> Thinkpads are way cheaper(and AFAIK they also provide very good Linux support)

My own experience with thinkpads has been one of non-stop frustration with battery life. The T495 advertises something like 14h of battery life; the actual battery life I got running stock Ubuntu on it was.... less than 3 hours, and that's with power optimization packages that do things like making USB no longer work installed. I recently switched to a system76, and so far its battery lasts easily 6-9 hours depending on what I'm doing.

The T495 is s special kind of disappointment (I have one too), but the fault is with AMD. Zen 1 mobile has extremely aggressive C-States and they essentially never clock down. Ryzenadj helps a bit, but not much.

I have a P14s Gen 1 from work now, that’s one gen ahead but an entire different league in battery life (and it wouldn’t cook your fingers on the palm rest)

Newer kernels have helped a bit too, much more than TLP, if you still have that device try Fedora on it.

My experience too: until I got an X250 (i5, 2 core) earlier this year that lasts around 10 hrs on a charge. Cost $160 in mint condition. Noticeably less powerful than my old T430, but can still do some real work on the go. Screen and keyboard are seriously cramped though, so it gets uncomfortable over long stretches. Still, there's something to be said for small and light. My work laptop is a big heavy Dell workstation machine that could double as an offensive weapon in a pinch.

I've got an E470 with Ubuntu on it, no problems with battery life.

I don't know about the quality of the pangolin or the HP but I can tell you that lenovos consumer level laptops are pretty trash quality wise.

The thinkpads (at least the X,T and P models) tend to be a different story but even that is changing in recent years

I spent over $2500 on a ThinkPad X1 Extreme three years ago. Died within three months (wouldn't turn on). Lenovo replaced all the innards, but then the 3D video didn't work at all. Had it replaced again. Two full replacements in the first six months. Later, I spilled a drink on the keyboard, and despite their claims of spill-resistant keyboards, it permanently fried eight random keys. By then it was past the warranty period (one year) and Lenovo was unwilling to service it at all. I was ready to pay, but it's not even an option. They told me I had to go through a third party. Couldn't even get any supposed "authorized repair center" to respond to my requests for estimates. A few months later, the video started going, and now it locks up a few minutes after booting.

I get that shit happens and sometimes products have defects. I'm willing to put up with a reasonable amount of annoyance. I'll never buy another Lenovo product, though, because once you're out of warranty, you may as well throw the thing away. They don't care at all.

> The thinkpads (at least the X,T and P models) tend to be a different story but even that is changing in recent years

Maybe relative to Thinkpads of yesteryear, but in comparison to the field of professional laptops, they are still best in class.

I bought a consumer-grade Lenovo (Flex 15") for about $1200 CAD.

While it has amazing components like the AMD Ryzen, Radeon GPU, etc. The quality of the rest of the components is trash.

The trackpad keeps disconnecting, the screen is very poorly backlit, the speakers sound like headphones that came with 1990 Walkmans. It's not a good laptop even if it looks good on paper.

Yea, I've heard mixed things about IdeaPads. My comment was specifically about _Think_Pads. The names are easy to confuse but are very different in build quality.

Really? I bought an Ideapad for my mom a few months ago and I was pretty impressed with the build quality. It was plastic (as all $450 laptops are) but felt relatively rugged, and the internals were surprisingly open too. I was rather happy with the thermals too, there wasn't much we could throw at it to make it sustain uncomfortable temps.

Plastic laptop cases are objectively better than metallic ones. Plastic doesn't heat up your legs that much, and good carbon plastic is stronger than steel, weight-wise. Subjectively, metallic feels better though.

Only "objectively" by your priorities. The fact that metal heats up your legs is also a benefit (e.g. better heat transmission = better performance and component lifetime in the same environment).

As someone else noted, "strength" in material is not one-dimensional. Carbon plastic is still way more conducive to cracking, for one.

Ergo, there is no "objectively better" choice between metal/plastic/carbon in the general case, it comes down to preferences, priorities and requirements.

What about by volume? Also, stronger meaning what? There's a combination of factors here: not just whether it breaks, but also how (dent vs crack..). Also, how well it ages. Also, how much flex does it have and how does that affect the lifespan of the internal components?

I don't know those answers; perhaps carbon plastic wins on all metrics. It would be interesting to learn.

>Also, stronger meaning what?

Usually tensile strength. For example: Tensile strength: even a commodity PA6-GF30 (most half-decent tools are made of) is ~110MPa [according to ISO 527], cast Aluminum - would be ~150MPa (22K psi for the imperial folks) depending on the alloy.

Of course, most laptops would be using an ABS blend, which is the hallmark low-quality tools.

>Dents

That would depend on the top finish, not so much of the material itself.

> >Dents

> That would depend on the top finish, not so much of the material itself.

Would it? If I dropped an aluminium bodied laptop like a Macbook or HP Envy, I'd expect it might scuff and slightly dent at the point of impact. If I dropped the cheapest plastic bodied thing from Currys/Walmart/whatever, I'd expect it might scuff and crack the plastic between screws or something.

What top finish would you apply to a cheap plastic laptop to make it 'ding' like aluminium instead of crack in a drop test?

I would not consider cracks "dents". I already mentioned the cheap 'ABS' plastic, they would crack (also it's not UV stable). You can look up PA6-GF30 (nylon, 30% glass fiber reinforced) tools and they survive ~2m (6 feet) drop tests. Laptops won't do that as their screens would crash. Here: a popular video[0] of some massive abuse of a multimeter.

Again, a good plastic with glass or carbon fiber reinforcement would have similar properties to al-mg body, yet feel cheap as most people consider all plastics quite the same. For example: polycarbonate, 30% carbon fiber would have tensile strength of 150MPa (which the same to cast aluminum)

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlA7-fh5nDQ

No, neither would I. I was agreeing with the commenter you replied to, that I'd expect a plastic laptop to crack, and a metal one to dent. If it has to be damaged, I'd prefer the dent.

You said above that that was more to do with 'top finish' than 'material'; that's what I was responding to - how would you finish crackable plastic material to make it dent like aluminium/alloy instead.

Plasti-dip.

Just an anecdote, but I know someone who had an Ideapad gaming model and while it seemed solid brand new, a year or so in it started falling apart and by year two it was looking ragged just from normal usage, mostly at home on a desk or a lap (so no wear from travel or being knocked around in a bag).

The issue seems to be less with structural design and particular choice of plastics that cause them to not hold up to wear.

On the flip side of this, I have an old 710S and apart from the now completely unusable micro-HDMI port it's held up really well throughout use and abuse over the years. Battery life holds up as well.

If only it had a less brittle video-out and TB it would be close to perfect even today, but these to otherwise minor factors unfortunately make it close to useless apart from as a spare travel device.

Now, report the battery life of that after an year of use

I am using a Lenovo Duet Chromebook (has good Linux container support) right now, and it is cheap and has good build quality. It is not particularly fast but it was about $260 including pen and keyboard case.

They have gotten a lot better recently in my experience.

After ~10y straight of ThinkPad T-series, I won't be getting another one. The BS you have to go through to get firmware updates with important security and bug fixes is ridiculous. On paper they're in fwupd/LVFS but in practice it've very spotty. After a full day of trying other approaches, I eventually succumbed to installing Windows and Lenovo's adware-encriched update manager on a spare SSD just to be able to use my Thunderbolt port with my official Lenovo dock.

On top of that, every series have been getting worse and worse maintainability/extendability/serviciability for pretty every generation. The latest vanilla T-series are comparable to the first-gen Carbon-X1 in this regard.

...Now if only System76/any of the others in the open-laptop space could figure out a way to do more than 1080p on a 13-15" panel. It's 2021 and I can buy a decent 2K 10.1" USB-display online for $200, why are there no options for that many pixels on a new customizable laptop starting at $1200?

Before you conclude that Thinkpad have good Linux support, go on over to lenovo's Q&A forum and look up battery issues for the t14. At this point in time I've spent so much time on this that I could have easily saved 5k or 10k by having a machine that just worked!

Yep. That's how Apple hardware is dirt cheap.

If you want to run Linux though, battery life is the least of your problems with (post.. was it 2016?) Apple hardware.

Good Linux support is rare. Name one other USA vendor besides System76 or Purism that is Linux-first.

Linux is at best a side project for Lenovo and Dell.

Just picking on "Name one other USA vendor besides System76 or Purism that is Linux-first."

Kubuntu Focus - https://kfocus.org/

Pick away!! The more the merrier.

>but even the more premium laptops like Thinkpads are way cheaper(and AFAIK they also provide very good Linux support).

This has not been the case in 5 years.

What isn't the case? They don't provide good support for Linux or they aren't way cheaper? Cos AFAIK both of those are true.

Yeah, good luck updating firmware of your docking station or using DisplayPort's from it under Linux

So the USB C port works fine to a run a display under Manjaro. Haven’t seen a laptop with a display port that wasn’t a MacBook tho.

Unsure how not updating firmware on a dock means linux is not supported well on a laptop.

Today you can get a Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 13.3" Ryzen 7, 16G RAM, 1T Disk, QHD screen for about the same price.

And in september and november Lenovo will launch additional QHD IdeaPad Ryzen models for an even lower price.

QHD (1440 resolution) is important to me because I've become accustomed to it on my workstations. And my work got me a Thinkpad Yoga X1 4th gen which has an internal resolution of 2560x1440 so now I just can't go lower than that.

And yes I am a full time Linux user.

Yup. Hard to pick this over a Dell XPS or a ThinkPad with Linux. Nevermind many other options that Linux can be installed onto.

On the System 76 website, this laptop upgraded to 16 Gigs of RAM comes at at $1288 for me.

Which Dell XPS with equivalent specs at 15 inch screen is cheaper let alone considerably cheaper? I can't seem to find on the Dell website https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/sr/laptops/xps-...

Gets even worse with 32 Gigs RAM- the cheapest Dell XPS is ~$500 more that this machine specced out to 32GB RAM https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/sr/laptops/xps-...

The XPS won't have AMD, and the Thinkpads with Linux pre-installed are pretty limited.

Lots of cheaper, equivalent laptops have AMD. The new Intel processors and GPUs are nice. The System76 is overpriced.

There are no other Linux-first vendors besides System76 and Purism. Dell and Lenovo seem to put up with Linux as a side project.

Yes, you can get cheaper laptops. Whether they are "equivalent" is a matter of what you consider "equivalent". Certainly you can get Clevo from other sources at a lower price. They just don't come with the same enduring Linux support, let alone niceties like coreboot, etc.

That is the problem with basically any commodity market. The margin are so thin, it sort of hard to compete without the economy of scale. Not to mention the selling point of Linux support doesn't exactly have a large TAM.

do ideapads actually have good linux support? Compared to a thinkpad it's cheap, those seem to start at 2 grand these days

Not sure about Ideapads.

Thinkpads with AMD cpu-s are not that expensive: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1645679-REG/lenovo_20...

Same specs for 40% less than Pangolin.

interesting, I was recently on the lenovo website and couldn't find a single thinkpad for under 2 grand. I guess they just hid them well.

My Ideapad Flex 5 runs great (Ryzen 7 5700u), but fingerprint and autorotate do not work (yet). Otherwise, it is completely stable and everything works.

What $ price would you put on dedicated Linux support?