Buying a Linux-Ready Laptop | Hacker News Reader

Buying a Linux-Ready Laptop

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30 pointsjrepinc14 comments

My friend had a Purism, which was a frustrating experience in many ways. And it was quite expensive.

I am a very happy customer of System76. I got a Galago. Ten days later, the Darter was released. I returned the Galago, got the Darter, no problems whatsoever. And support has been excellent.

The Darter, running Pop OS is an extremely nice machine: Great keyboard, good touchpad; although a bit too sensitive while using the keyboard; good screen; and Pop OS is a beautiful and stable OS.

My daily driver had been a 2015 MBP, but the newer MBPs are extremely disappointing. The Darter provides so much more for the money.

I have a purism, and it has been great.

One wonderful thing was really standard hardware. Like standard screws, standard power adapter with normal barrel jack, standard memory, standard flash slot, standard 2.5" hard drive bay and standard screws.

All the hardware was chosen so no binary blobs were required.

Later I installed arch linux on it (which I like immensely)

One challenge was trying to figure out exactly what hardware I really had, but I muddled through. It would have been nice to have a table from day one showing every detail, such as screen resolution, touchpad model, exact wireless chipset, etc. It would also have been nice to have sane defaults for things like the touchpad. Apple trackpads really spoil you - they are by default very well tuned, and you get precise control without glitches like movements during typing.

Canonical has certified a range of hardware for Ubuntu use. This includes the Lenovo P1/X1 Extreme (I run Pop OS on the former), a variety of Dells, and many other high-quality laptops that your IT team may be comfortable supporting.

https://certification.ubuntu.com/

I appreciate the work that System76 has put into smoothing out many of the rough edges of using Linux on a laptop but haven't felt compelled to consider their products, nor those from other boutique vendors. They all appear to be relatively expensive vs Lenovo/Dell etc and, at times, look to be clunky/have inferior build quality.

I roll an x1. Works great.

Or you could just grab yourself a sleek dell XPS 13 developer edition that ships with Ubuntu [0].

  [0] https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/dell-laptops-and-notebooks/xps-13-developer-edition/spd/xps-13-9380-laptop/cax13w10p1c706subuntu

I’ve got an xps 13 with coil whine. Fucking sucks. Bought an x1 instead.

My two daily drivers are a System76 Galago and a Thinkpad T480. The only complaint i have about the system76 is the fans go like hell when I have a web browser open, much less intellij. The thinkpad is great and the extra support is fantastic

It's like people don't know you can just install Linux on anything for free.

That's not necessarily true. Especially for beginners - they often end up in driver (un)availability hell for some component or another.

Even if there are drivers, a lot of them are really buggy.

I'd expect official Linux support to guarantee better quality level (less buggy)

I don't begrudge anyone buying a laptop with Linux pre-installed, but at least in my experience, most mainstream laptops work pretty well out of the box with Linux nowadays. In the past decade, I've used a a custom Sager notebook, a Lenovo Ideapad, and most recently, an HP Elitebook, and on all three, wifi and graphics worked without needing to do any driver configuration. On the Elitebook (which I'm typing this comment from), the touch screen even worked out of the box on Linux, which surprised me, as I wasn't planning on getting it working myself if it didn't.

I had a similar experience with Dell XPS 13 and Arch. Everything worked out of the box including touch screen and external dock (monitors, USB). Actually I had the feeling it worked even better than on Windows (where the dock needed some fiddling with USB 3 drivers).

I got the dell precision 5520 with ubuntu preinstalled and I promptly installed arch. My experience (aside from nvidia) was pretty much as good as it gets with linux. I never had any issues with wifi etc. If one is spending 1k+ on a laptop I would recomend buying it with linux because 1. you know that all of the chips are compatible with linux and 2. it is usually $100 cheaper

Not lately. I tried three laptops somewhat randomly. Everything worked out of the box.

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