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Comment by vee-kay | Hacker News Reader

Get any gaming laptop or corporate grade laptop.

They'll look good, work well (from hardware perspective), and you can replace their built-in Windows OS with the Linux flavor/edition of your choice.

By the way, if ultraportable is your idea of laptop nirvana, you can try... Samsung made awesome AI-powered laptops (the Samsung Galaxy Book5 and Book6), I got the Book5 few months back for my friend's son. It is sleek, lightweight and powerful.

Here is the TG review/verdict: https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/laptops/samsung-galaxy-b...

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> you can replace their built-in Windows OS with the Linux flavor/edition of your choice.

From the arch wiki: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Laptop/Samsung

> Samsung Book5 - Internal Speakers not working on linux

Also, it caps out at 32GiB of ram, I feel like these days that's pretty low for anyone who uses javascript heavy webpages. Like, my firefox on linux is currently using 42GiB of memory, and that's with under 200 tabs open, and then when I build my nixos config, that usually takes another 10-20GiB of memory

Get any gaming laptop

Don't get any gaming laptop. Some of them are truly bottom of the barrel slop and it really matters that you do your research. (See, for instance, NuclearNotebook reviews on YouTube)

Maybe in current era of skyrocketing prices of memory & storage components (due to mindboggling demand by AI-driven tech industry), I would agree that budget gaming laptops are not worth the value.

But for decades, I have found that gaming laptops (decent brands and popular models) gave best bang for buck, especially with AMD hardware. My 12+ years old Lenovo gaming laptop is still going strong, and my 15+ years old Sony Viao netbook is also doing well (with SATA SSD and RAM upgrades few years ago).

But yeah, read/check up on the reviews (from reputed reviewers) before splurging for an expensive laptop.

One nifty trick to identify VFM(value for money) laptops is to check Amazon site/app for "Smartchoice" laptops. It is a special keyword that Amazon adds to listings of popular laptops that are VFM (best deals) and having good reviews.

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