12 Years ago I had a Sony Vaio. I quite liked it. Then in my next job, 2017 or so, I went for a Toshiba Portege, and absolutely loved it.
Guess what the above two have in common? Yup, they stopped making laptops for the professional market. So now I'm a bit at a loss. Any recommendations?
Requirements:
Lightweight and easy to carry around.
13-15" display, preferably
Decent battery life
It absolutely must have an RJ45
Works well with linux
Good keyboard quality
ISO keyboard availability
Touchpad. Bonus points if it has the touchpad buttons ABOVE the pad itself.
I can't really fault that logic. I like the keyboard, the screen, any many other things with them. It's just some minor annoyances with some of the Fn keycombos that I don't like.
But one thing that I can say for sure: It will never be as durable as my Toshiba. It fell between two ships decks. It slid off the roof of a car and syraight into asphalt. It has pieces missing from it. The RJ45 port has been torn out of the mainboard. But it still works, and I bought it out for 50$ when I left my previous employer, and I still use it from time to time to this day.
Actually, I thought dells were shit computers, then I started working at a place that only deals in Dell. I'm actually pretty impressed after having used a 5300. It's been a pretty solid choice except for the battery.
I work help desk, and I'm actually surprised we don't get more issue tickets considering it's a global company.
Dells are great until they break. Ever seen an HDD taped the the top side of a motherboard? I hadn't until I was working on a dell Inspiron. Also, their drivers are usually the biggest pain in the ass to load.
That being said, I had a D620 latitude in college with a 9 cell battery, and that thing would handle all my classes for the day on a single charge. It was also much sturdier than the Toshiba Satellite M505D I switched to.