There isn't an easy place to find out how well various laptops are supported. Years ago I decided to buy a laptop and did a lot of research to find one that worked well with Linux, and I found many people who claimed to have Linux working well on their laptops. However, when I looked for detailed information and dug into write-ups people did, I found that there were always problems. Suspend and hibernate didn't work right, usually, and various laptops had various other issues as well. Config files had to be changed, firmware had to be patched, kernel patches from obscure places had to be applied, and surprisingly often there was a small kernel patch written by the author himself. I would find these problems in reports of "success" stories, so I just assumed that everyone was struggling, and people who said they had no problems had crazy expertise and were just like the people who said the Linux desktop was totally awesome and fine in 1999.

As the situation of Linux on laptops has improved, however, it's been harder to find installation write-ups, which probably means that people who have no problems simply do not bother posting detailed accounts of the fact that they have no problems! I mean, here's one, but how many people are meticulous enough to write a blog post about the fact that their laptop works, and then add the post to http://www.linux-on-laptops.com/ so I can find it?

http://wernerroth.de/index.php/2009/12/18/kubuntu-910-runs-a...

So true success stories are mostly invisible, or at least outwardly look the same as the "success" stories where a guy applied six kernel patches and wrote a shell script that he runs manually whenever he needs to hibernate and claims, "Hey, wow, my laptop works great now, and it was so easy!"

For a person like me, who doesn't want purchasing a laptop to turn into a major educational experience, it would be nice to have some way of knowing whether a specific laptop will work out of the box with major Linux distributions.

Isn't this at least partly the manufacturer's fault? I think Ubuntu is trying to work with PC makers to get drivers written and tested before the hardware ships.

Maybe it's a bit chicken-and-egg to get that to happen - people won't buy Linux boxes until it works on every machine, but makers won't try to get it to work on their machines until people are buying Linux boxes.

I did manage to buy a Linux box from Dell a while back. Even though I immediately wiped their custom install and upgraded to the latest version, set up dual-boot, etc, buying one with Ubuntu pre-installed was the best way I could determine to make sure the hardware would actually be compatible.

It's weird; I have one of those Thinkpads, and it works great with Ubuntu.

And, slightly older MacBooks always run Ubuntu great :-)

I thought that was surprising also. ThinkPads have a good track record of Linux compatibility.

Is it IBM versus Lenovo difference, I wonder? IBM used to be fairly good about using reasonably open or at least industry-standard hardware when they were running the ThinkPad show.