Laptop Brands with GNU/Linux Preinstalled

Come on, pre-installed is a market.

I know a lot of people that won't delve into a ubuntu install, but use it day-to-day with no problem.

That said, this list could describe the differences between all of them.

For instance, the purism laptop has a barrel jack power adapter, standard screws, memory and drives. All their components have been chosen to use drivers that are entirely free software.

And lenovo - now I wouldn't know what is on that machine - their windows laptops had bios-resident spyware and their own bloatware, so pre-installed for them is a negative.

I believe framework is fairly decent, but I'm uncertain if their hardware requires non-free drivers or hardware blobs.

The advantage of "preinstalled" is that as a buyer, you know that all hardware works with linux out of the box. Nobody will stop you from reinstalling afterwards. "I wouldn't want it preinstalled" is a very niche complaint.

I don't think so. It's definitely a starter for many people, to have the convenience of 'a Linux' which has been optimised and tested for the hardware it's being shipped on. An advanced user can choose to wipe it and apply their own. It's functionality no different from a blank drive.

That said, it's possible from some places to buy laptops without OS.

I'm running Linux on a LG Gram laptop and that beast feels way sturdier than any Mac laptop. It's lighter than any Mac laptop too (hence the LG "Gram" name, I guess). FWIW my Mac M1 laptop's screen died after about a year without any good reason. Meanwhile my years old MILSPEC LG Gram laptop keeps cranking just fine.

Do I miss the retina display? Yes and no. I may miss the tiny pixels but I sure as heck do not miss the brittleness: a laptop has to feel like something you can count on. Not like some fragile piece of porcelain which you must take extra care of.

Now I'm excited by Asahi too but in my case it'd be more for a desktop than a laptop (I think I'm really done with Mac laptops).

Then you have to deal with MacOS. Your boot times are the sum of MacOS then Linux, you have to update 2 OSs, you pay the RAM+CPU cost of running 2 whole systems at all times, you get security patches until Apple stops rather than when Linux stops (yes, Apple supports things for a long time, but I have thinkpads from 2008 still running current versions of Linux).

Then the user is stuck with the macOS UI and macOS software.

I have a very custom desktop UI based on a tiling window manager (WM); I tend to run it with one or two windows per screen, so that I can focus. I have a suite of synchronised colour schemes between the WM, my editor, my browser (with custom styles for commonly-used sites), my terminal, my PDF reader and my screen locker, so I see one unified colour theme across everything I do on a computer (with separate themes for work and personal computers, so I instantly know what context I am in). I have as few distractions as possible from the work I am doing. I have a fairly consistent set of keybindings across my environment, with custom keybindings for custom work.

Since it’s written in Common Lisp, I can dynamically reprogram my WM as it runs. What I mean is that I can connect to it from my editor and open a REPL; I can define, replace and debug live code in the running instance. It’s not quite as powerful as a real Lisp machine would be, but it’s better than any other desktop environment I’m aware of.

My Compose key setup is much more powerful than macOS’s Option key. I have a pair of true Hyper keys dedicated specifically to my own cross-application tooling, unused by any specific program.

I believe that switching to macOS, Windows, GNOME, KDE or any other setup would be a step back, or at the very least require a significant investment of time and effort to begin to approach parity.

Then there is the issue of freedom. Just about every line of code I run is free software, which I may inspect, learn from, debug and change. It’s not there to make Apple more money.

Then there is the issue of privacy. Apple claim to care about privacy, but with free software I can actually examine code to see if it does anything I don’t want it to do, and I can hire someone to do that for me, or rely on others I trust who have done that. You can’t do that with proprietary software.

The developers of GNU/Linux and the other software are more aligned with my own interests, wants, needs and desires than the developers of macOS are. It’s not perfect alignment, of course (Mozilla is a good example where improvement really is needed, as are the systemd developers), but on the whole the free software community are reasonably well-aligned with me.

I care about privacy, freedom, customisation and productivity. When I use my system, it does what I want it to do and nothing (or at least very little …) else. It gets out of my way and enables me to be effective in my job and in my computer-based hobbies, and gets out of my way so that I have time for my non-computer-based hobbies and the rest of my life.

GNU/Linux and other free software afford me much more privacy, freedom, customisation and ultimately productivity than does macOS.