Which laptop should I install Gentoo on ?

[LegionOfHell]

I have two laptops:

[389292]

Sell Dell Latitude E6440 and leave better system for yourself, why would you do it the other way around??

[LegionOfHell]

(1) The Inspiron does not have a dock, the E6440 does. This allows me to use the laptop both as a desktop replacement and a laptop.
(2) The Inspiron is heavier and less portable than the E6440.
(3) The E6440 has superior keyboard and touchpad.
(4) The E6440 is designed better, easily repairable, upgradeable and cleanable....The laptop parts can be bought for cheap online. applying the thermal paste is much easier. With the Inspiron, you have to disassemble the whole unit in order to
get to the CPU and heatsink and there is the risk of damaging different parts..
(5) The Inspiron is an Optimus laptop which is not well supported (yet?)
(6) The Inspiron is significantly more expensive. I could earn somewhere between 900-1100$ CDN dollars by selling it...and save it for later use ? with 900 bucks I could buy 3 E6440's!!!

So yeah, while the Inspiron is the better laptop performance wise, I wanna know if Gentoo is doable on the E6440(Since My Gentoo setup is very minimal) and given the packages I want to install(Xorg + bspwm + Urxvt + vim + zathura + portable firefox), my E6440 setup will run 90% as smooth as the Inspiron. If true, I will end up selling the Inspiron, that could earn me some cash and also get rid of the trouble of managing two systems!!

[tiggy]

I don't think I am willing to weigh in on the choice, but I do have a similarly specd lattitude e5540 (16GB ram, 850 pro, except my i7 is vpro and has half the cores ) as well as a 5530 and they both work great with gentoo (minimal builds, dwm etc.). I have generally found both of them to be easy to work with as well, both hardware and software. That being said I have not tried the dock yet, even though I have a few laying around, but I'd assume it works fine because there is a specific kernel option for it, though I suspect it is not enabled in the default gentoo config - someting to keep in mind.

If you would like to stay tuned for me to try the dock real quick that wouldn't be a problem for me. I just finished finals for uni and have much more time on my hands.

Just curious, does your lattitude have 2 mSATA ports or are you repurposing the CD bay? I think some CD bay sata ports are only sata1 which could hit performance but I could be wrong.

Also you could probably get away with -j8 on your e6440. Someone may disagree but I have -j8 on an 8GB build and I've only had problems with ungoogled-chromium and i think mupdf or zathura-mupdf. Just remember to lower the makeopts if a build fails first because I spent way too much time for my pride to admit trying to figure that out before I remembered I set j8 (or give it >~4GB of swap). If this is your first time installing gentoo and you have an intel wifi card, as I suspect you do, my advice would be to follow the guide for linux-firmware for intel wifi (iwlwifi) chips before you leave the liveboot environment. I believe it says its optional but not having internet makes it tough to download the firmware for getting internet (lol) if you don't have ethernet handy. Could save you some time. Also, if build times really become an issue look into ccache or getting the binary version of firefox that is already in the default gentoo repos.

Another thing to note is you probably could only get ~200 dollars(US) for that e6440 at this point if you tried to sell that instead, even with upgrades. Laptops just don't hold their values. I sold around 10 of those things around 4 years ago and couldn't get rid of them for anything over 400 and they were new (open box). So maybe a faster processor isnt worth the money you could get for your inspiron.

--- Edit
Just noticed you have >250 posts so my advice may not be much advice lol.
---Edit 2
I've also answered some of my other questions by rereading your post... just use this as a yeah it works well on Latitude.
--- The dock also works fine out of the box with just the option enabled in the kernel.

[LegionOfHell]

[charles17]