The stuff Hacker News actually recommends.

Laptops

Asus TUF

9owners with an opinion
56%of verdicts positive
0/1positive/negative since 2024
0happy after 3+ years

Praised for performance and value; criticized for reliability and display.

What people wrote

Doesn’t like it
I can't say I'm surprised by this at all. I bought my 4790k's ASUS TUF board awhile back because I wanted something basic enough and wasn't interested in overclocking or tweaking. The BIOS had other ideas. I had to manually configure a lot more things just to avoid overclocking, including setting RAM timing and going through each BIOS setting to ensure it wasn't overclocking in some way. The "optimal" setting would turn on aggressive changes like playing with bus speed multipliers, etc.
Doesn’t like it
Hmm, are you sure that's what the suggestion is because the first line of the Verdict says: "If you want an amazing 1,000 nits (IPS) LCD — go for the HP EliteBook 865 G10, Ryzen"... My comment directly talks about why the Sure View display is objectively not amazing, and has a lot of downsides. Also, I have an older Ryzen laptop with a 250 nit display and to me, it's basically too dark unless you work exclusively in low lighting (even sunlight from office windows made it unpleasant to work with) so I think the TUF would also be hard to recommend unless you really were someone who never looks at their screen (but then, why get a laptop?). The G14's display I'd say is significantly better than either the TUF or the HP's. Personally, I think 350 nits would be my minimum. The G14 has a 500 nit display. It's also DCI-P3 and Pantone validated making it much more color accurate. It's a matte display, supports HDR (largely irrelevant to Linux I know), and supports 120Hz and VRR (it can actually be tweaked to 144Hz and 30-144Hz VRR, which is actually amazing to me [1]). Notebookcheck of course has a review on the display: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Asus-ROG-Zephyrus-G14-GA402R-G... (much faster pixel response, PWM at 27KHz only at https://rog.asus.com/us/support/FAQ/1049059 [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ZephyrusG14/comments/w9k8p3/my_g14_...
Doesn’t like it
As much as I tried to believe in Asus' reputation in the past 20 years, I'm pretty much done with them. 2 of 2 mainboards (TUF and Maximus series) with random reboot issues, 1 of 2 GPUs with firmware issues causing BSODs, 1 of 2 routers (high-end models) with power supply failure problems and sometimes corrupting settings on reboot.
Likes it
My "least powerful" laptop that I still use for development is ASUS TUF A15. With Ryzen 7 4800H CPU. 8 Cores 16 threads. I bought it recently dirt cheap for $799 Canadian (translates to $586US approximately). Stuffed it with 64GB RAM (I had it lying around but it is cheap anyways). I run CLion from JetBrains on it for my C++ development. When doing full rebuild of the project and libs (all cores at 100%) the fan comes on but not really loud and goes back to sleep for the rest of the development. Building itself is really fast. Not sure why you have such poor experience. Maybe those thin laptops can't really handle CPU loads without overheating.
Likes it
I put off buying a new gaming laptop for my daughter until I could find one with decent specs for under US$1000. I'd check every week or so. Finally, thanks to Black Friday, I found two yesterday that had just crept under. Asus TUF F15 at B&H: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1702433-REG/asus_fx50... Acer Predator Helios at Best Buy: https://www.bestbuy.com/site/acer-predator-helios-300-15-6-f... They're really almost identical; I ended up buying the TUF (which has since gone up but only by $20) because it had a larger SSD. I'm sure somebody else can do better - please comment here if you do! - but this seems to set a pretty good benchmark.
Recommends it
I owned the previous generation of the Asus TUF, the A15, along with my wife, and can recommend it. My experience with these low-end gaming laptops is that the screens are low quality. You might buy her an external monitor and a wireless keyboard + mouse so she can use it in clamshell mode. But those are fantastic deals -- kind of jealous actually. Last year I paid ~$1,400 on Black Friday for an MSI GE76 Raider 11UE that has these specs: > 1TB SSD, 32GB RAM, 17.3" FHD 144 Hz, i7-11800H (11th Gen), RTX 3060 Computing advances at insane paces.
Doesn’t like it
Oh really ? Then you're lucky you don't have one of those "gaming laptop" especially the ASUS TUF models (I am not a gamer at all but yet i decided to get an asus Tuf505d) and believe me setting up Linux on it wasn't boring at all. I actually learnt a lot while doing it. Because once you'll figure out why the wifi is shutting down every x minutes. You'll then have to find what's wrong with the Bluetooth who doesn't activate. And of course at some point you'll want to connect an external monitor right ? If you thought plugging an hdmi cable and pushing some keys would allow you to display your stuff on your projector... Well think again. Don't get me wrong I love Linux.. I have been using it for the last 12 years (switched to Ubuntu recently) While it's amazingly easy and smooth on my rpi4 (for my personnal use). It can be boringly complicated on some laptop brands
Likes it
I work in Deep Learning and I have been using Pop OS entirely for more than one year now. The experience is really good. It is not too polished and not too barebones. And it is extremely reliable which, in my personal experience, matched by only Linux Mint. I use an high-end Asus TUF series laptop. And my experience with the laptop + OS is really good.
Likes itDoesn’t say they own it
That's some crazy powerful hardware, and would be a significant upgrade for most people. My main and only laptop (apart from some ancient ones) has a quadcore i5-8350U and 8GB RAM. (I kind of want to upgrade its RAM though) I also have a PC, that I upgraded to a Ryzen 7 5800 and 32GB RAM recently, but a few months ago it was an i7-4790K with 8GB RAM. Sure, 8GB RAM is quite little, but it's still within the mainstream. In laptops quad-core CPUs also only became mainstream in the last few years, let alone more than that. FWIW, I don't have any real performance issues with Jetbrains IDEs on either of my machines, but I don't use them much either as I don't like the convoluted user interface.
Likes itDoesn’t say they own it
(another disposable account), I see a lot of MSI and Asus gaming laptops with good specs and reasonable pricing. The Asus TUF series has some of those cheap but good laptops. Also, Gigabyte gaming laptops have good specs, pricing. Regarding the discrete GPU, I actually don't know if you can remove it from budget gaming laptops, I'd think you usually can't, but there are some expensive Alienware gaming laptops which I think could allow this. As it was mentioned, the brightness could be a pain point, I'd double check about it in notebookcheck (the site).