Quiet dual‑boot Linux laptop advice?

[u/djoos007]

Hi all,

I’m looking for a new laptop that I’ll use mainly for Linux with Windows 11 on the side for occasional stuff. I don’t game, no 3D, nothing heavy. Just some light photo editing, and now and then a small video edit. The rest is the usual: multitasking, browser, Office, a bit of development, some VM’s and text LLM work.

This laptop will replace my desktops and run with an external screen. I work almost always at home, so silence matters more than weight.

I’m trying to figure out what hardware actually makes sense for my use. Things like dual NVMe, dGPU or not, Coreboot, and what kind of CPU is worth it? Also curious whether a commercial brand or a Linux‑focused machine.

Any advice on CPU, storage, iGPU/dGPU, firmware and thermals is welcome.

Thanks!

[u/sarinkhan]

The best laptop I ever had, like since I have laptops, is my framework 16. You can have 2 SSDs in it, once for each of if you want. You can configure it however you want. You can have the ports you want. If you don't want a egpu, you can have none, or you can have a bay that holds 2 more SSDs. Or you can add whatever nvme devices in it (TPU as an example).

Linux support is perfect, and obviously it also works on windows.

Only issue: they are expensive. But you can repair them endlessly, upgrade them, replace every part.

They support egpus and the like, most have usb4 ports, some tb4, perhaps TB5.

Everything on the laptops works without any effort from me on linux, and I get firmware updates offered on my linux desktop. I click "update" and it does it.

However I dont think the bios is open source, not coreboot. However the keyboard, the macropad and a few stuff are open source zmk firmwares.

[u/Keyvan_KR]

Ideally AMD or Intel hardware , nvidia has a higher penalty. For dual booting, you should have two different drives (windows sometimes fucks up the boot loader with updates).
Core boot/libreboot is a philosophical choice.
Since you don’t game, you don’t need a crazy dGPU. So integrated graphics should be ok. Just make sure it has AV1 decoding. The gpu should also have a NPU for LLM acceleration. This limits it mostly to modern cpu generations.

I’d go with a laptop series that makes it easy to get spare parts for should you want to repair. Dell latitude (the business line up) is good. If you can spend more money, go for the framework laptop. The upfront cost is higher but you have more upgrade and repair flexibility

[u/Assang101]

I wouldn't even try to dualboot from one NVMe, due to Windows assuming it is the only os on the drive. During major system updates, it routinely overwrites the MBR or the shared EFI ESP, rendering the other operating system unbootable.

Better option is to have one NVMe for windows and another for Linux. Using two separate drives for dual-booting eliminates the primary risks of operating system conflict by physically isolating their boot data and system files.

Just go into your BIOS setting and disable fast boot AND disable fast start up.Ensure your system is set to boot strictly in UEFI mode rather than Legacy/CSM mode to ensure smooth multi-drive enumeration.

As you may NOT know, physically disconnecting or disabling your existing OS drive while installing the second operating system stops the installer from overwriting your existing bootloader or placing the new EFI system partition on the wrong drive. So be careful