Ask HN: What are the best Linux-based laptops?

Who has the best Linux laptop - System76 or ZaReason or Dell or anyone else?

ThinkPads have a historically good reputation because kernel developers tend to use them. But as trouserpants says, almost all of the machines from major manufacturers will work fine.

I'm not sure this is true.

You can still run into issues if the model of laptop is brand new. Things like graphics and wifi maybe a little iffy.

I'm sorry, but this just does not agree with my experience. Yes, if you work at it, you can probably get 80-90% of things on your machine to work. But even getting to that point takes some effort. And quite often, there is that 20-10% that just doesn't work quite right. Like not being able to wake from sleep reliably. Or having popping noises when you play audio. Or having some of the audio jacks not work. And it just frustrates me to see this kind of blithe assurance: "Oh, don't worry, everything will work."

It's the same story with distributions. So often, someone asks what the best one is, and several people say something like "They're all good---you can't go wrong!". Which, again, doesn't agree with my experience. There's always something janky no matter what distro you choose. But the good ones (like Ubuntu pre-Unity) had considerably less jankiness.

I wish we lived in a world where you could install any Linux distro on any random hardware and have everything just work. But that is not the world we currently live in.

I've stuck to ThinkPads. They are great....or were great. They recently changed the keyboard (bad) and also got rid of the physical mouse buttons (NOOOOOO! BAD LENOVO!).

With those gone, there isn't anything particularly compelling about the current ThinkPads. In that case, just pick most anything and go with it. Ubuntu should run great on most anything these days.