2019 Thinkpad for the past four years, she’s rock solid.
Even if it’s the MacBook Air, it’ll be just fine haha.
Ngl, makes me laugh when I see someone pull out an Alienware laptop. That’s like bringing a lambo to a classics car meet 
Avoid Lenovo Yoga why? Theyre pretty good in my experience. Avoid anything made by HP though
Yeah I’d say a post that summarizes any pros/cons and links to relevant resources can be helpful and can be used as a catch-all reply whenever someone makes the same post again
I’m in the Formula SAE team and I think almost all CAD/CFD/FEA design work gets done in the ME computer lab machines or rendered on Purdue’s supercomputer. I think it doesn’t matter especially for group engineering work as you’re gonna have to be with your team anyways, so might as well use the lab computers together. But yeah I guess having a beefy personal machine is nice.
A shocking amount of students back in my TA days were extremely linux ignorant and only knew how to do the few selective commands to submit their assignments
Heck at my first digital design job I was the only one who had a Linux workstation and really knew how to use it at all.
I mean yeah I run WSL on my windows machine and get some stuff done that way. But since most of my work is done on my personal Purdue ECN machine through SSH, I don’t think you really need Linux for your personal device.
It’s like a Vet Tech who’s never seen a giraffe
Started 2017 graduated 2021- spend a grand on my laptop at costco (nice-ish lenovo) when I graduated HS and it’s stlil sitting near my bed for when I don’t want to use my desktop.
Buy once, cry once.
That’s giving the Alienwares too much credit… in my experience, they punch well below their weight
I used to get a lot of yoga laptops to repair. Probably the highest alongside Samsung
Mind if I dm you with it just to get feedback?
Yeah, you don’t need it, but as I said it has its perks. The GUI things that you would otherwise run on a lab machine (assuming they still have those RedHat thin clients, but probably not at this point?) you can likely run via SSH with X11 forwarding, which is very convenient.
Oh…right, plus then you don’t have to run Windows. 
I don’t go to Purdue so I probably won’t be that helpful