Which laptop maker makes the best laptops?

[Cromulent]

I'm looking to get a cheap gaming laptop but I'm confused about all the available choices. I don't mind paying a premium for a well regarded brand.

Can someone recommend a brand to go with? I'd like to be able to run Linux on it as well.

 

[Cromulent]

Lenovo

I know nothing about Linux so can not comment on that

Thank you. I was looking at Lenovo so that is good news.

 

[Cromulent]

One advantage of buying from Lenovo is that you can spec the laptop without Windows and save (usually) £90.
But you need to define 'cheap', especially when you initially ask for 'best'.

Thank you. Yes I saw that when I was playing around with the configurator.

I'd ideally like to be around the £1k to £1.5k mark in terms of budget. Nearer to £1k would be best.

 

[Cromulent]

I just bought my wife a ASUS TUF A16 Advantage Edition.
Comes with a AMD 7735 and a 7600S GPU, with 16GB RAM.

I was lucky, and bought it from CEX in my town. Spotted it for £605, which as it is basically brand new, was a great price.
I then found out why it was sold to CEX, when it was only 4 months old. Turns out the MediaTek WIFI card was defective. Kept vanishing from the hardware list.
CEX simply offered a refund. However, for £15 on Amazon, an AX210 Wifi card fixed it.

What I'm getting at, is have a look at shops like CEX, see if they have any decent bargains. After all, new this laptop I got is still just shy of £1000. You might find a bargain

Thank you. I'm still umming and arrring about getting a PC laptop as I'm not a major gamer but it would help with certain specialist software.

 

[Cromulent]

As others have said, Lenovo make good stuff.

I've got the previous gen Legion 5 Pro with a 5800H and 3070 and it's a great system.

As for Linux, do you know what distro you want already?

I put Nobara on my Legion 5 Pro as it came pre-installed with Nvidia drivers and I was already familiar with Fedora. I run Fedora KDE on my desktop (AMD GPU) and as you'd expect given Nobara is a fork of Fedora they're basically identical once setup. Pop_OS! is another popular one for out of the box compatibility with Nvidia GPUs if you can stomach Gnome. If you get a laptop with an AMD GPU, run a few from a USB stick and then install whichever distro takes your fancy.

Any questions on the Linux front just @ me.

I normally use OpenSUSE Tumbleweed as my distro of choice.

I'm still undecided about whether I should go for it or not as I don't game as much these days as I used to.