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

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

#91
post #30

I've found my last 3 Thinkpads (T480, T490, T14) to all be excellent for Linux work. No real downsides, everything works as it should. If there was one thing that's let me down, it's that their webcams aren't great with occasional audio issues. My current driver though is a Flex 5i Chromebook, running ChromeOS and Linux via Crostini. Last time I had a Chromebook, I wiped it and ran straight Linux. But now Crostini is…

I don't know if this is just me, but the keys in any Lenovo are like too close to each other. There's no gap so I often end up mistyping sentences, but I just use a mechanical keyboard anyways.

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

#93
post #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 j…

XPS 13 has a windows sleep issue but not with Ubuntu. But windows sleep issue is with any laptop. Hybernating works perfectly with windows or ubuntu but sleep is difficult.

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

#94
I've used Ubuntu on a Dell XPS 15 and a T480 in the last 12 months. The XPS is a much better laptop, but there was less fiddling around with the T480, and everything worked more smoothly than on the Dell. Could potentially be related to using 18.04 on the T480, and 20.04 on the Dell. My experience, anyway.

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

#95

I like my Lenovo Legion 5 Pro gaming laptop with Ryzen 5, Nvidia RTX, 4k display on PopOS with CUDA and everything working.

Oh I wonder how much difference there is from Linux Mint (it's also Debian-based, and a lot like Ubuntu.) Currently have KDE Plasma 5, working at 125%, but have issues with brightness controls. With Cinnamon (GNOME) and 125% fractional scaling, Steam renders super tiny with those settings, and I had games have resolution issues. (Legion 5, 1080p/144, Ryzen 7 4800H, RTX 2060)

Do you use native resolution at 100%? Or fractional scaling? Brightness controls?

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

#96
post #48

I did some research and just purchased Thinkpad X1 Nano Gen 9 last week. My Debian Linux setup was fairly easy. I had to drop Macbooks because it's NVMe SSD is soldered and is not upgradable. Thinkpad X1 Carbon is a decent choice, but they all seemed to be limited to 1920x1080 screen resolution for some reason -- which is a big-no for me.

I was surprised regarding the 1920x1080 screen. I have a Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 6 from 2018 running linux, and it has a 2560x1440 screen with 500 nits of brightness. For what it's worth, the Gen 10 has an optional 2240x1400 screen, but the brightness is limited to 300 nits, and it has a thicker bezel.

My 2018 Thinkpad also has 16 GB of RAM and a 1 TB NVMe SSD. I was tempted to upgrade it since it has been 4 years, but after looking at current offerings, it seems there is not much point (the new processors are way better, though).

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

#97

How do I down vote one? I'm on a System76. I gave it a shot. No.

Interesting I had the opposite reaction. Had an oryx pro at home for three years. It's a beast, plays games. Battery life wasn't great but I use it plugged in most of the the time. Has the Nvidia graphics which use a lot of power.

Liked it so much I got the pangolin all Amd laptop for work. Its been my daily driver for 4 months now and I really like it. Much better battery life than the oryx pro (integrated graphics). It's fast enough And has enough cores I did some long genomic software runs on it. It's much quieter under load the the oryx. This machine is great but they don't seem to sell it anymore. I'm pretty happy with the Amd notebook cpu and if I have to get another I probably would be looking for that.

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

#98

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…

IMHO ARM ThinkPads have a lot of potential due to their low-heat fanless design.

The X13s is nearly there in terms of Linux support, better in some regards than the M1. Next generation will be hopefully closer to the M1 in terms of performance.

However, pricing is weird in some markets. Here in EU/UK, the X13s is really expensive and makes no sense to purchase.

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

#100
I was super happy with my Purism Librem 15 for 2 years. (Weird freezing issues after that. Replacing the memory didn't help. Maybe the mainboard went bad?)

Have been tempted to try the Librem 14.

I bought a Framework, but couldn't find the right distro to use it as a daily driver. Maybe I'll find time to try again.

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