I purchased in if the “factory second” 13 inch units. I’ve been pleased with it. I’m not a gamer, and my primary needs are for writing. Sadly, due to age (mine not the computer) I need to plan some changes, so I’m looking for an upgrade path. Ideally, I’d like to stay with the 13 inch. It is easy to haul around and I’ve already bought the chassis.
My primary concern is eye strain. In your opinion must i move to a 16 in or would the better screens resolve eye strain?
I’m also looking toward upgrading the motherboard. Am I correct in understanding the AMD MB is better than the Intel? I’ll be adding RAM and maybe an external GPU for home office uses. If you have suggestions for a dock for using a larger screen in the office that would be helpful.
Thank you in advance.
Oops, almost forgot, my current OS is Ubuntu with Gnome.
In my opinion, the matte display is far more easy on the eyes, indoors and outdoors, than the oldest glossy display. I do not have the newest one with the rounded corners to compare to though. Wayland / Hyprland do not seem to have fractional scaling issues (though pure Qt and GTK apps can be hilariously inconsistent on scaling issues), so I need neither the resolution nor the refresh rate of the latest screen. I wouldn’t mind having the extra 100 nits of brightness in the latest screen, though, for sure.
Intel vs AMD, “better” is very subjective there I think, so I’ll stay out of that.
I have both a Sonnet 550 and a Razer Core eGPU shells. Both have worked just fine with Intel Mainboards, Arch Linux in kernels from very late 5.x.y up to today’s 6.10.y, an older Nvidia card, and closed source Nvidia drivers. Well, there have been a couple of nasty bugs in those drivers that took some time to get fixed, but that’s not the eGPU cases’ fault at all. Performance is definitely better than iGPU, but with anything close to a modern card the physical TB / USB / PCI lanes bandwidth to the card will be the limiting factor.
