I’m considering buying a laptop from Tuxedo, but I’m in Australia and I’m not sure how bad that idea is. Does anyone have experience or recommendation? I would not buy from any american company though. Is there a risk to not go through the country, or that I would have to pay a massive tax on it?

I bought 2 lenovos before. It seems to be getting worse for Linux and Amd. My first one was awesome, the second one had so many issues and I have to use a usb wifi and blacklist the internal one, so I probably want to skip lenovo this time, even if I have to pay a lot more.

  • guillem@aussie.zone
    3·
    3 days ago

    I went with Laptopwithlinux for my last one, I don’t remember the reason (probably the shipping too). I’m quite happy, don’t recall having to do any workarounds to get my distro running.

    I’ve also had Slimbook and Tuxedo (when I was living in the EU) and my takeaway is that no laptop is perfect. The Slimbook was great because of the aluminium case, like dialectalraveling says, but the monitor’s light leakage was a bit too much for my taste (same goes for LWL). Tuxedo was great because I have never found such a great power/weight balance, but the case (magnesium I think) took very few years to start chipping. LWL feels like a reasonably priced in-between (but I miss the others’ FlexiCharge, now I need to unplug the charger manually).

    You could also try and find the corresponding white label model (TongFang, Clevo…), maybe some Australian company sells them without having to go through customs. Unfortunately I can’t recommend Metabox though: at work I have one, the specs are good but the trackpad and the most used letters on the keyboard started “peeling”(?) after very little time of use (I swear I don’t eat at my desk).

    • guismo@aussie.zoneOPEnglish
      2·
      3 days ago

      When you say it took very few years to ship, do you mean days, weeks, months, or actually years?

      They seem to have some nice stuff too. It seems that all Linux oriented shops do. All this enshitified garbage of not letting you upgrade memory or hard drives seem to be bullshit of big companies just like the mobile phone ones do too…

      But so far I’m researching, it seems that since amd embraced “AI”, talking about enshitification, the CPUs are barely better than my current one, while using a lot more power. It seems that if I want to have the same power consumption I’ll actually have to downgrade, while paying more.

      I may be better trying to find a used laptop that has the stuff I want and just replace the battery. Weird days where buying a new laptop after years will get you something worse and more expensive than you bought…

        • guismo@aussie.zoneOPEnglish
          1·
          1 day ago

          I would pay thousands of dollars to kill intel, not to help them.

          I still have very bad memories from when they became a near monopoly with criminal ways and set back the world of cpus by many years. Luckily the market is different now so that’s unlikely to happen again, but I don’t ever want them on the top again.

          And that’s not even counting their massive support for israel. Anyway, of the evil companies I don’t want to support they are close to the top of the list.

      • guillem@aussie.zone
        2·
        3 days ago

        Years. I don’t know how many, but less than 4 or 5, not super bad, but annoying enough specially in the corners. Also by the 5th year the rubber “feet” had started to crumble.

        • guismo@aussie.zoneOPEnglish
          2·
          3 days ago

          Oh… chipping. The case was breaking. Sorry… I thought you mispelled “shipping”, that it took a very long time for them to send you the laptop.

          Yeah, that’s important for me. My current lenovo, although higher end than the previous, doesn’t compare. The first one is all metal. I dropped it several times on concrete and it survived without barely any issue. While this one even being so careful gives me a headache.

          No point buying something expensive that will die on the first time I’m not careful and I’m usually not careful.

          • guillem@aussie.zone
            3·
            3 days ago

            If you need sturdy, nothing like a refurbished old Thinkpad, but probably the expertise needed is too much for me.

            • guismo@aussie.zoneOPEnglish
              1·
              2 days ago

              My ones are thinkpad. I’m not sure why people praise them so much. There’s all different kinds.

              My first one like I said is a tank though. I never thought laptops needed to be that sturdy, but now I know that, like phones, they need to be as strong as they are expensive (and it’s usually the opposite).

              • guillem@aussie.zone
                1·
                2 days ago

                I had a ThinkPad X200 (IIRC) that I could literally stand on. Still working (with limitations). I wish things could last that much nowadays.