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Comment by soulbadguy | Hacker News Reader

I second JoshTriplett, thinkpad usually have great linux compat. right out of the box. I usually only get laptops without discreet GPU, but it seems that discreet GPUs (both amd and nvidia) are the sources of most trouble when switching to linux.

> If I could order a laptop direct from Red Hat I'd do it without hesitation.

Dell xps dev edition is the closest thing to that right now. but i definitely agree, it would be awesome to have a linux equivalent of the surface pro made by either redhat or canonical.

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I think a lot of the GPU stuff has been largely solved in recent years, too. I have one and only one reason I will not use Linux on a laptop, and that is power efficiency. I have never managed to get any laptop to even 60% of the battery life it gets with Windows. Those times I've tried to use all of the PowerTOP calibrations, the end result has been unpredictable drops in performance and things like my trackpad just freezing at random intervals.

I'm on Mac for now. I really, truly want to be on Linux because I would like to use docker-compose for development sandboxing (and Docker Mac performance is unacceptable). But until I can get solid battery life, it's just not in the cards.

Odd, my battery life improved when I switched from Win10 to Ubuntu-MATE. Well, I guess I also replaced the HD with a SSD so that helped. But I have had pretty good battery life with the default install.

My GPU situation is definitely not resolved. I can't get it to switch to the discrete 90% of the time. and then when I do, I cant get it to swap seamlessly between intel for desktop and radeon for games. So my laptop is delegated to being a terminal and browser only machine.

Also, since 4.2, I can't change the screen brightness. I can change it during the BIOS splash, but once the kernel takes over, the key stops doing anything. The brightness slider moves around, but doesnt actually do anything.

It's a shame too, gaming is the one thing keeping my dad (who has the same laptop) from switching over to linux.

Can confirm on W520, W530, and W541 (I think). They all have terrible GPU support. The W530 for example has no video out muxer, so you have to use discrete graphics if you want any kind of external display, tanking your battery life. Brightness doesn't work.

Not only that, the W520, T420, and L420 [0][1] and W530 have BIOS/chipset bugs that mean you need to disable x2apic. Avoid unless you love tinkering with Linux.

[0] https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-P-and-W-Series-Mobile/... [1] https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/18/1

I agree that auto-processor-scale on Linux is not great, but I have been able to get good battery life from Linux by using LXDE and keeping the processor on its lowest setting at all times. (This may or may not result in unacceptable compilation times, etc, YMMV.)

I have an XPS 13 9350 running Fedora 24, and battery life is excellent. I have a friend with a different variant of the same laptop running Windows 10, and it has all kinds of power management issues.

(If you need a secondary monitor, the situation isn't so good, though. Linux is missing support for some i915 USB-C feature that can cause issues with some adapters.)

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