[hpcjoe]

I've not had obscure graphics or bluetooth problems for like 4 years now. Graphics problems have not been a problem for the last decade.

I've been running linux desktops and laptops for about 20 years, starting with early/pre-RHEL redhat, and moving around to many others. My first laptop was a pentium thing at 75 MHz, and I triple booted Linux, OS2, and Windows/DOS on it. I wound up kicking off the last two, as I used them only infrequently.

Battery life is an issue for me, but its not linux specific. The laptops I have, all have power hungry ram and GPU cards. I get 2 hours on them, or if I play with the brightness and other things, I can stretch it to 4 hours. My old 2010 laptop (still in use, still running linux) is a 16GB ram, 0.5TB SSD affair with an NVidia GTX560m card. My 2018 laptop is a 48GB ram, 1.5 TB SSD (0.5 + 1.0) with an M2 256GB SSD for the included windows 10 home, and a GTX 1060m card. Windows 10 on the newer laptop lasts about 2.5 hours before it shuts down. I now run the pre-installed windows 10 via a kvm with passthrough of the M2 into the instance.

All of these are currently running late model Linux Mint 19.2 with accelerated graphics.

Work laptop is a Mac 16 GB ram, 512GB SSD with an intel/AMD hybrid graphics bit. This will last 5 hours with significant tweaks to aggressive power off, and me not running any builds on it.

I like the mac for its physical fit and finish, weight, etc. But I need to bring the power supply with me, as I can burn through much of the power in a 2 hour meeting.

I like the linux machine for work, and everything else. It just works. The drivers just work. The networking just works. Single/multi displays just work. I have cinammon (display manager) set up to a very comfortable configuration.

I am hopeful that the day job will enable me to trade up to a bigger machine with linux and nvidia graphics at some point ... 32GB is bare minimum for a functional machine for me, 48->64GB is better.

My home office deskside is an older Sandy Bridge machine with 16 cores, 128 GB ram, old GTX750ti card, running the same environment as on my laptop.

Of course, YMMV.

[pjmlp]

> Graphics problems have not been a problem for the last decade.

Except one happens to have a laptop with an older AMD card or Optimus Intel/NVidia combo.

[zokula]

Older AMD? Any AMD card or igp made in the last 14 years works out of the box with Linux, save their newest GPU arch.

[pjmlp]

Tell that to my AMD Radeon HD 6330M, released in 2010, 8 years ago.

The open source driver still doesn't provide feature parity with the proprietary one that Ubuntu LTS dropped support for.

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2016/03/ubuntu-drops-amd-catalys...

Namely hardware video decoding and OpenGL version.

[ben-schaaf]

Sounds more like AMD dropped support for Linux. It's shitty, but I'm not sure what you can expect from distributions if AMD stops updating their drivers for newer versions of xserver.

[pjmlp]

Yep, while you can still get the up-to-date driver for Windows, fully DirectX 11 compliant.

So this thing about marvelous open source AMD support, depends pretty much how much luck one has.

[hpcjoe]

I don't have laptops with older AMD. My current laptop has the ability to switch between CPU and discrete GPU, but it doesn't work well even under windows, so I disabled it in BIOS.

AMD drivers have been hit and miss for a while, which is one of two reasons I tend to prefer NVidia cards. NVidia took time to make sure their whole stack works reasonably well.

[fnord77]

what brand/model is your 48GB laptop? I'm shopping for something that can take lots of ram.

[hpcjoe]

This is a Sager Notebook NP8156. There are newer models, including better NVidia cards. Up to 64 GB ram. I bought mine with 16GB and added 32GB. Very expandable. Battery life is 2-ish hours, though can be increased by reducing brightness.

Lenovo has a 32 GB max model, and HP has a 64 GB max model.