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Ask HN: What laptop are you using to daily drive Linux?

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I am an idiot, and bought a Dell XPS 15 with an Nvidia graphics card, and getting the graphics card to work without excessive patching is not worth it to me. I'd rather just get an AMD laptop instead for daily driving Linux.

What laptop are you using for Linux?

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I have a Framework laptop (the original 11th gen Intel one) with Arch Linux and some experiments with NixOS. I've been really impressed with the laptop and their Linux support has been superb. The one caveat is that the battery life isn't great, but I hear that the newer motherboards (particularly the AMD one) greatly improves this. It's nice that I have the option to just drop in a newer motherboard, but I honestly haven't felt that it's aged nearly enough to do that yet.

> It's nice that I have the option to just drop in a newer motherboard

Switching from Intel to AMD will also require new RAM and a new wi-fi module:

https://frame.work/products/mainboard-kit-amd-ryzen-7040-ser...

That's good to know. The RAM I think I would've thought of, but perhaps not the Wi-Fi replacement.

Any issues with sleep? This was the one thing preventing me last time I was trying to move permanently to Linux for work a couple of years ago. Laptop wouldn't sleep properly and the battery would drain.

My old laptop was a System 76 Gazelle with an Nvidia card, never had any problems with it. I am busy and just left the stock PopOS on there, worked fine.

My current is a Tuxedo Computers Pulse 15 II, with an AMD card. I love this laptop. I mainly bought to have something portable, more memory (64 GB) and quiet. The sold me on the quiet and battery life and it's fantastic.

Early on I had a couple of issues with the hardware suspend but they solved it through their tomte system. (I had an oddball setup I configured with two different drive manufacturers and it was messing with suspend. I found and applied config for my Samsung.)

The only issue I've had with the AMD card is that running Immersed to create virtual desktops for VR using inactive display imports crashes amdgpu. Pretty niche :). Apparently that's something you can do with Nvidia. I worked around it with an HDMI dongle.

Edit: most responses here seem to be the big manufacturers but you really avoid a lot of problems by buying from a Linux vendor. If you're busy, this is a real lifesaver.

I almost bought a system76 Lemur instead of my X1 Nano, but decided against it after reading a bunch of reports of bad QC by their ODM Clevo. The ThinkPad having a 16:10 screen over the Lemur’s 16:9 screen was also a factor (which appears to have not changed since 3 years ago).

Tuxedo’s Pulse 14 looks interesting but I wish its screen were a bit brighter. Also no ANSI keyboard layout option which is a bummer.

Hm mine is ansi, maybe it's different now or by size.

I think they added US keyboards a couple years ago.

Seconding System76. I bought one for my wife after HP and Dell refurbs failed to be stable for her, so instead of trying to find a reasonably priced (<$800) business-class laptop we blew the budget on a $1500 Pangolin that's done well by her for several years.

My daily driver is a desktop because I'm an old fart that likes to build computers (with optical disc drives!), but I have a truly ancient HP Elitebook refurb with a dented lid that still takes care of me on vacation. Neither of us do anything fancier than use an HDMI projector with them so we're not asking for much. It really stung to be compiling Realtek modules for the HP only for it to crash every week and the Latitude to have a disappearing sound card, even for budget refurbs.

I stopped using laptops years ago, I still have an old Dell Latitude, but my daily driver is an assembled desktop, with good iron, large screen space and a serious keyboard.

Laptops makes sense ONLY if you REALLY need to be on the go, a desktop replacer seen the actual state of crapbooks on sale is a choice only if you have masochistic tendencies... You can assemble a desktop twice the spec of a "good craptop actually on sale" for half the price and have much more comfort.

I have a Framework 13 AMD. Everything works great on Linux (even the fingerprint reader)—-I’m extremely happy with it. The keyboard is good, the speakers are good (with EasyEffects), the screen has a perfect 3:2 ratio, the battery is great, and I can upgrade and fix it. I also had an XPS 13, MacBook Pro (2013 and 2023), and a Thinkpad X1 6th gen. All things considered I like the Framework best.

Did sleep work properly out of the box?

Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen5 (Intel i7, nVidia)

Pro: * The warranty service is wonderful. Both online-scheduled mail-in service and in-person service. Calls are answered by real people quickly. Fan broke, but it was quickly replaced. Some electrical noise coming out of the motherboard -- Lenovo is willing to replace the motherboard, but so far no catastrophic failure.

Con: * Poor QC with thermals. I had to repaste myself after both factory and service center couldn't get it right. * Fan and motherboard issues (as mentioned above) but fixable/fixed by Lenovo under warranty. * Small things are broken all the time with Ubuntu: speakers, microphone, screen sheering etc. With the lastest Ubuntu, it is marginally better.

I still would not recommend this model unless one is an advanced user willing to debug these things (I still haven't figured out what's wrong with the headphone jack noise). But once the bugs/defects are fixed, this machine is a dream to use.

The headphone jack noise might be from automatic power saving of the audio controller. You can deactivate that with tlp. It helped me with my ancient Acer ES1 some years ago.

Thinkpad fans spin up quite aggressively in my experience. You can use thinkfan to set higher threshold temperatures.

Screen tearing has been solved for me after switching to Wayland.

A very handwavy final remark: some problems might vanish on their own by using a recent kernel, e.g. on Fedora instead of the Ubuntu LTS release.

Thank you for your comment. I find it assuring that I actually had followed every point you mentioned before. My observations are below.

1. I tried every power saving option available at every layer (snd_hda_intel, pulseaudio, TLP). None of that eliminated the problem. 2. ThinkPad fans are aggressive indeed, and I did use thinkfan to reduce the noise, but it turns out the physical fan was just terribly pasted. Re-pasting with a higher quality paste helped immensely. 3. I did try Wayland, but I am told it has its own issues. In the end, I put up with shearing under X as it didn't bother me that much. The most recent kernel mitigates shearing. 4. Indeed, a recent kernel automatically solves many issues that I had previously solved manually (mic, speakers, etc)

I had thought LTS with its continual updates should address these problems as well as a more recently released distro should. It seems that I was mistaken.

I have a Lenovo X1 Carbon, gen 10, and it's pretty terrible. It's my fourth X1, and they somehow get worse every generation (and it will be my last).

Here's just some of the problems I've had:

- The cooling setup is poor, so it overheats very easily. It's melted part of the rubber off already.

- The trackpoint is slightly broken, and sometimes the pointer will constantly jump to the top of the screen until it's disabled.

- The AC/DC converter makes clicking noises sometimes.

- Battery life is very poor.

- It just randomly locks up sometimes, and needs restarting.

I had been using a ThinkPad Carbon X1 Yoga, but recently switched to a Dell Inspiron 16 2-in-1 because I wanted the extra screen space. (2-in-1s work in tent mode, which is great when I'm using a mech keyboard and trackball). I tend not to roll my own Linux on a laptop, because of the weird custom components, so Ubuntu is the easiest course. It has worked quite well, though I haven't bothered to try the fingerprint reader. The machine does firmware updates flawlessly, and suspends and wakes reliably (my window manager is i3, and I just use the provided xss-lock/i3lock mechanism).

Annoyances? This machine has a high-res 3840x2160 monitor, and you have to struggle to tell various applications to scale output. The nvidia GPU in this model means that I had to roll back from sway to i3, as sway “does not support” nvidia.The autorotate feature doesn't work out of the box, but a small bash script does the job.

Dell does have some support pages for Ubuntu, but I'd say their Linux support is perhaps not quite as solid as Lenovo's. I'll repeat a few pieces of advice: (1) use a distro that has all the drivers, including the nonfree ones, (2) be prepared to do web searches to solve arcane problems, and (3) expect to have odd little glitches in various apps, at least until you solve them. That said, I'm very happy with Linux on this machine.

Framework 13 AMD

Initial issues with the iGPU seem to have gone away with software updates. The one chore you will have is finding a fractional scaling setup that works for you. I went with turning Gnome's experimental fractional scaling feature on. (See 1.1.1.1 https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/HiDPI) Some people just use a font size multiplier.

Everything else works great.

Note that the brand new KDE Plasma6 solved fractional scaling on Wayland.

It’s not my daily driver but the ThinkPad X1 Nano Gen 1 I use for studying runs Fedora pretty well.

Only complaint is that its screen, while otherwise being excellent, requires 150% UI scaling and the only DE I’ve found that handles fractional scaling under Wayland almost fully competently is KDE, which isn’t quite my style. Have read that several Wayland tiling WMs handle fractional scaling well too but those are even less my thing.

I've been using fractional scaling without any noticeable problems in Gnome on Fedora for 3 years.

I have to compile my Emacs from source with the flag --with-pgtk and I have to arrange for the command-line arguments -enable-features=UseOzonePlatform and -ozone-platform=wayland to be passed to the Chrome binary when the application opens to prevent Emacs and Chrome from being blurry.

In my experience GNOME with fractional scaling works mostly ok if you can stick to Wayland-native GTK apps and terminal but XWayland and Qt stuff can be wonky. Point in case, Anki needing an ugly custom drawn titlebar in GNOME under Wayland thanks to the whole fiasco with client and server side decorations.

I hear Lenovo Thinkpads are quite a standard

Yep Lenovo tends to be the best AFAIK but I run Ubuntu on a Dell Lattiude and it all works fine.

An Acer Aspire V3 from ~2013 (my first Laptop). It also has an NVIDIA card (GTX 750M), but I can't remember having any issues with the drives, since you can just apt-get them. Even CUDA works, even though it's not really that useful on a machine like that. Upgraded the RAM to 32GB and installed an additional SSD. The Keyboard broke once and the original Battery was pretty much dead, both could be replaced for cheap. The new battery even is double the capacity and lifts the laptop up a bit which solves the airflow issue it originally had. For a 10 year old device it surely still runs great and still gets used for development when not at home.

Edit: Have been running Backtrack 5, Kali, Parrot, Pop and now Debian.

I'm using a System76 Lemur pro. I've had it more than two years and I only have good things to say about it, some of which are: - The battery life started off as spectacular and is still not bad, I get about 5 hours out of it for general use, including compiling code - When it arrived it had a dead pixel in the middle of the screen. They replaced it in a very low-fuss way, sending the replacement immediately (before I'd sent back the original, so that I didn't have any downtime) - The spec is well-suited for coding/general linux work. It doesn't have a fancy graphics card or a hi-res screen, but I don't want those things,they add weight and cost and decrease battery life. - I installed NixOS from the get-go so didn't ever experiment with PopOS so nothing really to say there

I’m currently running a T460p and another random Lenovo from like 10 years ago. They both work great. But if I was buying a new one, I’d probably give System76 a try. I know it’s Clevo, but they also appear to have gotten pretty good lately. Plus, Coreboot built in is pretty sweet.

I'm using a T480 with NixOS, the only configuration I remember doing was related to using the iGPU and some power settings, you can find my flake here[1].

[1]: https://github.com/adham-omran/flake

Thinkpads are generally great, but of course the trick is generally to check before you buy. For my last purchase, I just looked through https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Laptop/Lenovo and cross-compared against features I cared about and prices on ebay until I found something that suited. YMMV depending on what your requirements are; my uses happen to be light enough that what I bought was a 5 year old device:) Newer devices may have worse compatibility; again, check the lists for issues before spending money.

Thinkpads, of course - I've gone from one to the next over the last decade-plus. Currently at work I have a T14, while at home I'm using a T480.

Generally I have used Ubuntu, but I switched my home machine to Mint recently, and it's been fine.

I bought the cheapest one at the store, as I always do. It was even on sale. IIRC it was less than $200.

This was in 2022. My former "daily driver" Linux laptop was from 2009, and it gave up in 2023 (keyboard hardware failure, no problem running Linux). As for brand, both are ASUS. It's not that I prefer ASUS particularly, it just happened so that these were the cheapest on the days I frequented the store. A laptop is a generic thing for me, I can use any of them.

(I dont' get the Nvidia graphics cards trouble you are referring to, don't you run Debian?)

Dell precision 5680 just moved from Precision 5500. Running Ubuntu mate 22.04 on the first and Ubuntu 22.04 on the latter.

Not many major issues, on the 5550 everything worked pretty great except using VMs slowed everything to a crawl and some weird networking issues where the connection would randomly drop to 2mb/s.

Just started with he 5680, and had to do some back and forth with the graphics driver to get it to work and am now running into a weird issue where an electron app will open and display blank for several minutes before loading and working fine. Still investigating.

Still not worth going to Windows even with the challenges.

I've been on a ThinkPad T560 for nearly 8 years, with an i7 processor and 16Gb of RAM. I replaced the hard disk with a 1Tb SSD, but that's the only modification. I've made.

Everything works fine without needing any special tweaking (running Pop_OS!).

(Edit: Bluetooth has not always been as reliable as I would like, but seems to be behaving itself these days).

My only reason for annoyance is that it has run for so long and works so well, I can't justify buying a new toy to play with! I will eventually get something else with more RAM, but I don't strictly need it for my use cases.

I have an Asus ROG Zephyrus with an AMD CPU and a dedicated Nvidia RTX 3060. It also has integrated Radeon graphics.

When using the Nvidia, the system is quite unstable (I get some weird issues with KDE on Wayland) but when using the integrated graphics it works fine. Since I only play games on Windows (this laptop is dual boot), I haven’t missed the Nvidia yet.

The WiFi has an issue though and it seems related to the adapter used. Sometimes when I boot into Linux, the WiFi is not detected (drivers can’t be loaded or something like that); things only get back to normal after power off/on.

I bought a ThinkPad T495s despite some of their warts because the Linux compatibility is generally good, and they can be found for cheap secondhand. Battery life is not great, but it's powerful enough for coding and spinning up test k8s clusters. I used to have an X1 Carbon 9th-Gen, but the thermals were so bad it would throttle after only 2 minutes under load. I could get a MacBook Pro and have a smoother experience, but the advantge of secondhand is that I don't care about the hardware. It gets destroyed who cares, just buy another one.

Hey, I have an xps 15 w 1050ti I have been daily driving on Pop! OS for 5 years now. I really do not like spending endless time messing with my computer. Pop os is like ubuntu but more respectful of your time. You want the iso with nvidia drivers preinstalled: https://pop.system76.com/

Everything works without configuration (WiFi touchpad blah blah blah + built in seamless gpu mode switching between integrated, gpu only and hybrid mode).

I have a System 76 Pangolin 15" Laptop (4.75 GHz AMD Ryzen 7, 32GB RAM)

About the only complaint I have is the keyboard, which has a numerical pad on it, so it takes up a lot of space for something I never use. I tried out Pop_OS which it comes pre-loaded with and ended up liking it so I kept it. Haven't run into any issues. Sound, wi-fi, web cam, etc., all work perfectly.

I have a Dell XPS 15 with an Nvidia graphics cards (I installed the latest nvidia driver via the ubuntu interface), and everything works well

Suspend works and everything? I've ditched ubuntu due to stuff like snapd and installed debian instead. It seems whenever the GPU gets put into low power mode (suspend) it gets into an invalid state that not even a reboot can resolve. I have to power down, wait, and then turn the laptop back on.

I'm sure I messed something up when I installed everything and probably added a workaround that isn't meant for my driver version (systemd/persistenced scripts)

Similar setup with the XPS 17" model and Ubuntu. Might try Debian somewhere in here.

Thinkpad X1 Carbon for a lot of years, now. Have been considering going another direction next time (System 76 or Framework seem likely).

Dell Latitude E7470, Arch Linux, I3 window manager.

The only annoyance is that some programs (Gimp, libreoffice) have really tiny text in menus and such.

I like a all in one that comes with a battery, the HP Envy Move. I really can use it like a laptop and it has a 23.8" touchscreen.

i just got an hp envy 16" -- its a bit heavy on the legs. but seems ok. did you manage to get audio working? I use arch btw ;)

Dell Precision 5570 is what work buys all Linux users at the moment. Dual Intel/nvidia GPU, but I only use the Intel. Works flawlessly that way but no clue how awful nvidia support is. I think coworkers use it.

I do have to enable power management on the nvidia GPU to prevent it from eating my battery in 45 minutes or less, but that’s my only issue.

Asus Zenbook UX325EA

I use Ubuntu and everything works OOTB except hibernation. The computer is cursed with the new Intel power levels, because someone at Microsoft thinks suspended laptops should receive mails like they were smartphones. There are workarounds.

Other than that it's perfect: great screen, Intel graphics, USB-C charging, everything.

Dell XPS 15, the laptop itself is pretty great.

Currently running Arch + Hyprland, and the whole setup runs smoothly just off of the iGPU and is a savior on my battery life.

Kind of sucks to have an expensive laptop and not use the GPU at all, I might switch to using the GPU when plugged in and when I unplug it have a script switch back to the iGPU.

I also have an XPS 15 and I hate it. The sharp edge of the keyboard deck is so uncomfortable on my wrists. It also flexes a ton of I move it and will register clicks. And then it gets scorching hot.

I'm glad you like it but I can't wait to get a new laptop someday.

Lenovo Carbon X1 32gb with 12th Gen i7. Run Debian 12.5.x very well. Best combo I have ever had including MacBooks.

Same here, Lenovo Carbon X1 gen 9 (ca. 2021) with Debian Bookworm. No problem at all.

I also run a Ryzen 4000 HP Envy 13" (ca. 2022) 2-in-1 with Debian Bookworm. It works somewhat fine in laptop mode but is crap otherwise. I seriously consider reinstalling MS Windows on that one.

Linux Mint (LMDE) could be a nice option there

Huawei MateBook 14 (AMD 4600H)

Very close to perfect for me!

Pros:

- AMD CPU/GPU

- 3:2 HiDPI screen

-Metal construction

-Long battery life

- Very quiet even when under load

Cons:

- Fingerprint reader is not supported

- Screen is reflective and 60Hz only, I'm spoilt by high refresh screens now, buy one and you'll understand why.

Looking forward to ThinkPad T14 AMD Gen 5, last year's was close to perfect, but no way I'll be investing in a 60Hz LoDPI screen device.

For my personal use it is KDE Slimbook I (Intel CPU and iGPU, soon to be replaced by KDE Slimbook V with AMD CPU+iGPU, should be getting it in April), and at work it is a Lenovo T590 (Intel CPU+iGPU; also has Nvidia mobile GPU which yeah is very problematic to use so I mostly just do not use it)

I'm using a Thinkpad T480 (Core i5 8250u) with Kubuntu.

I undervolted the CPU so that it runs cooler and doesn't throttle. Then I upgraded the RAM to 32GB.

Overall, it's quite a good laptop that I paid $200 for 2 years ago. But you can't do any heavy lifting with it.

14" Asus Expertbook with a recent Intel CPU, 32 GB of Ram, and integrated graphics.

It's the lightest laptop I've ever used, yet still has good build quality and great battery life.

Everything worked out of the box with NixOS, Sway, and suspend-to-disk with full home directory and swap encryption.

I found an HP EliteBook in a recycling pile. It looked good so I grabbed it. It was just missing SSD. I coincidentally had a compatible power supply. I got ChatGPT4 to help search for and find a suitable SSD drive (there’s a lot of little codes that you have to watch for beyond just basic SSD memory size). I spent probably $20-$30 for replacement refurbished Samsung SSD (though the vendor said it was new). Ultimately, installed Lubuntu on it. I really like having it as a secondary laptop to run Docker natively, for example. But, man, I would never want Linux as my primary system. I would miss too many of the features that you find on a modern commercial OS (e.g, accessibility features like text to speech). Yeah, I know, there are probably open source alternatives, but as far as I could tell, they were non-starters in terms of quality.

HP 255 g7 - it's Ryzen 3000 and supports up to 12GB ram. Arch linux since day 1 without any issues.

Screen is pretty bad though but I use an external monitor for coding anyway.

Battery is also really bad, all in all not the best but works for my budget

Thinkpad X1 Nano with an intel CPU because I needed Thunderbolt for my setup. I got a matte screen to reduce reflection and added a 5G modem for only $100 more. Highly recommend as a lightweight travel laptop.

I have a workshop laptop, Lenovo Thinkpad X1.

But I did have a System76 until I fell down the stairs and it came with me.

The System76 is built for Linux Pop OS but the Thinkpad ran Ubuntu fine... it may have been Kubuntu even, I can't recall.

System76 Lemur Pro, the best and lightest laptop I have ever owned. And the purchase price helps to support the development of PopOS, the smoothest Linux distro for people who want it to just work.

I'm using an Asus Vivobook F510UA, with an i5 and Intel integrated graphics.

I believe I got it in 2018, I've swapped out the disk for an SSD and upgraded it to 24GB of ram, it runs Ubuntu perfectly.

X1 Carbon running Arch and DWM. Works great, except I haven't configured it to suspend without draining the battery yet.

Love the computer. Can't stand a laptop without a pointing stick. :)

Lenovo T580 i7/32GB/512GB with Ubuntu 2204. Nice size, great keyboard and everything "just works".

Home desktop running Tailscale on Ubuntu

X1 Carbon running Windows, spend most of day on VS Code SSH connection to home desktop ;)

I've used XPS 15 and the GPU is really a problem. I've had better luck with a gaming laptop Legion 5i which has dedicated mode for the GPU.

I use a Thinkpad T480, slightly upgraded with 32GB RAM, SSD, glass touchpad. It runs Debian with Cinnamon beautifully!

i had the dell xps 15 and everytime the battery died dell would send out a repair guy to replace the motherboard. after 3 times I finally sold it and got something else.

this last time (2 weeks ago) i bought an hp envy 16" with nvidia gpu. things appear to work fine on arch but i have no audio and have no idea why.

Panasonic Toughbook CF-54 mk2. Rock solid, as you may imagine. Everything is supported in Arch Linux.

System76 Lemur Pro. It works great but it looks, acts, and feels a little too cheap.

System76 Oryx Pro! I've had it for a well over a year now and I really love it.

Try Nobara. It’s basically Fedora with some extra stuff for gaming.

I use Fedora on an Lenovo x1

Thinkpad T14s Gen3 AMD, all working perfectly on Fedora 37, 38 and 39.

Lenovo T490s, everything works except precision track pad functions

I'm still using a T480, keeping my eye out for the T14 G5.

Lenovo thinkpad t14s AMD, gen 3.

Everything on it just works.

MBA M1 is a fantastic Linux laptop.

Do you run Asahi directly on the metal or just Linux through a virtual machine? I thought Asahi wasn’t quite there for a daily driver

It’s good enough for Linus. The most recent changes getting audio and video acceleration running make it viable IMO.

Thinkpad X230 with Xubuntu

Slimbook works like a charm

Same here 2nd gen KDE Slimbook, working flawlessly

HP Dev One built for Pop-OS

X220

ahhh, good memories!

Alas, I scrapped mine after the logic board quit.

Luckily I bought a batch from a company sale. Easy to swap out parts.

ThinkPad X1 Nano Gen 3

Lambda Tensorbook

thinkpad t440p with ZorinOS

huawei with AMD Ryzen

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