askchapo

Thinkpad T series or P series. Latest T series isvery repairable with official ifixit guides, compoennts will be produced 15+ years from now on, arguably the less shittier laptop of them all

It depends on your price range and how much will you're willing to go up to, you can try a premium ultrabook like a framework 13 which should be able to play rdr2 which goes for around $1350+.

You can also get a second hand macbook (m1 or m2) which can do all your needs extremely well (though the wants are are severely lacking minus any linux that you put onto it). These macbooks should be good for about 5-8 years at least and can be found under $1000 (I got a fully specced macbook air m1 in mint condition for 750).

Otherwise you can go with the big box option of a mid-range thinkpad from 3-4 years ago, not going to do your want but its the cheapest option.

Don't recommend going for a "gaming" laptop as those are riddled with invasive BIOSes, poor heat management, very low battery life and also weight issues. If you want to play demanding 3D games just get a steam deck separately.

If you're concerned about AI running in the system you should delete Windows from the computer before ever logging in.

The "Ryzen AI" brand is just what AMD decided to call their current lineup of CPUs, they are all called that and it doesn't really mean much or guarantee that you can run a model locally.

used thinkpad

could play RDR2 or some equivalent

So a gaming laptop?

You could try finding a gaming laptop with a dedicated AMD graphics card. AMD's drivers are open source, so their devices work much better with Linux than NVIDIA's, in case you want to install Linux (you can even buy Lenovo laptops with Linux preinstalled, at a reduced price for some reason, but maybe not the gaming models). You can play a lot of Windows games on Linux, but you can also always dual boot and use Windows when you want to play a game (I do this with a desktop computer, a bit of a PITA though, and might be more of one if the laptop BIOS user interface is clunky).

from an IT/help desk perspective, i don't like Macs. But their battery life is so much better than the Thinkpads at my job. If you buy a used Macbook, look to see if the seller lists how many cycles the battery has gone through. Its also something you can find in the settings.

i have a Legion 15ach6 that has a RTX 3050 ti, which would probably manage to run RDR2 but it might not look great.

Thinkpad

Windows/Mac/Linux?

Any refurbished business class laptop. All the stuff made for the personal home market is garbage.

I recommend macbook air with m4. Great battery life and portability. Not too expensive etc. Can be used for lightweight development (anything not using too much docker essentially), unless you need reverse debugging. Well supported compared to Linux laptops in general. Then you can get a base model gabecube later for your gamés.

Edit: Deleted because my recommendation was on the BDS list

I love lenovo laptops, but IMO only buy from them during their big annual sale (I believe it happens around this time each year) and avoid the "businessman" lines (like x1 carbon). I had an e220s (thinkpad) with a low wattage processor and it served dutifully for over 7 years (my older HPs, dells, etc only ever lasted around 3 years before shitting the bed). There may be other good options these days. If you are looking to spend $, I would get look for a professional "workstation" style notebook with discrete graphics rather than a gaming one. If you really need windows for work stuff, use massgrave to activate Win 10 LTSC for free

An m4 MacBook Air starts at a grand and will do what you’re asking, including rdr2 through parallels. I recommend upgrading to the 24gb of ram model especially with memory prices going through the roof and they havent raised prices despite the memory costing 4x as much as when the computer was launched.

Genuinely there is no better time to switch to a mac if you’re trying to escape ai and windows 11. There’s a virtual machine system built in that lets you run linux as a guest os and the skills you learn running linux and macos have a good amount of crossover.

You will also have enough horsepower to run old games from the teens and back in VMs and dos/3.1/95 exopacks are 1tb of classic gaming.

If you are gonna buy used then t series thinkpads and dell precision and latitude laptops are good. For maybe the first time in my life im gonna actually recommend you not do this though because the big platform laptop market is insanely clapped out right now.