Ask HN: Light ML Laptop for Linux 2025?

[New_California]

Brief: looking for a well balanced laptop well running Linux and easily capable of local inference for small LLM-s, image generation, etc. It will be used standalone so quality display and keyboard are important.

The perfect laptop (I do not expect to find one): * Light and quite 14"-15" * Gaming laptop midrange+ (because that's best for AI) * Great Linux support * NVIDIA GeForce w/ ~8GB VRAM * 32 GB RAM * 2 NVMe slots (Linux for ML/dev/work, Windows for games) * Bright screen 300-500 nits

I am not looking for a monster workstation - I have the PC for that. I am looking for a balance of Linux, gaming-quality-GPU, and quality mobility.

The Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 (2024) comes very close - except for my critical condition of running Linux well - I can see very mixed opinions for ROG series.

Any tips, however far from my elusive ideal are much welcome!

[pitched]

I use a MacBook Air with the 24GB RAM upgrade for exactly this use case. You won’t be running Linux easily outside of Docker (or similar tools) but the AI tools are all pretty reliable running on bare MacOS. Also, the lack of active cooling will limit you after 10-20min of running it hard, which is the trade off for how incredibly mobile the thing is.

[talldayo]

Nvidia's long been rumored to be designing desktop and probably laptop SOCs. Once those come out, that will probably be the Linux option in that range. Not sure if any of it is slated for 2025, but it's been around the corner for a few years now.

[NetworkPerson]

Check out the gigabyte laptops. I did basically exactly this for a bit of one of theirs. All hardware worked out of the box with Debian and Kali. Space for two m.2’s s well, so no pain points of multiple OS’s on the same drive.