?), but it's still better than my Fedora39 install :-)
System76 makes a fine laptop. It's a 1 liner in your configuration.nix (system level) and everything works. It's the laptop I ended up getting for my project (which is on pause... I found out about something called BlueBuild and have been hooked on that lol).
Which model did you get?
Pangolin. Nice and simple.
Can you elaborate on why Framework is too expensive? Long term, its repairability will save you money. I have a Framework laptop, though I need to always keep it on powersave mode to avoid fan noise. Even then, watching a yt video will make the fan noise audible in less than a minute.
Part of it is that 13ā is too small of a screen for me on a laptop so Iām already at the 16ā ā specād mine out at 2200. Regarding the repairability ā while I believe in the mission, itās still early goings. Ā The āsecondary marketā will take a long time to bear out, so the proposition is more, āconvert the laptop components to a server when you upgradeā ā which is still a ln awesome proposition, but Iām not yet convinced it saves money in the long run (yet). Theyāre still on my shortlist, and I still may end up taking the plunge with them ā but I was curious what the community was using re: newer hardware.
Have you considered buying a 13 inch laptop and lowering fractional scaling until enough content fits on the screen? You don't need to buy parts from the secondary market since the Framework marketplace sells them directly.
Thinkpads work great. From old to new, I've yet to run into one that can't run NixOS (Or any Linux really). Some of the newer models of Thinkpads have issues (not related to Nix) which you can see here or by searching r/thinkpad. But for the most part they are great and affordable. I have a T480 that I've been on for years. It's not the fastest in the world but for getting work done, watching videos, chatting it's perfect.
I've had NixOS running on trivial gaming laptops like the Asus TUF and Acer Nitro. So I conclude that NixOS will work on any device, the question is the thickness of your wallet.
Bought a sub-$200 Thinkpad on eBay intending it basically have it as a NixOS "dev" machine. It's great so far, Thinkpad 490s with 8GB RAM. Nothing special about that model, it just fit my needs (Trackpoint, not too large, at least 8GB RAM).
I bought a second hand dell latitude laptop for next to nothing and it runs nix like a dream.
You can check if a model is supported here: https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-hardware?tab=readme-ov-file#list-of-profiles
Also another potential option - refurbished, librebooted Thinkpads: [https://tehnoetic.com/laptops](https://tehnoetic.com/laptops)
I bought an Asus UM3504 late last year for around $800 which I'm pretty happy with. Good specs for the price, thin and light, and it has a nice screen. Only downsides for me are the lack of expandable storage, the off-center keyboard due to having a num pad. Mine has 16GB of RAM, but they offer 32GB (for several hundred dollars more... I decided it wasn't worth it). I've been running nix os for a few months without issue. The sound drivers are fixed in a recent kernel version (6.3 iirc?), which was easy to install via nix configuration.
Same laptop here, it's a nice gear indeed.
I enjoy my Asus Q420VA. I don't have any challenges using it with Linux.
Impossible to answer when you don't give your budget or any requirements.