I’ve had good luck with refurbished Dell laptops. My primary laptop is a refurbished Dell Latitude 11" 3120. Bought it for ~$250 at beginning of this year and currently have Fedora on it. It’s not very powerful. I use it primarily to browse the web, watch movies/tv, and vnc/ssh to my other systems. Can last about 5-6 hours streaming video from jellyfin at 50% brightness, other stuff barely uses any power and can stretch out to 9-10 hours if I set display brightness even lower.

I’ve always bought Windows laptops then put linux on them so I’m used to verifying that tools such as TLP are installed, configured, enabled, and working. There is too much variety with laptops for all of them to be handled automatically unfortunately so I always verify it. If a laptop came with Linux pre-installed then it might be good to go ootb but I’d still verify.

Quick way to check if a program is using hardware video acceleration is with a gpu top utility.

Intel - intel_gpu_top

Nvidia - nvidia-smi / nvtop

AMD - radeontop / nvtop / amdgpu_top (just did quick search, don’t have any AMD powered on to verify)

EndeavourOS on desktop and laptop side of things.

For the OS side a few ways.

• Clone & then rename+change drivers
• Ansible/chef
• NixOS

For home folder side of things a dotfile manager, cloud services, and file sync tool will take care of most things. I use chezmoi for dotfiles & nextcloud for file syncing. Firefox is only cloud synced service I still use for now. I have yet to find any decent sources of information on dotfiles so gonna be stuck going through those stupid things to figure out what you want to sync.

Yes, my order status has been at preparing to ship for awhile now. I been wanting a good Linux tablet to replace aging iPad and hoping this works well enough for me. I’ll try to remember to update post on how I like it when it does arrive.

I started with Slackware around 1997 because I needed a free C compiler plus all I had were junk, hand-me-down computers. Stopped programming & using linux around 2000 and had switched back to Windows on a newly built, decent computer. From about 2000 until about 2016 I rarely used linux besides a couple routers. Raspberry pi 3 came out with built-in wifi & my dislike of Windows 10 got me back into linux for more use cases. Valve’s work on proton finally made it so I could switch to linux for most gaming & my Windows usage dropped to almost nothing. Currently using Manjaro on primary desktop and Fedora 38 on tablet with mix of distros in LXC & VMs on mini-PC w/ Proxmox VE & Synology NAS. SteamVR on linux been getting decent amount of work on it lately so once it gets stable I’ll have one less reason to need Windows.

It’s Debian-based so can install all the same desktop and window environments available there.