I had bought an MSI laptop from Costco. Even though I was happy with the performance and with CachyOS I had to return it. Lucky for me that Costco has such a generous return window, 90 days. My main issues were that it lacked adequate cooling for the X7 358H, had no UEFI support from MSI on their website, and the build quality was atrocious.
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’m not buying anything from Frame.Work as I’ve had two issues with them already which prompted me to cancel both orders, once for the desktop and once for the 13 Pro. Their customer service is lacking in my humble opinion.
EDIT: I mostly use my rig to code, game, and to tinker with private local models. In the US currently.
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.
A new laptop with a dvd drive? Sign me up. Not a fan of the ath9k wireless card (I know why they did it, Ive never had particularly great performance from the one I have, even accounting for the fact that mine is 1x1 )
Now I want to know who makes their hardware.
Edit: it’s a clevo nj50. Well good to know that.
ThinkPenguin hardware is extremely outdated. Would definitely consider PCSpecialist if it was an option.
Thinkpenguin is just rebranded clevo stuff. Most small company laptops are like that. Everything from system76, to sager, to eluktronics. Basically if you find a laptop you like through a Linux hardware company, maybe find the chassis model and save a bit bc there usually isn’t much different between them. If you play your cards right, you can get software support through another vendor bc they sell the same laptop. (Bios updates etc)
Like the Thinkpenguin t4 is just a clevo nj50.