Advice needed. I’m in dubio. Acer Nitro 5 or Lenovo ThinkPad Edge E580
12GB mem or 32GB mem. NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti of Intel UHD620. Intel Core i7-8750H-6-core or Intel Quad Core i7-8550U Processor. Since I’m no gamer on linux (I use the Nintendo Switch) I guess I don’t need the nvidia card. The difference between the two i7 processors? Will it have much effect? The price difference is minimal. Any advice is highly appreciated.
What networking hardware? Either of them have Broadcom Ethernet that may cause trouble?
Lenovo - Realtek RTL8822BE, Wi-Fi 2x2 802.11ac + BT4.1, M.2 card
The Acer Nitro 5 does not mention the chipset. Only Wireless Compability 802.11.ac
On their driver site they have two wifi drivers: one for atheros and one for intel, so I guess it’s not broadcomm
As you can see, the 8750 is a six core processor while the 8550 is a quad (4) core processor. The more cores a processor has, the more quicker and powerful is its capabilities. Also, the 8750 is newer, probably an 8th generation series that just started entering the market in the last part of last year.
Hopes this helps a little.
The above references may be too technical, but it will give you an idea of the capabilities between the two processors.
Hm. There’s a big difference between the two processors. Not only in speed but also in onboard graphics. I’m a little scared though for having a Nvidia card because I read a lot of stories about getting them to work properly in Linux.
That Nvidia the shared graphics that will require bumblebee? That always seems to cause headaches.
So the Lenovo is quad core, 32GB RAM, Intel graphics and realtek? That should work out of the box, and I tend to favor more RAM over cores. Unless you’re doing some serious number crunching and need 6 cores.
Yep , also Thinkpads are usually good with Linux.
https://www.lenovo.com/au/en/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpad-edge/ThinkPad-E580/p/22TP2TEE580
Edit: I would have at the very least 16GB RAM as Linux tends to being bloat as times go by.
It probably depends on what you do on your computer, but Linux is way less bloated than Windows (and especially AL 
)
I have a Thinkpad T460 as a daily driver (i5 dual core), and so far I have no issue at all on it.
Since you do not intend to play on this laptop, I would go with the Thinkpad, because it’s cooler 
, will works probably better with linux out of the box and (just guessing here) you can probably expect a better battery life on it.
True @gazeka74 , but if one has some installs on the harddisk one would need more RAM I guess & also depending on the distro.
Edit; looks like a nice machine you have in there. & added stuff
And that’s where it depends on your usage
If the OP wants to launch several chrome, plus libreoffice, plus spotify, plus whatever electron_ressource_heavy app, plus Gnome/KDE; having more ram would be useful.
On the other hands, if the OP only wants to launch a web browser on top of openbox and that’s it, 16go will be overkill.
So far, I don’t miss the 16go of my old laptop, 8 are plenty for me. But every one is unique, so what do I know ?
lol, you bet @gazeka74
On 8GB on my maine install & sometimes I would like to have 16GB, might be a plan for this year.But it s a way lesser lappy than yours, so guess it makes for a difference in most cases.
At the moment I’m happy with Arch/i3 or ArchLabs/openbox running on a i3 with 8G of ram. But this laptop gets old and some parts don’t function so well anymore. I don’t game but I like to play a lot with VMs. That’s where the memory hunger comes in. Normally 16G would be more than enough but I don’t buy new machines that often so I thought “o well. Let’s go for 32G” That way I’ll be sure to have enough. I also like Lenovo laptops. So I guess my choice is made. Thanks guys for your thoughts.
Like @sevenday4 has said, I’d go for as much processing speed as you can afford. Memory is a secondary consideration… I’ve got 20gigs installed and rarely consume 4.
However…
You’re not a gamer, either of these boxes will be fast… I agree with @PackRat, go with what’s going to work ootb.
I’d go Acer personally, owned multiple of their Aspire line and never any issues regarding hardware compatibility and their laptop BIOS’ are far from the worst.
No real statement on the lenovo as I’ve never owned one, most people lately complain about thinkpads not being up to the standards set by the old ibm models.
16G is nice, and what I’d recommend. Realistically if you don’t game/video edit on it, 8G is still plenty for the average user doing average things. Anything more than 16 is a complete waste and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise, even when rendering video, giving it all the ram in the world will only get you very marginal gains over the standard of 16.
Hope that all helps a bit, cheers.
Your advice helps. Thanks. I’m still afraid though of the NVidia card. There are so often issues in Linux with Nvidia / kernel / drivers. Any insight on that?
I personally run nvidia cards and haven’t really had issues, though I don’t use optimus or any of that mess.
Looking at their product listings for the nitro series and it seems all of them use a mixed gpu solution rather than opting to use just one, I know you can get this working with a bit of configuration.
They also have a few AMD based models if that’s more up your alley
Looking at the thinkpad and it seems largely compatible as well, possible AMD graphics, and realtek wireless (RTL8822BE) which shouldn’t have any wifi issues. It does look a bit more expensive (paying for the name)
Are you planning on using it for gaming/rendering?
No gaming. No rendering. The latter I do on my iPad Pro.
It’s actually sad how difficult it is to find a decently spec’d laptop without optimus crammed in there 
In this case I would try looking around for models with just the intel integrated graphics.
You’ll save some $$ and should be able to throw that back in to something else as an upgrade or just have a little extra cash in your pocket.