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.
all this talk about buying laptops…you guys can afford laptops right now?
Refurbished and Used can become quite affordable
If you aren’t running anything more than Minecraft for games you can get old Dell Latitudes for next to nothing. The downfall is that SSDs are $$$ now.
The Latitude 7400 (Non 2-in-one version) is genuinely an amazing laptop if you underclock the CPU a bit so it doesn’t sound like a jet engine. I run Debian on it and the thing gets 12 hours of battery life, and does everything I need. Build quality is pretty good too. I got it for like 200$ refurbished.
Yeah I was talking about the old E7440s for instance. Really solid old machines, and you can still play old games. Minecraft even works at lower settings.