Best 15 inch Linux Laptop?

16 points·conqrr··8 comments

Looking for a 15 inch laptop with integrated graphics, good battery, portable and runs linux smoothly.

Dell XPS: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/06/the-xps-13-de-dell-co.... Link goes to a review of the 13" model, but the 15" model gets generally good reviews too.

Purism Librem 15": https://puri.sm/librem-15/; higher res display is coming: https://puri.sm/posts/4k-at-last-purism-librem-15-rev2-4k/.

The frequency of "Best developer X" hardware questions make me wonder if it would be helpful to sorta sticky some of the most-upvoted posts somewhere. Like a "Hardware" tab on the top banner for logged-in users.

I like my now dated System 76 Galago https://system76.com/laptops

In general though, I've found power management to be poor compared to Macs

I am thinking of going with an ASUS k501UX although its not integrated graphics, its decently priced around my budget.

ThinkPads tend to do pretty well with Linux, generally speaking (sent from an X1 Carbon running Fedora 23, but this is 14")

Thinkpad P50. Stay away from HiDPI screens for now. Its a pain to scale.

MacBook, running VirtualBox, running Linux as a VM. That's my setup.

Why run Linux in a VM instead of on bare metal? I installed Debian by following some of the instructions here: https://gist.github.com/andrewlkho/23b5b5bcf853b3473421

The initial install process is a bit (OK, more than a bit) convoluted, but after that you're just booting grub and doing upgrades just like on a regular PC.

Basically, you run OSX from an external drive, install linux on a VM to which your internal hard disk is attached, then chroot into that environment (via another VM running linux) and install grub on the internal hard disk.

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