We're blood brothers my friend. Never again on Asus (though I do have a traitorous exception for mother boards, though I'm trying to change). I also refuse HP stuff for the same reason. Could be so good, but brittle easily broken parts end up wiping out all the quality stuff.

Definitely take a look at Framework laptops (https://frame.work). Unless they lose their way, I don't plan to buy anything else. I've also had great luck with Lenovo T* line (my T580 was one of my favorites of all time). Dell makes some gorgeous stuff as well (though I go with the business line of XPS, I forget what they're called at the moment, maybe Precision?). If you're going with Dell, Ubuntu or a derivative works a little better. I've had friction in the past with Fedora and Arch on Dell because it takes 6 to 9 months for all the drivers to make it upstream to the kernel, so if the model is new within 6 to 9 months you're stuck relying on Dell's build.

I like my framework laptop, and while my particular main board seems to have issues, their support seems good.

I started getting weird boot issues recently, and after doing some heavy diagnosis, they are sending me a replacement mainboard, I'll replace it, and send my broken one back.

Granted it is within warranty, and it was a week of back and forth with their support.

But it is miles above dell consumer support, that I had to send my laptop off multiple times (going without for months) and then they don't even fix it.

Seconding Framework - mine's not very old, so I can't speak to longevity, but their mission is aligned with my values and I've been pretty happy with it so far.

Yeah, I have a friend that bought a Framework laptop and he's said a lot of good things about it. My Macbook was expensive enough to where I'm hoping to get another couple years out of it, which I actually think will work out great, because that'll give a bit of time to further increase Linux compatibility on the Frameworks.

I sort of refuse to use any Linux other than NixOS at this point, so I might have to wait a little longer to get everything, but I think I'm ok with that.

> [1] I swore a blood oath to never buy an Asus product again; the laptop literally started to fall apart after only about a year of usage, and it was almost never transported anywhere (it lives right next to my bed). The plastic holding things together started to delaminate and I had to do a ton of surgery on it in the form of Gorilla Glue and clamps. Never again.

I know this is tangential but I've had to swear off high end laptops in general because of stuff like this, and I've seen it with many different brands - they'll jam a bunch of high end hardware into the literal cheapest, most badly designed case ever, and inevitably that is what causes the issues, not the actual hardware (with the exception of MSI boards, which always seem to have some inherent hardware issue).

Never again.

I think that, for reasons that are various but ultimately just different flavors of the same reason, this seems to be the case for high end anything.

My 14 year old Kia Soul isn't in the shop nearly as often as any of the much younger midrange and high-end cars my friends typically drive. My $75 bottom-of-the-line Seiko 5 wristwatch doesn't need nearly as much maintenance as my old boss's Rolex or my dad's Breitling. (And a $5 quartz watch would require still less maintenance and keep better time too.) Our fancy Breville toaster oven seems to be reflowing the solder in its own circuit boards, and my parents' fancy Bosch laundry machines need to be replaced every 5 years, while our cheapo unit works fine and is older than some of my colleagues at work.

I'm guessing it's just that trying to pack more fancy features into a product means there's more to break. Or, e.g., if you've got a higher-end laptop then it might have higher-performance parts that generate more heat and degrade the plastic more quickly. Or they might have tried to distinguish themselves by using materials that aren't typically used for a reason. Stainless steel cars, anyone?

I agree with everything, but I would like to introduce another variable: economies of scale.

There are more-or-less objectively correct ways to do a lot of things reliably, to a point where they’re kind of boring. Since they are somewhat objective, most companies use them as the default and the prices can get lower and lower because they’re making more and more.

When a company purposefully tries the differentiate themselves, that inherently means that they cannot benefit from the same economies of scale, which in turn means higher prices have to be baked in. Sometimes that’s fine, I think Apple generally makes solid products for example, but a lot of the time this differentiation is just “different for the sake of being different”.

> midrange and high-end cars my friends typically drive

I take it they don't drive Lexuses.

Yeah, this was one of those "Republic of Gamers" laptops, which on paper was pretty decent with a nice AMD processor and GPU, but the actual build quality was garbage.

I had this idea that I was going to have "one computer to rule them all", so something I could edit video on and play games and all that fun stuff. Since then I've come to realize that I would much rather just have some dedicated hardware (e.g. a dedicated mini desktop with a decent GPU) for intensive stuff and keep my laptop a bit more utilitarian, and primarily focus on something with decent battery life and solid Linux driver support.

I'm a little disappointed at how bad the 2019-era Macbooks are with Linux, and it's a little frustrating that the Macbook Linux for the M[1|2|3] is substantially nicer and easier to set up than something with an Intel CPU and an AMD GPU. As it stands, I managed to get NixOS installed on my Macbook and it's almost fine, but suspend doesn't work at all, and the audio quality from the speakers is awful, which is a dealbreaker for me right now.

I'm hoping that once Apple stops providing updates to Intel Macs, there will be a huge push to fix the kernel on the T2 hardware.

My asus zephyrus was unfixable too. Luckily I had an overpriced warranty for it. Not sure what laptop to try next for game dev, I actually went back to a desktop afterwards

I don't do game dev, but FWIW those $400-$800 mini gaming PCs on Amazon are surprisingly decent, with extremely low power consumption, and many of which have eGPU support if necessary. I've become extremely conscious about power usage in the last few months and so I've been replacing my servers with them.

I started using one as a home theater PC about a week ago, and even the internal GPU has been pretty solid. I was able to do 4k video editing with Lightworks Pro with no trouble; I had trouble getting Stable Diffusion working but that was more of a software-support-on-NixOS thing than "crappy hardware" thing.

I don't play a ton of new games but I did PS3 and Xbox 360 emulation on there and for the most part the frame rate was pretty stable, and I've read that a lot of people are having decent luck with even relatively modern games like Elden Ring.

I recently found that my Razer Chroma X could not fit a modern 40-series GPU.

I'm not sure I can recommend eGPU's for gamedev for this reason (among, many others).

Yeah fair, I've never actually used an eGPU so it's tough for me to directly endorse them. I know people who have had pretty good luck with them but I don't really know many game devs so I don't know how well they would actually work with that.

The only thing I do that gives serious use to the GPU is hobbyist video editing, and I don't do that terribly often anymore. I do sometimes run Stable Diffusion, but that's mostly as a goof to generate funny pictures of Keanu Reeves. For that stuff, I think even a relatively cheap GPU does the job well enough.

1/10 failure rate of Razer Blade 18's in the last 18 months.

That said: getting them seems to be horribly hard, so I might regret telling you this.