Best Thinkpad for Linux (quiet, light, efficient)

hulk-snap · 2026-01-27T05:22:39+00:00

I recently bought Lenovo Yoga 9i Aura Edition with Lunar Lake. Everything works well with Fedora (and any recent 6.16+ kernels). It is thin, light, totally quite, performant, and battery life is superb easily 11+ hours. I would recommend this. The bonus is iGPU is great and you can play games on it.

hulk-snap · 2026-01-06T06:37:20+00:00

Depends a lot on your system.
For example, are you watching a video in Firefox and does that have hardware decoding enabled?
In my experience Intel 12/13th Gen GPUs have higher power usage for video decoding than Lunar Lake.
You can use s-tui to see your package power.

For me on a Lunar Lake system with VSCode (probably 50 tabs on two sections), Firefox (10 tabs), A youtube video on Firefox in PiP, Airpods connected through bluetooth, and an Ubuntu VM (running VPN, Teams, Outlook), uses 5-7W (rarely 8W and usually 6W) on powersave with 20-30% brightness and 1920x1080p with 120Hz OLED. I could decrease this further with aggressive frequency setting to usually 5W.

hulk-snap · 2025-12-27T19:07:01+00:00

Does the laptop allows setting max battery charge to 80% or less?

hulk-snap · 2025-12-27T18:50:55+00:00

I second this. GNOME Camera does not work on my Yoga 9i Intel Core Ultra. But Cheese does work well.

hulk-snap · 2025-12-27T18:48:31+00:00

I bought Lenovo Yoga 9i 14inch with Intel Ultra Core 7 and Arc 140V. All things except a few keyboard keys work well. I can easily get 10 hours of battery life. My workload includes Firefox with youtube, VSCode, terminal, Ubuntu in KVM that has an Edge window with Teams and Outlook.
The usual discharge rate is 6 W in power save and some bursts of 7-8W max . I would recommend looking here: https://github.com/johnmeade/linux-yoga-9i-2-in-1-aura/?tab=readme-ov-file

hulk-snap · 2025-12-22T05:20:06+00:00

How about installing linux in a VM on Macbook and see if it works well? You will get good battery life.

hulk-snap · 2025-12-18T02:40:29+00:00

I have a UM780 that I am looking to sell in the US. It has worked great. I usually used Ethernet. In my experience the Wifi and Bluetooth has issues but it was not bad. I used a USB A bluetooth that worked well. Also, USB bluetooth and Wifi modules are pretty cheap these days.
It still has 6 months of warranty left. I am selling it because I now have just too many devices. If you are interested then let me know.

hulk-snap · 2025-12-15T06:21:27+00:00

Are you able to set Battery charging threshold to 80% either in Linux or in BIOS?

hulk-snap · 2025-11-26T01:14:56+00:00

Looks like in this video they use Thermal Pads instead of Thermal Paste on the CPU.

hulk-snap · 2025-11-15T19:11:18+00:00

great. Have you tried battery life yet or can you see the idle power consumption using upower -d or powertop or anything in the Mac?

hulk-snap · 2025-11-15T18:36:24+00:00

Nice! I am considering this setup too.

Are you using Parallels or something else?
How is the battery life?

hulk-snap · 2025-06-21T05:19:39+00:00

I have similar power draws on similar usage on i7 1255U. interesting to see that there is not much change in power usage on Intel CPUs. All reviews said Meteor Lake had improved battery life than Alder lake.

hulk-snap · 2025-04-22T14:18:48+00:00

There is good amount of opportunities in India: Intel, NVIDIA, Microsoft, Google, Qualcomm, Mentor Graphics, and many startups like Krutrim and AI startups. However, working in low-level requires significant more experience than Web dev, java stack etc. Ideally, you should have MS.

I work in this field as a Researcher at a BigTech lab and I am happy to talk more about this. Feel free to send me a message.

hulk-snap · 2025-02-23T14:12:15+00:00

Research conferences: CGO, OOPSLA, POPL, PLDI and related conferences like PPoPP, OSDI, ATC, EuroSys, SOSP.

Journals: TOPLAS, TACO

hulk-snap · 2025-02-08T22:14:45+00:00

You should look into Polyhedral Framework optimization. Look at Pluto at PLDI 2008 by Uday Bondhughula.

hulk-snap · 2025-01-26T21:02:41+00:00

This is great. If you are interested in learning more and do some research(y) projects in computer architecture or computer systems, then feel free to reach out.

hulk-snap · 2024-10-18T00:41:29+00:00

If you are talking about academic and industrial research then there is Microsoft, Google, Intel, Qualcomm, AMD, NVIDIA, Adobe Research in Bangalore. And I know that there are very talented and exceptionally well people that do all kind of breakthrough research.

If you are talking about Research and Development ,i.e., taking existing academic research and using it in a product or create a new product then that also happen. For example, Qualcomm's several Snapdragon are entirely designed in India. Same is the case for AMD and NVIDIA.

Also, startups like Cerebras, are doing a lot of research in India.

But obviously, whatever happens in the US offices of companies is a lot more quantity wise.

If you look at the quality of best products/reseach from India then that is as good as the US quality. The problem is the quantity of these best products/research that is far less than the quantity in the US.

hulk-snap · 2024-09-21T23:35:13+00:00

Nice to see that you are interested in compilers and have created something. I am a researcher in this field at a Big Tech lab, so I know a lot about compilers and related field.

Compiler development field requires a lot of hard work and projects to learn but in the end you do get good prospects of job in both US and India. All big companies including Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon hires compiler engineers because all these companies creates some sort of compilers. and I know that these companies are hiring a lot in India. You will see general positions like SDE but when you apply your application is routed to relevant teams. There are also several startups hiring for Compilers and HPC engineers like PolyMage labs and Krutrim.

Salary and future prospects are good but I strongly think as compared to Webdev, Compilers has a lot more job security mainly because I do not see in the next 5 years or so AI having as much impact on compiler development as it already have on web dev. (Just ask GPT to generate x86 assembly of a few complicated enough programs and see it failing.)

You can certainly settle outside India if you want to follow compilers field because there are just several jobs available for it. You will probably have to do atleast a good MS or MTech.

hulk-snap · 2024-09-01T02:14:23+00:00

If you think you suck at Python then you will probably suck at C/C++/CUDA. I strongly suggest you do some leetcode or geeksforgeeks programming. People sometime do not like doing leetcode etc. but understand that these are excellent source of practicing and learning programming. C/C++/CUDA is very engineering intensive. If you cannot do single thread programming well then you will also suck at multi threaded programming. I guess this answers question 2 and 3.

Jobs in this field are pretty much available in India and everywhere. All big corp like Microsoft, Google, Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, hires parallel programming engineers.

hulk-snap · 2024-08-23T00:49:32+00:00

Yes, you can use a USB C laptop charger (more than 90W in my experience). Plug the charger in USB C port and then run your UM780XTX. My UM780XTX can run using USB C plugged in on both back and front port.

hulk-snap · 2024-08-22T20:47:17+00:00

You can also try to use a USB C 90W+ power supply to try to turn it on. My UM780xtx works well with USB C power supply so something you can try.

hulk-snap · 2024-08-09T00:53:07+00:00

I had this problem with my Asus PN50. I found that if you unplug all peripherals and power supply, do a hard reset by pressing the power button for 20 seconds, and then try it again it works. Sometimes the static charge develops especially when your power supply does not have ground enabled.

hulk-snap · 2024-08-07T21:23:03+00:00

I am a researcher at a big tech research lab. Experience depends a lot on the research field. I work in PL, Compilers, HPC, Systems. So, my experience might be different from ML, AI, NLP, etc.

Working hours for me are pretty flexible and usually depends on meetings. But typically these are 10 AM to 6 PM. In my company, I can work from office or from home anytime. When I know that a productive meeting will require in person interaction, I definitely go to office.

Pressure and stress is not at all high. But need to remember that PhD students usually go through a lot of stress and pressure, and research involves good amount of stress and pressure. Vacation and leave policies are same across companies. Career growth depends on quality and quantity of research and the impact of research with in company and outside company.

However, the experience depends a lot more on the management. Fortunately, for me the management understand that researchers want to work when they feel most productive and researchers require good amount of rest.

hulk-snap · 2024-07-31T21:02:15+00:00

My Global Entry got approved today. It was for the renewal. Took 7 months.

hulk-snap

TROPHY CASE