Laptop Brands with GNU/Linux Preinstalled
floss.social
floss.social
I watched an LTT that indicates that Windows modern standby apparently doesn't even work right with Windows. ("Microsoft is Forcing me to Buy MacBooks - Windows Modern Standby" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHKKcd3sx2c)
Some will argue since thinkpad got sold off to Lenovo that they can’t be trusted given their track record; I don’t necessarily disagree but given how much MS/Apple/Google/Dell/etc have burned people one time or another I’d opt for good hardware, customizable firmware, and good software support. If true that thinkpads still all support s3 and Linux, that’d be my pick but I’m a mbp guy now.
And when plugging in/out various audio devices sometimes it seemingly gives up caring about where it says it is piping audio, and to which device it actually goes.
Not great advice. Dell laptops at least ship with a specific version of Ubuntu that has all the necessary drivers and config tweaks for the laptops devices to work well out of the box. A stock Ubuntu install will result in a half-working laptop and a not great experience.
The Dell-customized Ubuntu image is pretty clean and crap ware-free anyway so it’s definitely a good idea to use that.
I wouldn't trust vendor not to put spyware / crapware on the laptop.
It is a matter of trust. I trust my distribution vendor (no choice here really), but hardware vendors should just offer open-source drivers and apps and leave it at that. The app comes from the PPA already compiled, so who knows what it is doing.
Become a source of software where paranoid people install your things instead of from the OEM. Install rootkits on your drivers and sell to the CIA
But it's probably something trivial. I know stories about bleeding edge wifi hardware drivers not being provided by a year old LTS Ubuntu (well du'h). And of course there is the gpu driver shism. But i'm guessing.
Can you elaborate on the changes made by dell?
Most of the utility in running Linux on your hardware is from running the Linux distribution you prefer.
> A stock Ubuntu install will result in a half-working laptop
Probably just because Ubuntu is outdated, try Archlinux.
Another great source of Linux friendly hardware: old Mac laptops. A few months ago, Apple stopped supporting old gear for the new iCloud encryption, and if you had any registered laptops without this option turned on, then you couldn’t use it for any of your gear.
The point is, that I put Ubuntu on an old MacBook and a really old MacBook Air (the very small form factor). These old laptops have a new life, and run great. It was incredibly easy to do the installs, especially compared to my first Slackware install that I had to do with a 2400 baud modem Internet connection.
Joking aside I also have one and am satisfied with it. In my experience it is the Linux laptop with lowest power consumption/longest battery out of the box by far.
Some of these vendors go the extra mile to load up coreboot or some other libre BIOS. There is also some effort put into finding components with solid Linux support. These may be good motivators to buy a Linux laptop, even if you intend to reimage it off the bat.
But if you could go to your local hypermarket and buy a cheap Linux-laptop, I bet many customers would be happy with the installed OS.
The last, and only, time something like that happened was 15 years ago with the Eee PC. I still have mine somewhere around.
Given you are wiping out the OS, "Linux" and "no preinstalled software" are synonymous, but "Linux" is a better keyword.
edit: have bought two Zareasons and a Dell with Ubuntu preinstalled. The support with Zareason was great at the time, and I'm willing to support companies that ship Linux because they have support that uses Linux, but I'm not going to be running some retailer's OS unless I'm forced to with locked hardware.
1. To know that every feature of the laptop should work out of the box.
2. Ongoing hardware support.
You don't have to keep the supplied OS if you don't want to but what you want is support.
As long as it comes with Linux pre-installed the manufacturer will put resources into ensuring it works or you could return it. That's not the case if you just buy a Windows laptop and wipe it.
I'm told that their machines work well with Linux and I like the user servicing options so it just seems weird.
(I, for instance, use NixOS, the market for which I'm sure will be miniscule for a long time yet.)
I've asked this before and responses are just "its really easy to assemble!"
that isn't what I am asking though
I am asking why I cannot buy an assembled FrameWork laptop without Windows
its easy on your side - just do everything you would do and instead of installing an OS, just ship it
The price point is also in a sweet spot in the sense that if I break it or lose it or something, it won't be a painful financial loss. The same reason why I never buy sunglasses above $50. "I will financially recover from this."
Story time: A while ago Lenovo had bugs in their thunderbolt and uefi firmware, with symptoms like glitches when the devices were plugged in a lenovo ultra docking station. They published the firmware to LVFS and thereby enabled linux devices to apply these patches with fwupd.
However the dock, which is a device on its own, also has some glitches, little annoying stuff like certain monitors on the display ports not working every time when hot-docking. They made patches for that as well, because business hardware, but a microsoft operating system is needed to apply them to the dock.
Sure one can say: that is a problem of the dock vendor, which just happens to make the laptops as well.
Luckily the worst of the worst when it comes to firmware, the one on the wireless card that is reachable without direct physical access or a bridgehead on the system, is nowadays loaded by the driver and the binary blobs are updated by the package manager. At least for the most recent intel and qualcomm architectures (and maybe some other). However I am not entirely sure if they patch the device permanently or just load them for runtime. Relevant because there are wifi drivers embedded in UEFI (for example for WoWLAN), but who the heck has that enabled anyway.
I had minimal issues with any distro I tinkered with. Ultimately, the ol’ girl had some failing hardware components so I upgraded to the newest XPS model and will continue to do so until their quality declines. I absolutely love the machine.
The most important thing with these laptops is that I know it's gonna have the right hardware.
At some point I stopped reinstalling ubuntu as it just worked anyways.
I've had pretty good experiences with Dell and Linux, albeit I dual boot and usually get Windows from the factory.
Then I had to disk repair to put the windows bootloader back, then update windows, then restore syslinux bootloader (then moved the windows out of the partition into VM image)
There are a couple of things that I’d like to change on the hardware front, but no show-stoppers. Excellent build quality, extremely portable and performant enough for development work.
I have had excellent success with him over the years.
Deeply knowledgeable, and able to configure whatever you can imagine.