Favorite laptop brands?

General Discussions
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For me, I have three different brands for my Linux systems and I used to have another:

  1. Lenovo: at least on their mid to upper range units, Lenovo in their Thinkpad and Thinkbook brands retain a LOT of the characteristics that they aquired when they purchased the lines and systems from IBM’s Personal Systems Division long ago. These are still good, at least if you spend money on a good one. If you lack big bucks, wait 1 to 3 generations; for instance I have a Gen 3 Thinkpad T14 and it’s great but they have newer ones that cost a LOT more!

  2. Dell has always been a solid alternative to Lenovo (and IBM in days distant past). Their mid to high end models are pretty good too. The last one I got in the Inspiron series is a monster compared to my Thinkpad T14, but I suspect that I could get a leaner, lighter, newer model here too; their old Dimension desktops were excellent; their Inspiron laptop series matches in the laptop department; they probably have other models, but responders can probably be more informative than me on these.

  3. Hewlett-Packard: not necessarily the choice for high end stuff, but if you want a device that is likely to work and have decent support, HP does fine; I own an HP-14 from a few years ago that is still solid; I’ve used numerous HP laptops in the past with great success.

  4. Acer is NOT a good brand in my experience for Linux laptops mostly because of their inferior BIOS/system consoles; they’re among the best in price/performance, so the best place to use them is for a Chromebook, as long as you don’t have anything AGAINST buying stuff that runs a Google-based OS!

  5. ASUS has a good reputation; I’ve not had a lot of experience, specifically personal experience; what I see is only what I’ve READ, so again others would have to make any pro or con statements about them.

How about other brands and other experiences, as well as comments on the ones I’ve mentioned?

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Lenovo Think Pad is a great choice. HP doesn’t last as long and lacks the performance that you would get from a Lenovo Think Pad, every HP I have owned has fallen apart quite easily.

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For me, Lenovo Thinkpad FTW. The build quality and all is great, but best is its use of plain old Ubuntu LTS: all its devices work, install and run, no messing around needed.

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:100: and now that Ubuntu allows up to 5 ESMs free, it’s hard to beat. You have support on 24.04 LTS until 2034! :smiling_face_with_sunglasses:

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I’m using a Thinkpad T14 Gen 3 AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U with Radeon Graphics. As a retired person I can’t justify buying a brand new one, but these are still my favorite laptops.

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Yeah, I’m retired too, and not spending unless you need to is a reality. I can tell you’ve got the skills to dig into device/software problems and win the battle. Me, that’s not my skill set, so I like that Lenovo + Ubuntu is plug and play. We’re fortunate that we’ve got good choices. Win win.

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