Unless your hardware is exotic (or actively anti-consumer), most devices are well supported. If you wouldn't mind, what issues did you have recently?
This isn't an issue with the hardware being too new or anything; it all works and the firmwares are all available, but Ubuntu's kernel snaps don't ship them and they make it much harder to get them yourself either.
If Lenovo's own adapter doesn't work on one of the most well supported product lines on Linux, that is not a good look.
To be very clear, I am a long time Linux user and most of the third-party stuff usually just works.
My [old] laptop had a a card reader, hdmi, vga, a serial port and rows of usb2 ports, a plug for power, headphone jack etc etc
Back at his place he showed me the USB hub and the Rube Goldberg dongle collection. I said, ahh there you have all those connectors you didn't need.
I now think USB is magic. Not wanting to use it for everything means you are getting old. The future is a desk full of dongles.
https://resolume.com/forum/download/file.php?id=5430&mode=vi...
I eventually gave up and bought a Macbook and installed Homebrew and Rectangle on it. I haven't thought about drivers or firmware updates for that device since I bought it.
If I did own a desktop, I would use linux on it, and I solely use linux when I'm using VMs or cloud providers.
Recently started working at a company that uses windows and .net and it's so bad.
You should have used their special (released by them) nonfree ISO or Ubuntu and you would've been fine.
Your stuff is probably supported by official debian repos, just not ones that are enabled by default.
Try Linux sometime again! You won't regret it.
As a small tip, I prefer using Arch-based distributions as they get new kernels rapidly and therefore new hardware support comes fast. They’re also an obvious choice for people who play games on Steam since SteamOS is arch based.
In the AI age, almost any problem with Linux is a quick query or copy/pasted error message away. The days of spending hours on troubleshooting are over.
If you were willing to buy a whole new piece of hardware with a MacBook, perhaps you’d be willing to buy a Linux-first laptop in the future? For example, the Framework 13 Pro has purportedly caught up to many of the advantages of a MacBook Pro (battery life, haptic trackpad, CNC aluminum chassis), judging by early press impressions. Over half of Framework 13” customers install Linux and it’s Ubuntu certified. Besides being the premier Linux laptop, you also get all the repairability and modularity benefits the brand has on offer.
I personally own the current non-Pro model and despite its shortcomings that the new model doesn’t have (I have my preorder in), the overall package is a pretty modern laptop where 100% of the hardware works flawlessly with Linux.
Even if you aren’t looking for that type of machine and just want something from a more common OEM like Lenovo or ASUS, I have found that solid Linux support is not tough to find. Basically any common laptop that’s older than 6 months old is well-supported. One of my friends bought a $500 ThinkPad T14 on eBay and of course 100% of the hardware works.
Macs are the gold standard for not having any need to mess with drivers, but I have found my AMD graphics driver to be a lot more stable in Linux than in Windows. That was the major decision point in wiping my desktop gaming PC and installing CachyOS.
My “final straw” motivation to leave macOS on my laptop last year was Liquid Glass. Other motivations included my frustration with certain Apple services and the level of abstraction and lock-in they have, running out of storage space in my system, as well as frustration with my laptop being capable enough but unable to play any of most of my PC games from a software standpoint.
Returning to speaking of something relevant to this article, now that I have no macOS or Windows, I am no longer tied down with Thunderbolt as the only viable desktop email client anymore as I don’t need to support all three operating systems. I’m enjoying Evolution a lot more than Thunderbird, but of course there are numerous Linux-only choices I could have gone with.
Of what is builtin, the fingerprint reader and the numberpad functionality of the touchpad don't work.
Everything else works fine though.
They're at least free :)
On Ubuntu, I've purchased 3 different docking stations, and tried 2 existing ones, and none has worked quite right (some just flat out don't have all the drivers they need). The Windows laptop I have (which is extremely similar in hardware and generation), if you get a video signal out to a monitor, it's a very safe bet everything else works.
Back to "Practically Free" for old Dell docking stations. I acquired 3 of them for about 15-20 each shipped off eBay. lol At least I'm not sinking hundreds of dollars into each attempt at a docking station that may or may not work.
Bruh.
2 weeks ago I was getting full kernel crashes on Ubuntu Server due to an Intel iGPU on a Dell Laptop with a 7th gen i7. Fortunately Claude Code fixed it after a couple of attempts, but still.
Audio was completely corrupt on a Bazzite HTPC I tried to set up 6 months ago, until I changed some setting on my TV related to 10-bit colour. Then, when that was sorted Kodi would only run in 30Hz despite the fact that other apps supported 60.
My previous laptop with Arch (circa 2020) sometimes wouldn't wake from sleep.
When I ran an OpenSUSE Desktop (circa 2019) I picked Noveau instead of the proprietary drivers, and the picture was all corrupt. Then when I installed the proper Nvidia drivers, I did the wrong thing and my whole screen turned black, Linus-style.
I then switched the same desktop to Ubuntu, which was better out of the box, but would stop reading my USB SD card reader after unplugging it a few times. WiFi would also randomly drop out until I rebooted the whole system every few hours, and when talking to my Brother Laser Printer it would only print in like 30dpi or somthing ridiculous. I was emailing the files to myself, rebooting back into Windows and then printing from there because it was so bad.
The 5 year gap between the current Linux attempts and the last one had less to do with Linux improvements and more to do with agentic LLMs being able to paper over all the cracks. To be fair, though, I expect regular people having access to Opus 4.5-tier or higher models will result in all kinds of minor issues that would normally be overlooked actually getting fixed on Linux. (Thinking about it a bit more, regular users will have access to subsidised tokens too, so a million open source devs running $20 Claude Pro subscriptions might between them be able to do way more with that $20 million than Microsoft could with Enterprise API access).
We regularly buy dell latitudes or ThinkPad TPX series NEW ones for a large University. 100% Linux only usage.
Usual sleep/resume problems. No other problems
All problems with gfx you state are often listed in all dell forums - with windows.
Aliexpress style mini HT PC are always with poor drivers - even on Windows. Not just bazzite.