Linux

Go for fully Linux compatible hardware. Refurbished business laptops are very good value for the money. For normal tasks, it does not matter if they are five to ten years old.

Instead of contributing to (fascist) US companies I'd love to see people looking at alternative to the big companies we have right not.

We should look at manufacter are actually trying to be better, more considerate with people (all the people not just the west) and the environment.

In the tech space no one cares or no one dares to raise their voice against the big companies, their anti-consumer policies, their green-washing and definitely their genocidal fascist ideology.

Yes probably thinkpad are good laptops. If you're on a budget just do whatever you can, if you buy System76 you are not "on a budget".

2 companies I know of that seems to go on a better path than most I see in comments here are slimbook (https://slimbook.com/) and maybe Tuxedo (https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/).

We should be better than this.

T490 has been good to me with Linux despite my abuse, Im on my third lcd panel and going strong, no real llm capabilities in mine though.

Honestly, that laptop is probably better than you'd think. A lot of laptops have really poor performing thermal compounds. Repasting to even when new will improve performance. My personal laptop got repasted and it dropped 10C under load. Mind you this is a 5825u laptop so not much power draw.

I've been using Thinkpads since the late nineties... I've only ever had Thinkpads. I'm using my latest as a Steam Deck (Steam OS, AMD throughout) as I'm still using the X260 as a daily driver though I reaaally wish I had maxed out the RAM while it was possible. The old one runs KDE Neon.

The old ones are better than the new ones but the new ones you can charge with USB-C.

I recently grabbed a Framework 13 on eBay that "needed to be plugged in to boot and probably needed to have the mb replaced" for $500. Got it, replaced the CMOS battery and laughed all the way to the bank ;)

There's a reason Linux on a Thinkpad is a meme.

You haven't said much concrete about your requirements, use case, or budget, so I don't have a recommendation much beyond whatever Thinkpad meets your requirements. The "serious" models in the T, P, and X series tend to be preferable to the others.

I love mine!

HP Zbooks, Dell precision & latitude, thinkpad T/X series.

all this talk about buying laptops...you guys can afford laptops right now?

System 76 is a boutique laptop company. I bought two laptops from them and both needed service and repair several times.

I recently got a refurbished Thinkpad x13 for 500 CAD, and it's great with cachy OS on it.

I was also skeptical with newer ThinkPads, but at the end I accepted the risk and bought one last year: T14s Gen 6, the one with AMD CPU. It is perfect IMO except for one small issue that affected me in the first few months and got resolved with a firmware update: battery drain during sleep was significant. It lost around 15-20% charge overnight. After the updates it loses at most 5% in the same duration.

And yeah it can update its firmware on Linux, just like Windows. Pretty rare thing to see. It has official support for Ubuntu and Fedora. I myself tried Arch and it works perfectly as well.

I was looking at the System76 Lemur Pro, but I can’t seem to find any reviews on the newer models. Build quality and performance is really important to me as my daily driver for the last several years has been a MBP14 with an M1 Pro.

i've had a galago pro and the build quality on system76 seems to be better than average, but well below the competition at their price points -- they are all clevo/tongfeng rebadges.

however the build quality on the ultra high end models does mirror the build quality and this probably matters to you since you're considering framework, which also has a high price point.

system76 makes sense if you're doing for the support as well as the capabilities like the ones you're looking for (coreboot mattered for me back then) and my experience was overall positive w them; but i learned recently that their support made things so easy for me that it made my linux skills get antiquated.

Something with an amd 395 ai max + maybe

I have a Asus flow z13 and very much enjoy it, but the form factor is not for everyone

What are you looking for? What are your requirements? I mean, gaming? Programming (if "yes", do your projects require lots of running services/containers?)? Which country are you in?

In Europe, I like using PCSpecialist a lot. They offer thorough customization of the hardware, and their prices are good (they start low, and it gets even lower because they allow you cutting Windows out of the bill). In the US I've bought a ThinkPenguin and was happy with it. I didn't really like my custom-configured Toshiba back in the day. It had weak cooling and was thus very noisy, and it wasn't done well, deteriorated with time a bit too much.