Dell Latitude 7390

I used to drive three external displays (3x24", 1920x1200@60hz) on my almost four years old dell latitude 7390, using the integrated intel uhd 620 chip. it's incredible that a modern macbook costing likely twice as my old work laptop (the latitude 7390) can only do so little... Oh and the latitude had a ton of ports.

7390s have been sub $200 on ebay for the last year or more. They are circa 2019. Great machine, I'm looking for a replacement currently but the new latitudes have moved the power button onto the keyboard and removed the touchpad buttons.

I think it depends. For me, fanless is super appealing. However, I have a Dell XPS 13 7390 with a i7-10710U where the fan is at 0 RPM most of the time I use it, and that is super satisfying to me. However, during a big compile, the fan does come on, sometimes it comes on at a high speed. But then, within about 30s to 1 minute, it goes back down to 0 RPM. I'm pretty happy with this, even though I love even more the idea of a computer that didn't even need a fan.

I've had really good luck with the one generation old relatively up-market Dells - their consumer products tend to be mediocre, but the Latitudes and Precisions are typically good hardware ... look for Dells that start with a "7". My little 12-13" class carryin' around laptops for the last many years have been a first-party refurbished Latitude E7250 succeeded by a similarly refurb Latitude 7390. Replacement after not quite 5 years because I finally got a tiny hairline crack in the LCD that caused some discoloration in the corner of the screen, from a hit that would have bent the corner of an aluminum chassis machine, and it was starting to struggle with running video conferencing at the same time as my usual workloads. First party refurb meaning https://www.dellrefurbished.com/ - It's a joint venture by FedEx and Dell, stock is "whatever they have right now" but there are always machines coming through, and there are usually coupons that make it even cheaper, so pick what you want and watch for a few weeks if you can. As you note, going for a generation old machine not only gives time for the hardware support to settle out, it makes it _much_ cheaper: Both of those were around $500 for examples optioned up to 1920x1080 screens, the newer one has 16GB of RAM in it, etc., and I kind of prefer that the machine I carry around day-to-day isn't something I have to be super precious about. In the two example cases, everything _except_ a Broadcom smartcard reader that I don't ha

i don't play videogames and i don't do ai/ml, video editing or whatever. i spend most of my time in firefox and in terminals. i do use virtual machines quite a lot to test stuff around, so high cores count and high memory would be a plus for me. but an nvidia gpu is a deal breaker for me. I just don't want it. I don't need it, i don't use it, it just makes the whole thing less usable. and it draws a lot power that i'd prefer using otherwise. the intel integrated gpu is not only sufficient for me, i actually WANT it. it just works under gnu/linux and i don't have to mess with drivers. I cannot stress enough how much i hate having to deal with proprietary drivers. and last time i played a videogame, it was openarena, and it ran beautifully on the intel hd 600 my work laptop had (dell latitude 7390, great little machine). edit: regarding amd gpus... i'm not sure. i've been told they work with open source drivers, but still it's a power usage i would happily avoid.

I voted for the Dell XPS, but really wanted to vote for the Dell Latitude. I recently upgraded to a refurbished 8th gen (KBL, top of the line i7 model with NVMe and Thunderbolt) Latitude 7390, and everything "just works", including BIOS updates via LVFS/fwupd with only a few days lag over the announcement on Dell's site. With this level of support I finally feel like a first class citizen running Linux. Oh, and it has a proper selection of ports, including wired LAN.

I have a dell latitude 7390 from work and it's an amazing little machine. it's basically an dell xps13 but with all the ports you might need, and ram and disk that you can upgrade. that machine really made me change my opinion about dell as a laptop vendor: you mostly have to look at the latitude line and you'll find sturdy and boring laptops that you can count on (without the flashy fancy things that are basically impossible to fix/replace if/when they break). If only the latitude 7390 had the trackpoint... I'd throw my old thinkpad in the trashcan and I'd buy an identical unit for myself.

I've got an ikea desk (180x90 cm), a random ikea office chair that i stol... loaned from one of the previous houses where I rented back when I was a student, a three-armed monitor stand and three 24" 1920x1200 lcd displays (randomly bought, hunted for the price not the brand -- a dell one, an hp one and a lenovo one). The desk is spacious enough to accomodate both my tiny work laptop (13" dell latitude 7390, an exceptional machine), the displays and random stuff. I use Sony MDR770 bletooth heaphones (but i always have problems with microphone audio). I am fairly satisfied with this setup, except for the headphones. They're fine for listening, but have problem when I have to partecipate to meetings. I'm not very picky except for displays: 16:10 or nothing. 1920x1200 is way way way better than 1920x1080.

I've been given a Dell Latitude 7390 at work and I think it's awesome. Basically, it has a full array of ports (Thunderbolt/USB-C, USB-A, microphone jack, an eff-ing ethernet port, hdmi, smartcard, sim and micro-sd), thin bezels (it looks like a 12" but it has a 13" display), a good display, 60WHr battery, a good enough keyboard and it's well supported by GNU/Linux (basically, only the fingerprint reader and nfc don't work). Mine is configured with a quad-core 8th gen Core i7 and 16GB ram. The fun thing is, my colleague sitting at my left has a 13" macbook, and I often hear his laptop fans spin up (from the distance!). OTOH, my laptop fans have basically never spun up. If only it had the trackpoint it could easily get me to abandon the ThinkPad altogether.