Linux

I wouldn't be worried about buying AMD in terms of thermals, their laptop CPUs are fine. Usually, it's the WiFi card that poses the biggest problem in terms of driver availability, in which case you can purchase an Intel WiFi card from Amazon for $15-$20. Battery and "optimizations" depend on your config and distro. Most plug-and-play distros should be fine OOTB, if you're setting up Arch from scratch I assume you don't have a problem in looking for drivers/compiling code.

Edit: I personally do not suggest that anyone buys a new laptop unless they do not have a choice (horrible used market or the like). There is a heavy mark-up on new devices and the used market in the West (especially in the US) is excellent if you're OK with fiddling with some parts of your laptop (or not - sometimes you don't even need to do that). But being in c/linux that's about granted, eh?

I saw some Reddit posts claiming AMD being not optimized for Linux particularly for arch related distros (I use EndeavourOS)

This is literally the other way around.

But in general it depends on the budget. Both Intel and AMD work perfectly on Linux. It's more about the CPUs themselves. AMD is better in the budget category because of much more capable iGPUs and performance/price ratio but Intel is better in high end because of simply better technological advancement (as long as you can keep the chip cooler than 90°C).

But if it keeps working for a long time, like 6+ years, then I don't mind investing.

I wouldn't be so optimistic about modern laptops, especially ones with dedicated GPUs. They don't live for more than 2-3 years without repairs.

Ryzen and AMD in general is perfect under linux, no configuration, just working out of the box on any debian/ubuntu derivatives. They are performant yet energy efficient in my experience so i really cant say anything bad about them.

if you want a hassle-free experience, go for a used Thinkpad a generation or two back, especially if you want Debian. if you buy a new Thinkpad, a) the software support isn't there yet and b) you're paying the corpo extortion tax for stuff you don't need (IME and friends).

as to Intel vs AMD, whatever you choose will do fine for the vast majority of use cases; even the 1st gen T14 meets your specs (6-core, 16 GB on-board) and those can be had for $200ish; even less if you're willing to tinker.

Honestly you're spoiled for choice when it comes to cpus, anything you're looking at should for the most part "just work" as long as it's within the last 3-8 generations of cpus (I'd recommend the last 2, since they significantly improved power efficiency and you're going for a laptop). What you'll mainly want to consider is linux support for the system devices (wifi, etc, etc) which you can Google per model and robustness of the device (which is slightly subjective, but a 1.1lbs 5mm thick whatever is generally less robust than say a ThinkPad).

Either or

Linux will likely work fine.

Any reason you need a new one? I just got a Thinkpad T14 Gen 1 with a Ryzen 7 Pro 8 and 16gb of RAM for £200. Probably fast enough to everything except newer games and training AI.

CES 2025 is just around the corner. I'd wait to get a new laptop now.

I just went through this search for attending Uni, and unfortunately it’s almost impossible to get a reasonably-to-decently spec’d out laptop running AMD at the 14” size right now. The purpose was to avoid any 13th/14th gen intels for their recent issues, and increase it’s longevity.

What it boiled down to (for me) was: • Asus Zephyrus G14 (32GB Ram), or • Thinkpad P14s Gen 5

Ultimately went with the Zephyrus, and holy shit I’m glad I did, even with Win11.

Edit:

To clarify, Framework is available to me, but I couldn’t take a chance on class requirements. This video was very helpful in making the final decision.

Obligatory Framework plug comment. Doesn’t matter which architecture you go for, they support Linux ootb and there are community threads for almost every distro. You can also upgrade it in a few years :D