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Poll: What's the best laptop for Linux these days?

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31–40 of 440 posts

Re: Poll: What's the best laptop for Linux these days?

#32
post #2

Sorry to hijack, but I have a somewhat similar question: any recommendations for a SFF or Mini PC that can adequately run the latest Fedora for home productivity purposes? Web browsing mainly and light gaming.

look into geekom, they seem to have a good price to specs ratio

Re: Poll: What's the best laptop for Linux these days?

#33
I’m really enjoying the Framework laptop with fedora but I recently figured out how to change the display ratio scaling so my Thinkpad X1 Carbon 6th gen might be good too.

The Framework laptop may end up replacing my MacBook Pro 16, the last one before they came out with Apple Silicon.

Re: Poll: What's the best laptop for Linux these days?

#34
post #19

I have had 0 problems with XPS Dell running Ubuntu. I've run it both as a dual boot with Windows and a standalone. Loved it so much I bought a second. The 13 in "Dell XPS 13" refers to the screen size. You can have a bigger screen. 15 & 17. My laptops are Dell XPS 17. I have heard good things about the Dell Precision as well.

Does it sleep? I was really happy with an earlier Dell XPS (which my daughter still uses), but my newer one is horrible. I always have to do a full shutdown, otherwise if I don't use it for a few days, the BIOS resets and once I even had to remove the CMOS battery.

Between the sleep, the bad mic, fan noise, I think my next one will be a ThinkPad (my 10 year old ThinkPad is still rocking, gave it to other family who just needed a browser).

Re: Poll: What's the best laptop for Linux these days?

#35
I'm confused. This is a really vague question. What's the best color of car these days?

What features are you looking for in a Linux laptop?

The process should be to first identify what hardware features you want, and then identify Linux support for those features. Support varies from distro to distro; they all have warty bits, and you can spend a lot of time picking a Linux.

Meanwhile, it should be the case that lots of laptops run desktop Linux pretty darn well. The typical exceptions today are graphics drivers (damn you, nvidia!) and touchpads when the vendor decides to manufacture something new. Most other stuff should work with minimal effort.

I'm typing this from the LG 17Z990 that has been running Debian (and only Debian) for over 5 years now. (Not an endorsement of that particular laptop; the keyboard is SO FRAGILE!) Before that, I had a big honkin' Dell that worked flawlessly with Debian for at least 7 years. So that's 12 years of daily-driving Linux. It hasn't been without its nuisances, but neither are Windows or MacOS. Unlike Windows or MacOS, when something does annoy me in Linux, it is -- generally -- fixable.

I really don't think you need to buy a laptop for Linux support, at this point. Like, sure, double-check that it doesn't have a known problem. You might have to pick your Linux according to the laptop, though.

Re: Poll: What's the best laptop for Linux these days?

#37

I'm typing this on a brand-new Lenovo (T14s gen 3 AMD), the first brand-new laptop I've bought myself in about a decade the wifi didn't work on the 5.15 LTS kernel that NixOS defaults to, so I had to upgrade to 6.0. and there's some wonkiness with suspend, where the system will sometimes re-suspend itself a moment after opening the lid. a minor annoyance that I haven't taken the time to debug yet. my previous Lenovos…

I'm using NixOS 22.11 with a Thinkpad T490s and it's basically flawless. Everything works as expected, including the fingerprint reader. My best Linux laptop experience yet.

Re: Poll: What's the best laptop for Linux these days?

#38
post #7

Someone correct me if I am missing some nuance here but I think the two MacBook options aren't contenders for best laptop running Linux. The drivers simply don't support basic things like the touchpad or wifi (at least not without extensive reworking and a modified kernel). Perhaps in some years Asahi Linux will be functional as a daily driver on the newer ARM/Apple Silicon but it's definitely a hobby laptop right no…

Linus himself uses Asahi over an M2 Macbook Air: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/linus-torvalds-uses-...

I mean to be fair he is the Linux power user.

Re: Poll: What's the best laptop for Linux these days?

#39
post #6

Carbon is great, but I highly recommend looking into the lenovo t14 lineup. Especially interesting is the ryzen chipped ones. You can get a base model and then easily upgrade components, I did this and upgraded the panel and SSD if I remember correctly, saved quite a bit of money that way. It's fatter than a carbon but more performant, has more ports, and is much more extendable / repairable in my opinion. edit: I re…

I'm a long-time X1 Carbon user (over the years, between personal and work laptops, I've had 1st, 4th, 5th and 6th gen models)

I recently got a Gen 3 AMD T14s and I've been very happy with it. it's a bit thicker / heavier / wider than my old Carbons, but still a very comfortable size, and has much better specs (6c/12t Ryzen 5 6650U, 32gb RAM, 1TB NVMe, Radeon 680M GPU) than comparably-priced Carbons I looked at.

Re: Poll: What's the best laptop for Linux these days?

#40

System 76 is the first Linux laptop I’ve liked. Have had intermittent issues with the touchpad after updates. Solid machine.

System 76 is great for Linux but the Windows support is absolutely abysmal so you can forget about having high quality Windows dual boot setup.
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