Linux

My friend had an older MSI gaming laptop and it was built like SHIT. He didn't use it a whole lot until he started working at our company and it lasted maybe 4 years of reasonable daily use. Physically it was fine because he never actually touched the laptop. But that thing was so incredibly unstable and eventually ended with it's M.2 and it's internal sata slots being unusable, and making the machine take 5 minutes to boot.

I also bought two MSI "business" laptops and those things were absolute junk too. The touch panel came from the factory broken. Thankfully nobody wants to use that shit so we just disabled. But my co worker dropped one the other day and we need to replace the whole display assembly but I can't for the life of me find parts for the machine. After about two weeks of searching my only options were A. a whole ass laptop for $500 (thankfully they depreciate lick a rock) or B. A complete display assembly for $375. No thanks, we're replacing those pieces of shit.

Unless you want to game on it save yourself the suffering and just get a used thinkpad. The T14 gen 1 goes for $200 easily and it's quadcore CPU is sufficient, and you can find it with the 6 core. I bought a T14 s gen 2 AMD for $300 and it's 6 core blows that T14 out of the water and gets far better battery life, plus it's iGPU ain't no slouch. (All prices USD, can will probably be higher)

Side note are there any good hardware swap communities on lemmy? I have a number of old machines I need to get rid of.

If you can do Intel WiFi you'll have a nicer time, check it

Honestly build quality matters more than specs if you're not gaming in my opinion, that's why old thinkpads are so popular

I personally got burned by a shitty modern laptop because I only looked at the specs and nothing else

I'm talking about things like:

• chassis sturdiness
• laptop foot grippiness
• hinge quality
• touchpad quality/has trackpoint
• battery longevity (very important)
• display colour accuracy/viewing angles
• keyboard tactility/travel/flex

These things are harder to research but they're imo way more important than specs

I have the b5dd model (with the 5600h processor) and linux support is good. Just find out what is the make and model of the wifi card. B55D came with a mediatek card which had problems with older kernels.

Build quality is average at best and it is fairly heavy but when you are going for a budget laptop, you have to sacrifice something. As another commenter said, if you are not gaming or video editing, you could go for different model with a smaller footprint, and better build.

I haven’t worked on this particular model, but gaming laptop build quality is generally very bad.

Msi build quality is also generally pretty bad.

With that said, most people don’t need build quality because they don’t actually take their computers anywhere.

I have an MSI Bravo 17 for work since this month,
quite happy about it so far.

My experience with MSI is best price/value for hardware specs, but with shitty build quality.

However this one feels quite sturdy compared to earlier MSI laptops.

It can get loud under heavy duty,
but it goes quiet again under low workload,
for now at least, my previous MSI laptop sounded like a jet engine whenever it was powered on.

The one you posted seems particularly suited to run Linux upon, since it's an all AMD machine, and their Linux support is great.

My husband has had an MSI bravo for a few years. Uses it constantly, and it's great. No issues outta it whatsoever. However, he does not use Linux on it. He prefers to dual boot and the SSD is a little small for that (if you also want to install games).

Lemmys will see this and say hell yeah

If it's a steal, buy it and try it. Worst case, you could turn a small profit by reselling it.

The CPU is a pretty good one, the GPU is on the weaker side. You can run plenty of games on it, but AAA games wont run very well. This thing isnt very old and AMD GPUs are well supported by linux drivers so there shouldnt be an issue there.

Even a potato can run Linux so regardless of a distro it should be all fine.