Say you want a laptop with decent power for local AI development. If you don’t want to spend a lot of money, and you want a portable, sleek laptop (not a clunky “portable desktop”), consider the ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14. You can get one of these from BestBuy, on a deal, for under $2000. It comes with 1TB of NVME – but for ~$200 you can upgrade this yourself to 4TB using a Samsung Pro NVME. I did the same and ended up with a 5070ti, 32GB of ram, all in a fairly sleek laptop.

Hardware out of the way here are some tips:

• You can kick rocky 9.6
• You should add in elrepo and upgrade the kernel using the kernel-ml repo. At the time of this article this pulled me to kernel version 6.16.4-1
• Unfortunately X11 doesn’t work – use Wayland.
• I’ve found a lot of python libraries are not yet built with cuda 13 support – so stick with cuda 12.9. Also it seems to matter which version your driver targets, so i found 575.64.05 work well – still supports the 5070 ti, but targets cuda 12.9
• I was able to control the keyboard LEDs, screen brightness, and power profiles via KDE. I also tried the asusctl and supergfxctl – but ended up not needing these.
• As for screen control, for some reason the screen got VERY dark on bootup – so i ended up writing a screenbrightness systemd script that would set screenbrightness to max on bootup. Once in KDE i could control this via KDE’s controls
• I also found sddm works well, but could not get gdm to work – so stick with sddm/wayland
• One downside to this platform – when not on wall power, the GPU halves the amount of power it is willing to source. In practice for AI inference tasks this only seems to make a small dent in performance.
• Also on power modes: the Quiet mode is so pleasent – little to no fan noise, and the performance is stilll quite good. If you flip to Performance mode, the fans are so loud – you have to really need the extra performance.
• Lastly, sddm seemed to crash on boot – so i wrote a timer based systemd script to restart it 7 seconds after boot, and this fixed that

Here’s a kickstart for rocky 96: https://github.com/carsonfenimore/kickstart

• Be sure to disable secure boot