Hello! For work (where I’m compiling a big Rust monorepo in a loop), I’m on a Thinkpad T14 Gen 4 and it’s getting a bit annoying.
My only constraint is that I’d like a 13-14 inch device
The AI memory situation is probably to blame, but after sending a LLM fetch specs and GeekBench results, it seems that for sustained multicore performance, the only thing that comes close (within 10% but still lower) of a M5 MacBook Pro (currently ~3200 EUR), is the HP Elite G1a (ARM linux is OK), but its list price is much higher (up to 4900 EUR for 64G memory and 1TB disk) for arguably worse speakers and battery on top.
So right now it’s hard to justify not getting a MacBook and that makes me sad…
Is there a laptop you’re using right now that comes close enough to a MBP in long compilation jobs, but runs Linux and doesn’t somehow cost more ?
Framework if you dont mind relying on the Community for coreboot support.
Otherwise System76, Novacustom, Starlabs, Nitropad, … there is a handful of sellers of coreboot laptops which is a market you should totally invest in. Coreboot is amazing and there is quite a variety!
Also not to forget Chromebooks, but they are extremely limited and mostly unrepairable.
AI
🍿
I honestly just SSH into my workstation from my laptop, into a tmux session, for all my heavy LLM tasks.
I’m not even using it for AI or heavy local inference or so. I just happen to easily fill up and use 40-is GB, and when I want ram in a package that performs well CPU wise it gets giga expensive fast :(
How big is just the repo?
Currently 260k loc in the workspace
I mean in MB/GB
I spend my day in RDP/SSH
Unfortunately not really. I use a framework as my day to day and offload builds to a Macbook pro.
The closest comparison to the Macbook Pro is probably the Framework 13 Pro with Intel Core Series 300. The newest Panther Lake chips are close to Apple’s M series silicon in terms of efficiency (and therefore much better battery life than previous models) and competitive when it comes to performance. They even market it as the MBP for Linux users.
The 13 Pro has excellenr build quality and a haptic touchpad, just like the Macbooks. And unlike the Macs, it’s super repairable, upgradeable memory, has modular ports, and supports Linux really well! And especially when you spec it with more RAM and storage (even in memory crisis), the Framework is incredibly close to the price of the equivalent base M5 Macbook (it goes more to show how obscene Apple’s memory pricing is really).
Alternatively, you could get an older M1 or M2 Mac and run Asahi Linux (but then you can’t upgrade the RAM or storage)
What was really the problem? If you compile it the first time, the second time it only compiles the files you’ve changed. No matter how big your monorepo is, as long as it compiles overnight, there shouldn’t be any impact to the speed of work.
So there’s this fun thing in rust where if you don’t have exactly the same feature set for all components of the workspace when you go to a subfolder for a component you can invalidate cached artifacts and trigger a lot of jobs. Same thing when you check out a branch then compile. And as I have a fair volume of crates in the workspace, changing mtime on the files for a checkout means I still have 5~10 minutes each time I want to run tests locally (a fresh run takes ~30 minutes to ~45}
the framework laptops https://frame.work/
I looked at phoronix benchmarks for the 13 Pro first, but I wasn’t impressed (even acknowledging that Phoronix should have asked for the Ryzen one)
Well if Panther Lake doesn’t work for you, I don’t think any x86 machine will. You might want to try Strix Halo, but those are more power hungry and aren’t in many laptops (I think it’s the weird ROG tablet and some HP machine that isn’t all too great). You might also be interested in the Framework Desktop, a fun little Striz Halo box, but it’s not the most portable
Stay away from Snapdragon machines, they don’t perform as good as M series silicon and Linux support is pretty poor.
Your best alternative is probably an M1 or M2 Macbook Pro running Asahi Linux, since you are fine with ARM.
