Hardware recommendations for supercollider as a livecoding instrument?

Questions
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Hello,

I am interested in a (cheap, light yet reasonably powerful) laptop/device to run SuperCollider on. I’d like to use a Linux distribution for it and, since I’ll also carry a 15inch OSX laptop, it should be lightweight.
My intended use would be

Laptop (SuperCollider) ← connected via ADAT / ETH / DANTE → Laptop (OSX, Reaper)

I was looking at lenovo ideabooks but got taken aback by them using android as OS…

does anyone have recommendations and general ideas?

thanks in advance :slight_smile:

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You can always blow away the pre-installed OS when installing Linux. I did this with my last laptop and never regretted it (though the pre-installed OS was Windows, meaning that some of the purchase price went to Microslop, perhaps I’d avoid that next time).

I’m not a hardware buff, and haven’t been following the market lately, but… my current laptop is a ThinkBook 14" from 2022, with a bit of discount from the shop I paid about US$750. It’s thin, and the lightest laptop I ever owned. My live coding setup launches with 3 reverbs which run about 7-8% CPU time in performance mode (maybe a bit less), and my sets usually run around 20-30% and max out around 40, 45, maybe 50%, no audible glitches – and that’s without parallelizing in supernova. That is, an unexceptional, off-the-shelf laptop (it is not by any means a high performance gaming rig) has more than enough power for what I’m doing in SC. (Admittedly that (today) doesn’t include running neural net synthesis…)

… which is a way of saying, maybe not necessary to worry about it too much.

But do pay attention to hardware support for Linux. I’ve had good luck with a string of Lenovo machines. Only one of them required a proprietary WiFi driver; all the others including the current one “just worked.”

Next time I’m looking for a laptop, I will consider hardware support for running machine learning models locally (because fork Sam and Dario, I will not pay a dime to either of them). I really like my current machine but suspect it’s underpowered for that use case.

hjh

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another thing you could look for (re hardware support) is whether the manufacturer gets “hardware certified” by canonical (ubuntu) for comparable models from the same time frame. You don’t need to get that particular model (or use ubuntu), but I assume they wouldn’t use a special wifi chip just to get it “certified” - meaning the same chip for which linux drivers exist will likely be in most if not all simultaneously produced laptops by that manufacturer…

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