On Sat, Jun 26, 2021 at 12:38:16AM +0100, Michael Goddard wrote:

If you were in the market for a laptop, which make, model, size etc would it be, and why?

We (I and my wife) have been happy with various Lenovo Thinkpads, they run Linux very well.

Currently my wife has an X201 and I have a T470.

On Sat, Jun 26, 2021 at 12:38:16AM +0100, Michael Goddard wrote:

If you were in the market for a laptop, which make, model, size etc would it be, and why?

I purchased myself this laptop a few months ago:

https://www.laptopsdirect.co.uk/lenovo-thinkpad-p14s-gen1-amd-ryzen-7-pro-47...

I went for a Thinkpad as even though they are not what they were in the past they still provide a Trackpoint which I prefer over a Trackpad, the Ryzen 4750U is a fast CPU and I get a 3 year warranty. 14" laptop is the sweet spot really for general use, if it was my main computing device I would go for a 15", if it was something that I was on the road with all the time and I was using a desktop for primary use at home I would have considered a 13".

£700 for a well built fast machine that will continue to get firmware updates and support for around 5-7 years seems good value to me. Although, I did immediately upgrade the RAM with an 8GB stick for a total of 16GB and replaced the 256GB SSD with a 1TB SSD which was about £50 for the RAM and about £95 for the SSD. Probably also worth mentioning that Lenovo do support Linux and have options in the firmware and released a firmware update to fix a bug that affects Linux users recently.

I expect to be using this as my main laptop for around 5 years after purchase, although I said that when I got my previous Thinkpad, a W530 workstation in September 2013. The only reason I got this as a replacement was that the W530 was getting a bit slow with some tasks, the keyboard and case were getting a bit grotty and recently it would do a few random reboots every couple of weeks although I suspect it just needs the motherboard replacing (I do have the spare but it's a 3 hour job to replace), and the battery got tired.

I would also avoid buying any "home" grade laptop, typically they have very poor cases and hinges and fall to bits quite quickly. There's a reason they are cheap to buy, I'd always be looking at HP/Lenovo/Dell business class laptops.

Adam