Laptop Upgrade

For the past couple of weeks I've been considering buying a new laptop. My daily driver has been a MacBook Pro with a M1 Pro and 16GiB of memory. It's a good machine, but the RAM is limiting and I've been wanting to fully move to Linux. I tried Asahi on it for awhile, and while the project is incredibly impressive, there's little things that make it not so suitable for me.

While I was looking at a Framework 13 or the upcoming Thinkpad T14 Gen7, the price of RAM made my eyes water. Thankfully I had one other option, a laptop I bought a few years ago that I barely use, the System76 Pang12.

I bought this computer as a previous attempt to move to Linux, but honestly, the hardware was just plain bad. Terrible webcam, inconsistent trackpad and an awful screen. The webcam isn't a huge deal, I'm not using the computer for my day job, and the trackpad is solved with a mouse. But the screen was a deal breaker. 1080p, washed out and horrible brightness.

But that got me thinking, can I replace it with a better panel? With a little research on Gemini and Panelook.com, I found a suitable replacement that matched the connector and exact dimensions of the factory LCD. $76 later and 15 minutes of install and this laptop is running a beautiful 2560x1440 165Hz display! The color is great, brightness feels a lot better, and it's just overall a joy to use now! And while this computer doesn't have the top end specs, it's Ryzen 7 6800U and 32GiB of RAM are more than enough.