AspenDove:

For example, I would eventually deploy to a laptop, so would I eventually have to train on a laptop? In my experience, this doesn’t make much sense.


No, as mentioned above, the pretrained model should give you the same outputs up the the floating point precision.



 AspenDove:

On the other hand, you mentioned the need to see the code to debug further. so how exactly to do that?


You could write an evluation script, which loads the model, uses a constant tensor, applies the forward pass, and prints the output.
Post this code here by wrapping it into three backticks ``` and also post the outputs from the Linux server and your laptop.