I'm looking to buy a new laptop. I recently switched to Linux (Fedora) and would like to stay with it (Not necessarily Fedora though).
My most important requirement is that it has a great runtime. I honestly don't want to deal with under-volting or anything like that. A "runs out of the box" approach would be best.
13-14", no dGPU, AMD/Intel.
edit:
I realized that great runtime is very different for everyone. I wouldn't consider 5-7 hours great. More like absolute minimum is 8. Better is 10-12. This sounds very unlikely though, apart from MacBooks with ARM CPU.
Any recommendations?
Does anyone have one of these that could confirm if that’s realistic? I’ve seen many laptops with similar specs and claims that come out to significantly lower battery life unless you do nothing but stare at an empty desktop.
Where the Lemur Pro really shines is battery life. System76 claims 14 hours, and I managed 11 hours in our battery drain test (looping a 1080p video). In real-world use, I frequently eked out over 13 hours. That’s off the charts better than any other Linux laptop I’ve tested recently.
I looked into them. And it sounded a lot of the users are not happy about the build quality compared to Thinkpads or Latitudes. How is your experience? Did you go with Intel or AMD?
Build quality on Frameworks is dramatically better than most ThinkPads. They've made a lot of improvements to battery life since the first generation (I got mine in the second batch), so it might have decent battery life now. They've always been more efficient on Linux than on Windows.
My daily driver is still a Dell XPS 13, 10th gen Intel i7, 16gb RAM and 500gb (nvm) SSD. I bought it referbed. I'm running Fedora 38 (Workstation) currently. Everything works but the fingerprint sensor (which I don't care about). It runs for hours as long as I'm doing "normal" stuff like browsing and writing. It runs so long that I get tired before it does. The only time the runtime suffers is if I'm cranking the cores (encoding, compiling, etc). No voodoo required, it just runs this way out of the box. Even the onboard firmware gets updated by fwupd.
The only oddity (to me) is that it's USB-C only (no A ports) so I carry a small dock if I need to plugin a normal USB device or network cable, but that's rare for me.
Someone else also recommended a XPS. I'm totally fine with just USB-C. How fast do you get tired? If it's after 9 hours and the laptop runs for 12, that would be awesome :)
I haven't had nine hours uninterrupted time in quite a while, but I've done six to seven with plenty left in the tank. I've kinda stopped measuring it because of that.
I was about to say the same. I usually run Dell XPS or Macs. The good thing about Macs is that the sleep modes and stuff all work really really well. The XPSs are solid, and the hardware support in Linux is pretty good.
A notable third entry recent entry for me is framework. Customizable, upgradable and not too expensive (when compared to the other two), it’s a great option.
That's a good reply. Reading the other replies, I realized that great runtime is very different for everyone. I wouldn't consider 5-7 hours great. More like absolute minimum 8. Better is 10-12. This sounds very unlikely though, apart from MacBooks with ARM CPU.
I've had good luck with refurbished Dell laptops. My primary laptop is a refurbished Dell Latitude 11" 3120. Bought it for ~$250 at beginning of this year and currently have Fedora on it. It's not very powerful. I use it primarily to browse the web, watch movies/tv, and vnc/ssh to my other systems. Can last about 5-6 hours streaming video from jellyfin at 50% brightness, other stuff barely uses any power and can stretch out to 9-10 hours if I set display brightness even lower.
I've always bought Windows laptops then put linux on them so I'm used to verifying that tools such as TLP are installed, configured, enabled, and working. There is too much variety with laptops for all of them to be handled automatically unfortunately so I always verify it. If a laptop came with Linux pre-installed then it might be good to go ootb but I'd still verify.
Interesting. 9-10 hours sounds nice! Do you think never ones would have even better runtime? Have you used TLPUI? Maybe with a GUI I could get my self to play around with TLP...
Next time I look for a small laptop to have handy one thing I'm going to be sure to prioritise is: how much battery does it use while suspended? I'd really like to not need to have it switch to hibernate after 30m of sleep or w/e and ideally just plug it in overnight like a phone.
One rule of thumb I discovered when doing research about a year ago is that AMD chips are generally way better than Intel chips when it comes to power consumption.