OOP is a senior engineer at Red Hat. I guess the bread is good

Yeah, a useful Ryzen AI Max is also some 6 k$ which is also wildly out of budget for a tinkerbox.

With discounts I was able to price one of Lenovo's at CAD 7K (USD 5K). I haven't had a new laptop in 9 years, with the last being a $2K Yoga in 2017.

I play games, home lab, and really want to take a deeper dive in to local LLM's. If it were to last me 9 years again, I could maybe reason through it as a huge treat to myself. It's tempting but in the end I can never justify pulling the trigger.

But I also want to main Linux. Gaming on ARM is progressing thanks to FEX but not a guarantee, and as evidenced by the write up there are a lot of workarounds to get Linux going. I'd worry that too much time would be spent tinkering with just getting/keeping the laptop running rather than doing the stuff that I want on it.