Hi!

I’m in the market for a new laptop and I’d like to consult with the community about what’s being recommended on the year 2026.

This is a laptop that I intend to use for both playing games and using as a mobile coding platform so battery and horsepower are the main points that I’d take into consideration, prioritising battery power.

I do not care if it’s otherwise bulky.

I am currently encountering issues with AMD hardware on my main machine so just having a guarantee that the hardware is not gonna flop on me would be a big plus.

All in all! Thanks for giving my post a read and any answer would be appreciated, specially in the 900€ range.

  • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
    11·
    2 days ago

    I use a Tuxedo Computers InfinityBook 15.

    Pros:

    • Vendor Linux support. I don’t care about using a supported distro, but if a vendor ships with Linux, it’s pretty good odd that the hardware will work with any distro without any weird quirks.

    • Being able to order with a fairly large amount of memory (I use 96 GB, and it’s available with 128GB now), though with what memory prices have done recently, memory may be limited more by price than motherboard capacity. I’m sure that it’d blow a 900 euro budget.

    • Large battery (can get 100 Wh, the most you can fly with in the US).

    • Screen can get up to be fairly bright, which is nice for use in brighter environments. My past laptops, mostly Thinkpads, tended to fairly dim screens.

    Cons:

    • Ships from Europe (Tuxedo is German). With Trump-era tariffs, buying them in the US is going to be more-painful. It also took a while to ship to the US when I bought it. You’re using a euro sign, so it may not be a con for you.

    • I’m not rabid about the trackpad, which is large and doesn’t have physical buttons. I find myself bumping the trackpad occasionally, and have set up keybindings to disable it in some games where it’s a problem. I’m a fan of Synaptics trackpads of the sort that Thinkpads have, a smaller pad with three built-in physical buttons (Linux being a good environment to use three buttons), but very few laptops have this; some Thinkpads do.

    • The power light does not pulse when the laptop is in sleep (not hibernate) mode; if there is a way to remedy this, I have not found it. I have my system set up to, on lid close, sleep, then hibernate after ten minutes or so, so tapping the power button will shut the system down depending upon how long it’s been sleeping; something that I don’t want to accidentally do when it’s still just in sleep mode. Many laptops are able to do this.

    • There’s more flex to the case than Thinkpads, which are mostly what I’ve used in the past. Putting a lot of pressure on the bottom of the case below the fan, like squeezing the case hard, is enough to make it impact the fan when it’s spinning.

    In the past, I have used mostly Thinkpads, but Lenovo has tended to take them in an increasingly inexpensive-but-not-as-good direction from where IBM originally had 'em. For me, the two front-runners when getting this one were either Tuxedo or Framework.

    I am currently encountering issues with AMD hardware on my main machine

    I have an AMD processor. I’m not sure what your concern is — like, are you wanting a laptop with an Intel CPU, or just not to have a discrete AMD GPU, or are you just frustrated at that other laptop?

    • Gonzako@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      10·
      2 days ago

      Oh, great recommendation! I am on Europe so Tuxedo being German is actually a plus!

      For the issue my main PC is currently being affected by a very similar issue to this which forces a gpu reset shortly after I start anything that basically looks at the gpu funny. This is a new issue that started after an update and downgrading everything I could didn’t fix it.

      • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
        4·
        2 days ago

        This is a new issue that started after an update and downgrading everything I could didn’t fix it.

        considers

        I don’t know if buying a new laptop is necessary to resolve that. I don’t know if this is the same problem, but I was just in a discussion with someone who said that he had had instability on RDNA3-based cards (I don’t know what distro) on kernels above 6.12.

        Someone else responded saying that they were fine on Arch, on kernel 6.18, IIRC.

        I also use an RDNA 3 card on my desktop (an XT 7900 XTX, on 6.12.48+deb13, Debian trixie’s current kernel) and haven’t had problems.

        You might just try installing a 6.12 kernel and seeing if the problem goes away, if whatever you’re hitting is whatever that guy is hitting.

        EDIT: Yeah, looks like Arch is currently on Linux 6.18.2.

        The discussion in question:

        https://lemmy.today/post/45004502/21377977

        And he said that he was on 6.18.2.

          • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
            2·
            2 days ago

            Hmm. If you don’t mind sharing, when you hit the problem, were you concurrently running a video game and an LLM on the card? That seems to be what the guy there was doing.

            • Gonzako@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
              3·
              2 days ago

              Nope, just running the game. But I am running kde with a lot of fancy shit on and I’m switching kernels around and they all have the same issue. I might need to do my own issue. Tried, 6.18-zen,6.17-hardened, 6.12-lts. I’ll try a few more kernels tomorrow but I’m a bit stumped

              • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
                2·
                2 days ago

                Hmm. Kinda a long shot, but if it’s easy to reproduce and you’re looking for switches to try throwing, the amdgpu driver does have a number of options.

                $ /sbin/modinfo -p amdgpu

                Might try rebooting, and at GRUB, editing the kernel command line, and disabling some features, seeing if things magically go away.

                Like, the bug report there is talking about some ring timeout. Maybe irrelevant, but could try amdgpu.async_gfx_ring=0 on the kernel command line.