Laptop

There is a less known story about Intel processors. Back around 2010s Intel developed its co called Iris Xe integrated graphics exclusively to be used in MacBooks. Nowadays, of course, it is no longer the case and the “next gen” intel graphics is available for everythone.

This, among other things, means that it is well-understood, stable implementation with a decent driver supports and so-called Linux compatibility.

Up to 11th gen everything just works.

So, your laptop of choice should be 11th gen Lenovo IdeaPad or ThinkBook, with 14“ ot 15” 1080p IPS display.

1080p is absolutely requred to have two pages of text (say, a pdf viewer and an editor) side by side with a comfortable 16pt font. It could be 14pt font while you are still young.

In fact, there is no way to fit two pages 80 characteds wide onto a 1080p screen with 16pt font. You will end up with two 72 characters wide windows, which is annoying.

The best laptop resolution seems to be “gamer’s” 1440p for “standard” 15.6 or new 16 inch screens. However, there is no way to find a 1440p laptop without some useless, infeiror additional discrete GPU, like Nvidia MX or whatever.

So, the trick is to replace the screen in an authorized service center, but it will, of course, cost some additional money (the price of the screen + service fees).

You have to put an M.2 storage SSD “stick” for a separate /home partition. The system could reside on a slower SATA SSD. The point is to have /home on a separate physical device.

You need at least 8Gb of DDR4, additional 8Gb DIMM could be installed at any time.

An 11th gen CPU, even the i3, has AVX2 and SSE4.2 instruction sets, supported by all modern compilers (gcc, and clang), so you could squize maximum from your i3 CPU and DDR4.

The most important characteristics, by the way, are the size of CPU caches per core and how many “channels” the DDR memory bus uses. So, 11th gen was the “peak”.

12th and 13th introduced hybrid cores without any other improvements. There are CPUs with DDR5 support (which is very good) but they are rare and still expensive.

Having this modest setup one could make FAST and smooth MacBook-like experience using Gentoo Linux. It is possible to play 2160p movies with mpv, libva and libplacebo, and your compelled with -martch=native -mtune=native Chromium browser will start 2-4 times faster than on Windows 10.

It is also possible to run windows apps and even old classic games with Wine. Everything will run way faster than under MS Windows. For that you have to install a multilib version of an OS. Of course, 3D support will be very basic.

So, with an entry-level Lenovo laptop with well-chosen CPU and memory you will have a pleasant i3, Emacs, Chromium, Firefox, zathura experience, plus any crazy things like running old Windows games at maximum speed (limited only by your hardware).

And, of course, all the classic programming langauges are easily available from Gentoo repositories. The main point is that this will run incomparably better, (without Trojans an viruses) that MS Windows.

Everything is well-documented with step-by-step guides, written by some other guys, just google it.