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Comment by jclardy | Hacker News Reader

Similar story here. Used linux in my HS/early college years, but switched to Mac when the swapped to intel. Recently looked at the possibilities of using linux again, but haven't really found any hardware that "just works." There is that one dell ubuntu dev laptop, but that is a pretty expensive gamble at $1800.

The best luck I've had for now is installing ubuntu on a crappy cheap Samsung Chromebook. Runs really well and everything seems to work fine, but the hardware is junk (The screen is atrocious coming from retina IPS displays.) Fun to play around with though, plus the battery life is incredible for it's $180 price tag.

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We have more than one (dell.com/sputnik), several of which are less than $1800. If you're in Europe, you can also order online most of our Latitudes with Ubuntu too (should be able to by phone in the US too).

I've got a Dell dev laptop on order now. Hope to give a full report on how well it work soon.

Dell has a 30 day return policy for what it's worth though.

I've owned and used both the Dell Precision M3800 and now the Precision 5510 running Ubuntu. They've generally worked well for me. The M3800 with UHD screen and discrete graphics generally sounded like a jet taking off when the fan was going. The 5510 is practically silent in my experience and works more reliably to boot (e.g. I have a lot less trouble with the new Intel WiFi card than I did with the M3800's Broadcom card). Your mileage may vary of course.

I recently got the Precision 5500, which is great for the most part. The screen flicker is a trifle irritating, but I've had zero Linux compatibility problems. (I opted for Intel graphics.)

I just got one with the discrete graphics, and it works great with nvidia-prime. I only had to configure the touchpad a bit to avoid bumping it while I type. I upgraded from my beloved T420, and this is a great laptop.

What chromebook and how hard was the install?

I hear you on the display. My retina screen makes anything else painful.

I have a Samsung ARM (2 core, 2G RAM, 16G Flash) based ChromeBook, Model XE303C12. It's rather simple to get Linux to work on it. You first enable developer mode and then install Crouton (which basically runs a full fledged Linux in chroot jail - to satisfy the based Linux install.

It works exceptionally well and I generally get about 10 hours of use on each battery charge. I store my work in progress on a USB3 USB flash drive.

The screen is only 1366 x 768 and the touchpad is rather lousy. So given the shortcomings, I've gone back to using an old MBP. Maybe buying a second-hand MBA and installing Linux on that is the better option.

It really seems like only Apple can do touchpads. Thank you for the feedback! It saves me doing it and regretting it. Though some of them have better monitors.

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