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Comment by wldlyinaccurate | Hacker News Reader

In my experience most hardware works flawlessly, although admittedly some hardware is better-supported. I've owned two (soon three) Dell XPS 13 laptops since 2013 and have always had a really smooth experience running Ubuntu. The worst of my Linux woes were the usual suspend/hibernate issues running Ubuntu on company-provided Thinkpads.

I've also had to use various Macs for work in the past and have had terrible issues with wireless networking and bluetooth.

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"The worst of my Linux woes were the usual suspend/hibernate issues running Ubuntu on company-provided Thinkpads."

I don't doubt that is your experience but I don't know why. Lenovo are pretty Linux friendly and suspend/restore has been a fixed thing in general for years. Maybe you need to update your BIOS.

I can provide you with a very long list of fucked up systems that will, say, not run Windows 10 1903, depending on already installed software and other silly stuff.

I'm typing this on a Dell laptop that runs Arch Linux.

Macs don't even feature on my radar.

I run Archlinux on a gaming laptop (a Lenovo Legion) and it's perfect for my needs. And everything works! Linux becomes better and more compatible with each passing year. This laptop is a portable development machine with a nice keyboard and a powerful enough processor (I specifically wanted a 45W CPU).

All the "pro" laptops seem to be focused on smaller sizes, and on premium/luxury features and price. I'm glad cheap gaming laptops running Linux are a perfect fit for my use case.

If you are not a gamer and don't need a beefy GPU for development (most people don't), you can also look at more "workstation" grade laptops from e.g. Lenovo (P-series, that kinda thing) or Dell. You'll get a few enterprise features and spec bumps that might be beneficial versus 'gaming' features (e.g.: Xeon, ECC, more NVMe + free slots, free RAM slot, RAM up to 32 or even 64GB).

But yeah, gaming machines always make for great dev stations, whether desktop or laptop.

Suspend/hibernate works on thinkpads with a moderately recent Linux kernel and a bios toggle.

Source about the BIOS part? I own many thinkpads and use them at work too and never had to do anything with BIOS settings.

Some thinkpad models (e.g. 6th gen x1 carbon) didn't ship with bios support for the s3 sleep state. It was added later. Even the ones that were shipped with an updated bios did not have the option enabled (because windows uses "modern sleep"). I don't have a source listing all the lenovo hardware that needs to be configured for proper linux sleep.

I seem to remember borked cifs/smb support at one point being the most painful.

Edit: not sure why the downvote... MacOS, don't remember when, switched to custom cifs network sharing, and it caused a LOT of issues for my workflow at the time.

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