Dell Latitude 7490

0. Developer 1. Dell Latitude 7490 2. As long as I can. I think I've been on the Latutude for about 4 years now, but it's a second-hand device coming up on seven or eight years old. I generally don't need much oomph for the stuff I like to do at home (I don't game for example). I had a series of XPS laptops, but the battery life in use was poor and they tended to need the battery replacing quite quickly (puffy batteries - possibly because they run quite hot). Prior to that I'd been on second hand Thinkpads, with the X220s still kicking around somewhere in case the main device dies. I reckon the current Dell has at least a couple more years in it for my purposes. It has 64Gb ram so until website bloat gets out of control I'm good I think. I have a fairly fast mini-pc with oodles of ram on the network that I use as a sacrificial yolo machine for Claude, and an elderly desktop machine with a decent GPU for local running of LLMs. The latter is noisy and in practice it hasn't been turned on for months. I hate Macs, but envy you the battery life and spiffy Arm CPU (yes, I know about Asahi, but until one can safely entirely wipe MacOS from the Mac I'm not interested).

I think the Linux thing is machine dependent. I used a Dell Latitude something-or-other (7490? idk) for about 3 years, but it was the version that shipped with Ubuntu. Rock solid on Slack, and Teams mostly just had company-wide issues for us. But my colleague with the same model laptop and same Ubuntu version had no end to trouble with both Slack and Teams - turns out, the Windows version of the laptop had different internals and it struggled mightily. It was mostly GPU issues. Just thought that was interesting, mine is probably not a useful anecdote.

I was issued an equivalent Latitude 7490 at a gig in 2019 and enjoyed using it (under Linux). It's robust and easily upgraded, but a little heavier than I would like. I replaced the battery a year or two ago. I generally haven't had much trouble with second hand Dell and Thinkpad machines; perhaps buying second hand means that the real lemons are already ewaste? Though the XPS machines bought new were fine aside from the annoyingly brief battery life. Currently using a Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 13 under Linux for work stuff and I like that (much lighter) so if I can get one second hand with enough memory I might choose that when/if the Dell eventually feels too slow.

This happened exactly to me also, I suspect some flexing in the motherboard or other component; right now it is complaining about the RAM and reseating hasn’t fixed it. Great laptop otherwise however!

My personal laptop is a Dell 7490 running Ubuntu. It's from around 2019 and the cpu is the i7-8650. The ram and nvme card are replaceable so it currently has 64G and 2TB respectively. In this configuration it's very pleasant to use and I see no compelling reason to move to a newer machine. Parts or entire replacements are cheap. I think if you want to run Windows it might be more painful as the upgrade treadmill might force you to a place where drivers are no longer available. Battery life is poor compared to a Mac but about average for a PC (I've replaced the battery once so far though).

I have a 7490 that I adore - upgraded ram to 64G and it runs very nicely. The speaker volume being a bit low is the only negative I'd mention.

I have a Dell Latitude 7490 (2019), bought secondhand from ebay. Works great for me, but I put Linux on it and I've been able to trim it down to only the essentials (Alpine Linux with Sway). Barely warm and the screen is 157dpi so nice enough for text. If you're going with Windows, you can have much more recent hardware with no worry about compatibility (I'd take the Surface for the 3:2 screen ratio). But these days, I tend to use a desktop as I'm spending most of my time on my desk with a good keyboard and a nice 4k 24" screen (I ssh from the laptop when I'm on the couch).

I bought a Dell Latitude 7490 refurbished from the Dell Outlet a few years ago for < $1k and it suited my needs. I’m not sure what the newest Latitudes are like but the one I bought had the following qualities: 1. Installed Ubuntu on it, never had any driver issues 2. Keyboard was pretty nice 3. Screen wasn’t very good, although I did appreciate it having a matte finish. Not in the same ballpark as a MacBook screen.

Thinkpads have already been mentioned but I also highly recommend the Dell Latitude, especially the 7490. They have fantastic keyboards, great battery life, and absolutely amazing displays (among the best 1920x1080 displays I have seen on a laptop). Plus they run many Linux distributions out of the box with minimal configuration. If you live in the US or Europe I'd recommend the US/UK Dell Outlet. You can get a Dell Latitude in great condition (often like-new condition) for a nice deal, especially when they have their laptop promotions. I've had a good experience with their onsite service as well.