So i have my main system, i have been running NixOS on for over a year. It has been a pleasure to daily drive. And ive recently been playing with gentoo and funtoo. And althought alot of information, which is somewhat overwhelming but is slowly growing on me and making me appreatate linux as a whole. So i was wondring what other software users run, and what hardware they run it on. Ive also been looking into replacing my lenovo W540 because the Nvidia K110m is royal pain and kills my battery life. Ive been looking at lenovos t480, t480s t440p. And cant decide, i really would like at least 4 cores, good linux support and long battery life aswell as repairablility. The laptop is going to mostly be a web browsing machine aswell as trying out gentoo and new distros. If you have any suggestions on a laptop id very be much grateful.
My personal laptop is whatever the first gen Framework is called. After many, many years doing the "cool" distros, I've settled on Mint and don't really have any motivation to do anything else.. I have real work I need to do and can't be bothered to deal with figuring out weird shit. I just need it to work.
TBH, the only things I use my laptop for anymore is a browser, vim, git, and kubernetes tooling.. I barely have any interest in running Linux on a workstation at this point. The only things that really interest me anymore are being run in distributed clusters. Desktop Linux is kinda boring and tedious for me.
I got a T480s for approx. 350USD. Battery life is fine and parts are cheap. Can't really fault it... I guess the screen could be brighter? Great little machine.
More than a month now, and no crashes. All the issues I had, were my fault. Although in some very specific situations it seems to get in a memory filling cycle until the swap gets filled and there’s a crash
I got a Framework 16 ordered with no GPU. It's pricy, but it is the only laptop that has an upgradable GPU. I'm looking forward to a 7900S mobile GPU upgrade wherever that drops.
I'm currently using LMDE on Thinkpad W530 for work. Pretty much stationary, with second monitor and all. I got a more mobile X230 with 9 cell battery (same OS) for when I need to be on the move.
That i7 on the W540 would be very useful if you want to have good compilation time for your system.
I have a T480 and the battery will last me 2 days on a charge for my typical use. Since it has two batteries, I can swap the external one without having to plug in or shut down. There are lots of parts available and you can find used or refurbished laptops at a reasonable price.
The downside with the T480 is a lack of PCIe lanes. The thunderbolt only has 2 lanes, which is not so good for an external GPU. The NVMe SSD is also only 2 lanes, but I still get around 1.5GB/s, which is plenty fast for me.
My daily driver right now is an old Lenovo Ideapad (50-70 I think) with EndeavourOS, I have a few other assorted Thinkpads and Ideapads running mainly EOS or Arch, and home servers running Arch. I use Arch btw.
The "backup" laptops are flexible though, I distro-hop on them fairly often. Older Lenovos are usually great for Linux compatibility.
Opensuse tumbleweed on a lenovo X1 gen 7. Software wise - KDE desktop and VS Code, Dbeaver, Kate and Firefox. Oh, and the usual command line tools - git, npm, terraform... This is a work laptop, but I find tumbleweed to be extremely stable, considering it's a rolling release. If it does go south, there is a fantastic snapper support to roll back to the previous state.
Pretty happy with my Dell precision 5520 with nixos. Except that the oem batteries swell up, but a lower capacity 3rd party battery is fine. I'm going to be looking at the snapdragon x elite laptops when they come out next year
I use Linux MX on my gaming desktop and LMDE on my laptop. I also have an encrypted LMDE VM that I use for some working stuff, since I have to use Windows on my company PC (but we're allowed to have Virtualbox on it).
The desktop is pretty new, I built it a month ago after almost 10 years, it's i9 and rtx 4070. The laptop is several years old (HP spectre), but since the previous one gave me so many headaches with nvidia optimus, I decided to go full Intel, I'm happy I did because I had no problems with it whatsoever, Intel only on laptops for me going on.
OpenSUSE for most of my systems. It has been going for 7 years with no upgrade issues, and nVidia hosts an OpenSUSE version of their proprietary drivers, so you get good GPU support.
YAST2 GUI, btrfs snapshot, and rollbacks mean if you break something you are up and running by picking another boot snapshot.
On an older laptop from 2010 i gound NixOS was the best choice out of all the distros
My preferred daily has been opensuse tumble weed on my self built desktop and Lenovo laptops. I had been using Leap on a couple old MacBooks (one air, and one mbp). I tried nixos about 6 months ago and I've migrated several of my machines over to nix. Opensuse and nix are without question my top two.
Servers, I run Debian server, Ubuntu server, and rocky.