During the second half of 2022, I dusted off my laptop and travelled to three events for the first time in over two years. During these trips, it became apparent that my laptop is not the right tool for the job.

At KubeCon EU 2022 my colleague Lindsay brought her Apple Macbook Pro M1. It was lightweight, compact, looked fabulous and had epic battery life. Meanwhile, my ThinkPad P1 Gen 1 looked fabulous but it is a bit of a chonker and a massive power pig 🔌🐖 Battery anxiety was constant that week and also on my subsequent trips to SREday 2022 and the Ubuntu Summit 2022. Sensing that 2022 wasn’t an outlier and more travel would be on the cards in 2023 I decided that I wanted some of that thin and light laptop action. In early December 2022, I went hunting for a Linux laptop and this is my journey.

As featured on Linux Matters! 🎙️

I recently discussed my hunt for a new Linux Loving Laptop on the Linux Matters podcast. You can hear that discussion with my friends Alan and Mark in Linux Matters: Mastodon on My Résumé (Episode 1).

Linux Matters Podcast

Past laptop purchasing mistakes 😱

“Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it” – Winston Churchill.

The requirements for my last two laptop purchases were very different from what I need today; a Dell XPS 15 5550 and ThinkPad P1 Gen1 Both have significant power requirements with 15.6″ UHD displays and discrete NVIDIA GPUs. The ThinkPad P1 Gen also sports a Xeon CPU ⚡️ These made sense when I bought them, I was travelling one week every month and regularly compiling large applications, building container images, VMs and operating system images. These days I have a Threadripper 3970X workstation at home that I can connect to via Tailscale to run compute-intensive tasks. I simply don’t need a workhorse 🐴 laptop anymore.

Laptop criteria 📑

I’m deeply impressed with the outstanding work the Asahi Linux team are doing to enable Linux on Apple Silicon Macs, but running Linux on an M1 Mac isn’t viable for me as some hardware support (HDMI for example) is still a work in progress at the time of writing. Not ideal when you’re a conference speaker and running booth demos.

These are my criteria for the new laptop. Some must-haves, some nice-to-haves and some hard exclusions.

• Fully Linux compatible.
  • Linux pre-installed to demonstrate Linux is fully supported
• Full working day battery life; ~8 hours in my opinion.
• Low-power CPU, 35W or under
  • Ideally AMD 6000 series but a 12th Gen Intel as a compromise
  • No 11th Gen Intel or AMD 5000 series CPUs will be considered
• 64GB RAM, will compromise on 32GB RAM
• 13″ or 14″ 1920×1200 matte display
  • No UHD resolutions display will be considered (for power-saving reasons)
  • Touch support is a nice-to-have, but not essential
  • 1920×1080 as a compromise, but nothing lower
• No discrete GPU. Again for power-saving reasons.
• USB-C charging
• Dual NVME SSD, or at least a single 2TB (or more) SSD
• Decent keyboard and touchpad
• The Laptop should weigh close to 1kg
• Premium build quality and design (somewhat subjective I know)

With this list of requirements established, I started collating Linux laptop comparison notes in this somewhat idiosyncratic spreadsheet

A spreadsheet that probably only makes sense to me

Looking at the list of laptops in the sheet above, you might be wondering why I didn’t consider any laptops from the established dedicated Linux laptop vendors such as Entroware, Slimbook and StarLabs. Well, I did look at everything they offered at the time and none of them had a model available that met the requirements I’ve outlined above or the estimated dispatch time was nearly half a year.

I’m not going to elaborate on the rationale behind ruling certain laptop models in or out, but I will say this; I was very impressed to see every laptop in the Lenovo ThinkPad lineup had a Linux pre-install option of either Ubuntu or Fedora in “Build YourPC” system configurator. While comparing the power requirements of Intel’s i7-12xx series and AMD’s 68×0 series CPU at the time, I was sold on the impressive battery endurance of AMD’s offerings and the superior integrated graphics, so I excluded any laptop with Intel CPUs quite early on.

Lenovo ThinkPad Z13 Gen 1 with Ubuntu pre-installed

I went with