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Comment by hellcow | Hacker News Reader

Buy a one- or two-year-old Thinkpad, and it'll be supported as well as anything.

While this is probably generally true, the 2018 6th gen X1 Carbon (I have one and run Fedora on it) has had significant problems with Linux trackpoint support, which still aren't fully resolved. I had to run a firmware update from Lenovo to get things more or less working.

Even though Lenovo provides some firmware via fwupd, this particular trackpoint firmware was only available via a Windows utility, which sucked since I wiped Windows off the machine as soon as I got it. (I had to make a Windows live USB for the sole purpose of installing this update.)

The trackpoint still occasionally dies after waking up from sleep (but much less often since I installed the firmware update.) When this happens I have to run a shell script I set up to bring the trackpoint back.

So, I can't say the Linux experience with my laptop has been great. I'm guessing the device support for these new laptops with Linux preinstalled will be much better.

My Thinkpad was very poorly supported by Debian Stale when I bought it. I guess it would've been roughly one-year-old at that point.

Stable's entire selling-point is to be the Linux of yesterday, tomorrow. You probably would have had better luck with a distribution that didn't intentionally aim to be ancient.

A year-old laptop is just getting into the sweet spot for Linux in general and Fedora in particular. The new kernels that keep on coming into the release will help with hardware compatibility.

Debian Stable is definitely not so hot on a year-old laptop, though a newer kernel from Backports can really help.

I have a 3-year-old HP laptop and have been running Debian Stable on it for about 6 months now. It's been a fairly seamless experience, as these things go.

For newer laptops, I definitely recommend Fedora. It's the easiest way to get new kernels -- which are what you need for new hardware -- on the regular.

Debian Stable is never going to be a “laptop” distro, to be fair. One needs Ubuntu, Fedora, or some other quick-turnaround distro.

> Debian Stable is never going to be a “laptop” distro, to be fair.

Will never be a new laptop distro - I'll bet you I can run Debian stable on my Thinkpad X200 without issue;)

> it'll be supported as well as anything.

But how well is that exactly? Don't answer that, it's a rhetorical question.

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