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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

Typing this on a Asus 1215B that was sold with a Linux distribution and has already had a couple of LTS distributions since 2009.

Even though it was sold as Linux supported device, it had its own series of issues, with wlan driver being broken when Canonical decided to replace it for a less capable one taking 6 months to reach feature parity, nowadays GL is stuck at 3.3, although fxgl used to be able to do 4.1.

And then there is the whole issue with VA-API, and the workarounds to watch hardware accelerated video.

Hence why when this netbook dies, I most likely will stick to using GNU/Linux from VMs, which I have been doing with VMWare since 2010 in other computers, I don't recall the last time I went through the trouble of setting a dual boot system.

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Makes me think of what other laptops (or even just PC hardware in general) have some of the best support on *nix. Personally, in my experience most hardware has been passably okay, at least when compared with trying to run FreeBSD, though some required tweaking (such as touchpads).

I think Lenovo ThinkPad laptops have some of the best reputation in that regard, though the newer models can definitely be a bit on the pricey side.

With ThinkPads, just buy a few generations behind refurbished, preferably from a nonprofit recycler. They've always been great for Linux. The T series gives you more upgrade options, but the X models run longer on a charge and are small and light . I'm on my second now, having "upgraded" from a T430 to an X250. But I miss the larger screen and so will probably get a T470 or T480 soon.

Running boring plain vanilla Ubuntu LTS with the ("curse you, FreeDesktop.org!") Gnome Shell and a few extensions that probably drive the minimalists on the Gnome Project bonkers (also running a lot of web apps like Gmail and Keep as PWAs). Or at least I hope they do. Mostly program, don't game: I leave that to my kids, both game developers. As a literal greybeard I don't care much if The Year of the Linux Desktop ever comes, because I've been living The Life of the Linux Desktop for over two decades.

Still using docker for workloads at home, but if I was still managing massive numbers of containers at work I'd probably be running podman for anything that didn't justify the cost and complexity of k8s.

I'm running Pop_OS! (after a breakage with Arch) on my T14s and the experience has been really great.

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