I am in the market for getting my younger brother a laptop or PC as a gift for him starting at college next year. He is also somewhat of a photo/video enthusiast so I am looking for a machine that is capable of some photo/video editing but perhaps not that heavyweight.
I’ve visited my go-to computer shop and they showed me this machine:
I am also talking him into moving away from the proprietary world to GNU/Linux/FOSS. So I wonder if this machine will Linux? I look forward your comments, thoughts, ideas, suggestions etc.
Thanks in advance
Currently looks like the graphics drivers for Nvidia will at some point cause issues on the Linux side. And that can make your brother turn away from linux…
So if your purpose is to turn him to Linux, then I’d suggest not using Nvidia graphics cards.
Otherwise that machine looks like quite decent. It is small enough to carry around.
But we don’t know the price…
Right, that is what giving me some second thoughts as well. My idea is to support him as much as I can and hopefully get some help from you guys on the forum to get the machine setup with EnOS.
We live like 15 minutes ride from each other so being there physically to help him out is not a problem.
I’ve been thinking about the touchscreen as well. Will that cause some issues?
And the price, important factor. It will cost something around 1300€.
Actually, he has already a Dell Vostro i5 8th Gen. We bought one each some years ago. That one can turn into a Linux box with no issues but I thought to give him a little hardware upgrade at the same time he will be upgrading himself for some years to come. So I could also get him a PC as well. I have looked at a couple of makes and models. I’ll post the specs for you guys to have a look later on.
The specs are nice for Ryzen but it has Ryzen Graphics and Nvidia and is Optimus. It may be okay because the specs are saying it’s Optimus. Ryzen processor has graphics on it.
I also don’t prefer the touch screen.
Right now lenovo has a good deal on this one. The model with Windows 10 pro and 16 GB memory and 512 GB drive with 5700U
I have a somewhat different ASUS laptop that’s a 2-in-1 with touchscreen (https://www.amazon.com/ASUS-ZenBook-Flip-Ultra-Slim-UX461UN-DS74T/dp/B078YN3VY9) and the touchscreen has never caused any problems for me. Probably because I only ever use it as a laptop and haven’t messed around trying to use it in tablet mode or anything like that.
Catching up with the rest of the thread … I’d go with the Lenovo if it were up to me
The touchscreen works in laptop mode and in tablet mode (ie if I open all the way so the key board is on the back). Like I said, I haven’t messed around with tablet mode much. With my EndeavourOS/Gnome install it does some things ‘out-of-the-box’ like disabling the physical keyboard in tablet mode (so you aren’t accidentally typing stuff) but it doesn’t automatically rotate screen orientation based on the accelerometer. I haven’t bothered trying to configure any of that stuff because it hasn’t been important to me, but now that you have me thinking about it …
I would probably avoid another Optimus machine whenever I could. It is a pain to deal with to the point that once I got it set up with he nVidia card powered-down and everything running through the Intel graphics I haven’t ever switched back… maybe if I needed to game on the laptop, but that’s what I have a desktop for!
I’ve never had any of these setups myself but judging from what I’ve read here and there I understand what you are saying. That’s what is holding me up a bit for getting the Asus machine I posted above about.
For me it’s pretty simple looking at any computer:
Does it have Nvidia - if the answer is yes. . . I won’t touch it. Period.
Intel/AMD are the only things I will spend money on. I’d take Nvidia shit if it were free. But I’d probably just fix it and sell it on offerup to get it out of my hands.
