The MALIBAL Aon S1

Ended my Search for the Best Linux (or Windows) Daily Driver

Those of you following me here know that I left the Apple Ecosystem in 2018 and have since used a Lenovo X1 Carbon, System76 Lemur Pro, and a Starlabs Starbook as my daily driver and also moved to the Pixel series of phones with either Calyx OS or GrapheneOS. While I have been a Linux user since the 90’s and thoroughly enjoyed coming back to it full-time for many reasons including the much welcomed greater compatibility between my desktops, servers, laptops, and phones, I find that the “hardware choices” left me a bit dis-satisfied. Admittedly, I am a bit spoiled and tend to ask for a lot. I want something thin and light (3 lbs. MAX) so that I can travel with it but also powerful enough to be plugged back in on my desk as my main desktop replacement outside of any hardcore compiling or rendering which will still be left to my real desktops. It sounds simple but it’s quite hard to attain. I literally do miss many aspects of my Macbook in that sense. So I would say while I thoroughly enjoyed all of the mentioned laptops and still think they are wonderful products, I am not sure if my next laptop was going to be a later revision of any of the above mentioned but yet, I also don’t see a lot of better choices out there.

Let’s start by listing where each of these laptops excel and also where they fall short so that we have a basis for comparison:

1. Lenovo X1 Carbon —Super light, solid build quality with a web cam shutter!, amazing classic Lenovo keyboard, and lasts forever. I mean forever. I still use it to this day in my home office workflow and testing. Nothing has broken except that I finally had to replace the 2018 battery last month. It’s literally the oldest member on my brigade other than my 2012 Macbook Air(which still runs btw). However, everything is soldered and lacks in the max ram department. I get it though. It’s supposed to be for business people and not resource hungry techies. While the battery was super durable, it’s not the biggest battery so running Linux means you don’t get that many hours with it on the road. The speaker on the 6th gen was also pretty horrible…