[rla3rd]

You can pick up a Lenovo P1 Gen 2 with decent specs for about 1000 to 1500 on ebay. Max ram is 64MB and usually comes with an i7. The battery life isnt great if it has a built in Nvidia quadro card, I get about 4 hours. I bought it to be able to do ML with it. My only regret is getting one with the nvidia card built in. I believe it gets about 8 hours without it. I ended up buying a RTX 3080 Aorus Gaming Box to do ML instead via the laptops thunderbolt port. No matter what you get, if you want to do ML on it. I highly suggest just getting a laptop with at least a thunderbolt 3 port, and just skip on having an nvidia card built in.

[StillBored]

Yah, unless you absolutely need the discreet GPU, avoid it like the plague on the P1s. Mine cannot be fully disabled in the BIOS/etc, and its required to drive external displays. With Linux its hit/miss whether the machine works properly with any given linux distro nouveau vs the proprietary driver setup.

I'm in the situation where neither driver works 100%, and I just wish the laptop was wired correctly to just use the integrated GPU for everything like my older thinkpad. (AKA nouveau suspends/resumes properly, but can't seem to drive my monitors consistently, while the nvidia driver refuses to resume properly and breaks secure boot, etc).