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The majority of new laptops work out of the box with ubuntu 12.04. The driver complaint, while still fair in many cases, is not nearly as relevant as it used to be. Peripherals can be tough, but built-in hardware has come a long way.

Also, IMHO, weather dell is doing exactly what you want or not, they are continuing to support freedom of choice, freedom of software, and the hacker community in general. I commend them for the effort, and would love to see other vendors follow suit.

So, and I'm honestly curious here because I'm in the market, what is the best Linux laptop out there?

I hear people swoon over a particular Lenovo/Thinkpad model, but have no idea which one it is.

I have an 5 year old T60 and love it. What I like about it:

- Durable. I carried it with me on trips and it still works. Its build quality is much better than other laptops.

- Good keyboard. Very important for me as it is my main machine for coding. I like the keyboard better than many full sized ones.

- 4:3 aspect ratio, 1400x1050 non-glare screen (can fit more vertical code).

- Trackpoint device (the "nipple" as some call it). I never liked trackpads (but it has that too, I just disabled it).

Recently my kid tore out some keys off of the keyboard, I started to ran out of disk space on its old 60GB hard drive, and my fan got kind of loud. I considered buying another machine. Looked around. But the more I looked, the more I realized that I just wanted this machine. So I got a 500GB hybrid Seagate Momentus drive, a new fan and a new keyboard. Spent an evening upgrading it and now I am hoping to get more years out of it.

Opening it, it just confirmed the build quality. The components inside, the materials used just seems better than in equivalent HP and Dell laptops I had to take apart.

I have and X220 and a T420 and they work perfectly.

The W5*0 series is also a solid choice.

I disagree on your W5*0 point. I have a W510, and it constantly kernel panics. Thermal management is non-existent by default on Ubuntu 12.04, and the trackpad and wifi are extremely flaky.

Right now I'm on an x220.

IIR I had some acpi driver issue--in fact, had to manually white list my model in it--and power management is mediocre, even with powertop. But it gets the job done decently enough.

I too have a Lenovo x220. I use Jupiter [0] to manually send the computer to "power saving" mode. With that and the extended 9-cell battery, the screen only slightly dimmed, and wifi at full blast, I get around 7 hours of battery doing browsing and coding. I uninstalled Flash, and that gave me back around 2 hours of battery.

[0] YMMV: http://askubuntu.com/questions/98972/does-jupiter-really-imp...

I have x220i and I needed to fix mic mute button [1] and add a power management script [2] for saving power while on battery. I still get some graphics corruption with gpu accelerated chrome but it's not too common and I can live with it.

It would be nice if Lenovo or Dell would check how well their laptops (or even some model) worked with linux and tried to get this kind of stuff as default on major distros.

[1] http://askubuntu.com/questions/125367/enabling-mic-mute-butt... [2] http://crunchbanglinux.org/forums/topic/11954

It gets a little complicated. I got a Lenovo g560 with an Ath9k wireless card, and installed Fedora 14 on it and everything worked. I upgraded to Fedora 16 and everything worked except the wireless card. Apparently there is no way to tell the OS anymore that the wireless card is turned on. Filing bugs with Fedora and asking on the ath9k-devel email lists got no help at all.

What worked before no longer works. The card is permanently hardblocked. Supposedly the fix is to install Windows, flip the switch a few times, and then install Linux. I don't want it that badly. I will just figure out ndiswrapper.....

I know nothing about non-Thinkpad Lenovos and but with a quick googling I wouldn't put my money in one. As far as I'm concerned they might as well be Acer laptops.

When people say that Lenovo laptops work well with linux they mostly mean Thinkpad series and even then there are some exceptions. Best out-of-box experience will be with one that has intel cpu+intel wireless+intel gpu and was released a year ago. It's about as safe bet for a high quality fully working linux laptop as you can get.

I have x230, and I have to use a custom kernel, as the standard Ubuntu 12.04 kernel (3.2.x) hangs all flavors (standard/Unity, xubuntu, lubuntu).

HP Touchsmart tm2 here, and not everything works well. It has hybrid graphics (Intel chip for low power, and ATI for more graphically hungry applications) and Ubuntu 12.04 still cannot make any use of the ATI card. Worse, the ATI card is powered together with the Intel GPU at start, making the battery run out very fast and the laptop overheat.

This can be fixed with vga switcheroo, but it's really not an optimal solution. Net, avoid hybrid graphics laptops, usually they don't work well with Linux.

I have a Thinkpad E325, the AMD version. Everything just worked.

I bought a generic run of the mill but powerful Sager NP8662 3 years ago. It's a Clevo, and other than the fingerprint reader, I don't need any other custom drivers on Ubuntu. Even the bloody webcam and card reader work out of the box on 12.04, which I'm extremely surprised since I have to install manually drivers on Windows 7.

I'd say, if you have the money to spend buy an OEM laptop.

I have a Dell Vostro v131 that came preinstalled with Ubuntu 11.10. It's not the fastest computer around, but it's decently fast (I develop for Django, App Engine and Plone), reasonably expandable and seemingly well built. Plus, it's cheap enough you can buy one and a Macbook Air for the price of a high-end ugly Windows notebook.

Everything on the V131 works flawlessly.

T410 here and no issues.

I have a System76 Lemur UltraThin it came with 11.04 pre-installed(I'm now running 12.04) and it runs like a dream

I put it on a relatives Toshiba Satellite. 99% of laptop models are going to be fine with Linux, unless they start implementing secure boot. Drivers wise, the embedded cameras and microphones they put in laptops almost always are from a maker that already has some form of Linux driver.

T430 here. Great machine, but the intel wifi drivers for the 6300 chip are unusably buggy at the moment.

I use LinuxMint 13 on Ideapad Y470. It has 8GB RAM, 750GB HDD, slot for mSATA SSD and NVidia 550M GPU.

I run Bumblebee + BBSwitch for NVidia Optimus and it is blazing fast. Sleep works fine and I feel the battery life is much better than running Win7.

Dell Inspiron here, was running Ubuntu 10.04 for two years and recently installed 12.04. It's the first time in the last 5-6 years I've been running Linux on various laptops that suspend actually works (out of the box at least).

My previous machine was a Dell Latitude E6500, and it ran (well, still runs) Karmic like a champ. Suspend worked great there too.

I have a Lenovo X220 and a Lenovo X1. Both work well with Ubuntu.

I've got a Lenovo G770. Not particularly pretty but seems solid and has a nice big 17" screen for a decent price. I dual-boot Windows and Ubuntu without problems.

I agree. I have installed 12.04 on an old i5 Toshiba u505 and a 13" MacBook Pro (wiped OS X since I have OS X on my Air, and an old backup MacBook).

I don't remember having any problems.

Actually, most of new laptops do not work out of the box with Ubuntu 12.04 - you need to manually compile and/or install a custom Linux kernel in order to avoid hanging, as it is documented here: http://partiallysanedeveloper.blogspot.com/2012/05/ivy-bridg... and here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2005305.

For some reason Canonical decided to sacrifice stability and focus on something most users don't think they need (Unity).

Couple of things - replace "majority of new" with "ivy bridge chipsets ". A lot of people actually buy sandy bridge or even AMD you know.

Second, while I share somewhat common opinions on Unity, this particular example is a kernel bug. Most likely, ubuntu will backport those changes to 12.04 or has already provided a ppa for a newer kernel.

Well, I work at a Linux shop, and I don't know anyone who would buy an AMD laptop to run Linux on it. And it's been more than two months since IvyBridge release, so a laptop that runs SandyBridge is probably not technically new (it can be never used, but already morally old... :)

Yes, this is a kernel issue, already fixed in 3.3.x. But Canonical has no intention of backporting it to 12.04 (3.2 kernel). And we are talking here about "just working", not installing an unsupported kernel manually from a dev repository.

Sandy Bridge had the same sort of problem. It took a year to get Linux graphics working properly.

Canonical is also very aggressive about ARM support, and they want to be among the very first to support Cortex A15 and then the ARMv8 architecture. They're also making a big play with ARM servers and Ubuntu.

> George said the laptop won’t be able to dual boot Windows. But Dell made available an Ubuntu install image customized for the XPS13, so you could buy the Windows version and install Ubuntu yourself if you require dual booting.

They probably don't mean the laptop "can't dual-boot Windows," but that it requires extra steps in deleting Linux, installing Windows, then installing Linux.

There's almost certainly no need to delete linux first: just install windows and then fix the bootloader.

>If Dell's Windows installs are any indication, that means it's going to be loaded with crapware or custom non-OSS drivers.

I don't know how long it's been since you've bought a Dell Win PC, but they aren't 'loaded' with crapware, not like it used to be. I just got an XPS 8300 from the Outlet, and all I had to do was remove McAffee and the Dell Support Suite. I went into Add/Remove Programs, uninstalled each, and shortly thereafter, it might as well have been a fresh install of Windows.

"What I'd like (and I suspect many other developers would too) is a nice laptop that I can install Linux on, and have it Just Work."

Well, the first thing I want is for it to just work. Sleep/Wake should just work. The trackpad should just work. Etc. Oh, and it should all work well.

After that I would love to be able to install some other version of linux and have it just work, but having a Dell version that just works is a big improvement over things not just working.

Again, it's all perspective. iPads just work, closed game consoles just work. Linux can just work (until the next update) but a lot of the time it doesn't.

And that's just the way I like it, because in the end (for me), its the only OS I can configure to such a degree that it lets me "just work".

I'd rather have my trackpad, sound, sleep/wake, graphics driver, etc ... work out of the box than to have an extreme degree of configurability.

You are right, this is my perspective, but for Dell it's also a matter of numbers. Which direction, if they can't do both now, will sell more laptops, cause fewer returns, etc.

That stuff works as well as it does on Windows 7 (I'm forced to use Windows 7 at the moment on a contract); everything you named is as reliable, IMHO.

I'm wondering if these might be a better route than what Dell is proposing: http://zareason.com/shop/Laptops/

Thanks for this link - I have been searching for hardware along these lines for quite some time.

Don't forget System76. Their offerings are a bit slim at the moment since the line is being updated to Ivy Bridge:

https://www.system76.com/laptops/

Or Ohava:

http://www.ohava.com/openbook

My only problem with System76 is their focus on Ubuntu. I'm sure it is fine, and I am happy it is out there, but it isn't ideal for me.

Ohava is new to me though - thanks!

I doubt there is any crapware or really, and significant software difference in the Dell version beyond a desktop link. It seems extremely unlikely to me that they're doing much in terms of software customization. I'm sure you could get the laptop to dual-boot -- what are they going to do, modify GRUB2? --, but you'd need somewhere to install the other OS.

What they could do and which would be bad is use some sort of component which requires a non-free driver that's not supported well/anymore (so you're stuck with Ubuntu 12.x) or non-redistributable (ie. only available as part of Dell's iso). Let's say they ship a 100% proprietary and non-redistributable driver for NVIDIA's Optimus. But that seems very unlikely (if somewhat hilarous). And other than that I can't imagine any reason why you'd have any issue installing any other Linux distribution.

Though most laptops I tried worked out of box with Ubuntu, I still agree that there are lot of work that can be done for drivers. I recently got my sister a laptop. She is non-tech but is perfectly comfortable with Ubuntu. The only problem she faced was with driver for the 3G USB data card she had. I'm hopeful if laptop vendors push Linux, it will solve such little issues with time too.

One thing that always bothered me is that its has always been hard to get a decent laptop without Windows. I hate paying for Windows which I had no use of, and got that removed as soon as I bought laptops. Even if I may not use Dell's install of Ubuntu and replace it with my own choice of distribution, I wouldn't mind them shipping Ubuntu, as overall I'm hopeful this would push hardware vendors to get more serious about Linux drivers overall.

That's been possible for a long time on Dell laptops.

I've had 3 Dell laptops running Linux and I've never had a problem. Recently I've been using Mint, but before that I used Debian and before that Slackware. The biggest problem I ever had is that some of the wireless drivers had to be installed via module-assistant, which is annoying. Also, I couldn't get accelerated OpenGL on one of them, but that was due to an ancient video card that was unsupported even on Windows at that point.

I will admit they were second hand laptops, so maybe the bugs were worked out in the time between their being released and my buying them.

I got one of the original Linux Dells with Ubuntu on it back in the day, and it was a nice effort, actually. I opened up the box, fired it up, and it was a fairly standard Ubuntu that I kept using without having to fiddle with it all. It was a very pleasant experience, and sold me on Dell. I'll be in the market for a new laptop next summer, so hopefully this goes well. My big worry is finding another machine with a screen like this one (1920x1200, 15"), as I've gotten used to the screen real estate.

I don't think you can buy those anymore, unless you go for an old one. The last Dell with 16:10 screen was M6500, I believe. Now the best you can hope for is 1920x1080.

I bought one of the Dell laptops that came with Ubuntu a few years ago and I'm typing this on it.

I simply installed stock Ubuntu immediately after receiving it due to the same fear of crapware. But still, having it come with Ubuntu preinstalled means I knew all the hardware would work, as it has so far. Also it means I voted with my dollars for wider adoption of Linux by vendors.

This is the differentiation of OEMs at play here, they will just apply the same crapware they have been installing on Windows, on Linux as well.

If the OS and hardware are not from the same vendor, this is always bound to happen.

they provide an iso that will Just Work(tm) on their 13 inch ultrabook today.

They look nice, maybe you should get one.

Yeah but that's the problem... I don't want a special mystery Dell ISO, I want to use stock Ubuntu and have it Just Work. Using Dell's ISO locks you in to that certain image (upgrades are very likely dependent on Dell), it locks you in to Dell support (good luck posting in the Ubuntu forums about your super-special Dell ISO), and it almost certainly means they're not contributing back to the OSS community (though that's not so much a pain point as it is a general gripe).

Why do you assume it's so "super-special"? I doubt they'd have the rights to call it Ubuntu if it didn't have the standard package manager configuration pulling updates from Canonical.

The OP's argument is precisely about the fact that they shouldn't provide any ISO at all!

Just make sure your ultrabook is Ubuntu-certified or something and let people install the official version.

They could just get the hardware Ubuntu certified, literally. It might actually cost Dell less, too. Of course everyone wants their own "ecosystem", so maybe they'd rather just lose the customers if they can't lock them in.

http://www.ubuntu.com/certification/