
Buying a Linux-Ready Laptop - jrepinc
https://opensource.com/article/19/7/linux-laptop
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geophile
My friend had a Purism, which was a frustrating experience in many ways. And
it was quite expensive.

I am a very happy customer of System76. I got a Galago. Ten days later, the
Darter was released. I returned the Galago, got the Darter, no problems
whatsoever. And support has been excellent.

The Darter, running Pop OS is an extremely nice machine: Great keyboard, good
touchpad; although a bit too sensitive while using the keyboard; good screen;
and Pop OS is a beautiful and stable OS.

My daily driver had been a 2015 MBP, but the newer MBPs are extremely
disappointing. The Darter provides so much more for the money.

~~~
m463
I have a purism, and it has been great.

One wonderful thing was _really_ standard hardware. Like standard screws,
standard power adapter with normal barrel jack, standard memory, standard
flash slot, standard 2.5" hard drive bay and standard screws.

All the hardware was chosen so no binary blobs were required.

Later I installed arch linux on it (which I like immensely)

One challenge was trying to figure out exactly what hardware I really had, but
I muddled through. It would have been nice to have a table from day one
showing every detail, such as screen resolution, touchpad model, exact
wireless chipset, etc. It would also have been nice to have sane defaults for
things like the touchpad. Apple trackpads really spoil you - they are by
default very well tuned, and you get precise control without glitches like
movements during typing.

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roseway4
Canonical has certified a range of hardware for Ubuntu use. This includes the
Lenovo P1/X1 Extreme (I run Pop OS on the former), a variety of Dells, and
many other high-quality laptops that your IT team may be comfortable
supporting.

[https://certification.ubuntu.com/](https://certification.ubuntu.com/)

I appreciate the work that System76 has put into smoothing out many of the
rough edges of using Linux on a laptop but haven't felt compelled to consider
their products, nor those from other boutique vendors. They all appear to be
relatively expensive vs Lenovo/Dell etc and, at times, look to be clunky/have
inferior build quality.

~~~
true_tuna
I roll an x1. Works great.

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wilsonfiifi
Or you could just grab yourself a sleek dell XPS 13 developer edition that
ships with Ubuntu [0].

    
    
      [0] https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/dell-laptops-and-notebooks/xps-13-developer-edition/spd/xps-13-9380-laptop/cax13w10p1c706subuntu

~~~
true_tuna
I’ve got an xps 13 with coil whine. Fucking sucks. Bought an x1 instead.

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kstatz12
My two daily drivers are a System76 Galago and a Thinkpad T480. The only
complaint i have about the system76 is the fans go like hell when I have a web
browser open, much less intellij. The thinkpad is great and the extra support
is fantastic

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Data_Junkie
It's like people don't know you can just install Linux on anything for free.

~~~
rlpb
That's not necessarily true. Especially for beginners - they often end up in
driver (un)availability hell for some component or another.

~~~
cocoa19
Even if there are drivers, a lot of them are really buggy.

I'd expect official Linux support to guarantee better quality level (less
buggy)

~~~
saghm
I don't begrudge anyone buying a laptop with Linux pre-installed, but at least
in my experience, most mainstream laptops work pretty well out of the box with
Linux nowadays. In the past decade, I've used a a custom Sager notebook, a
Lenovo Ideapad, and most recently, an HP Elitebook, and on all three, wifi and
graphics worked without needing to do any driver configuration. On the
Elitebook (which I'm typing this comment from), the touch screen even worked
out of the box on Linux, which surprised me, as I wasn't planning on getting
it working myself if it didn't.

~~~
Boulth
I had a similar experience with Dell XPS 13 and Arch. Everything worked out of
the box including touch screen and external dock (monitors, USB). Actually I
had the feeling it worked even better than on Windows (where the dock needed
some fiddling with USB 3 drivers).

~~~
scifi6546
I got the dell precision 5520 with ubuntu preinstalled and I promptly
installed arch. My experience (aside from nvidia) was pretty much as good as
it gets with linux. I never had any issues with wifi etc. If one is spending
1k+ on a laptop I would recomend buying it with linux because 1. you know that
all of the chips are compatible with linux and 2. it is usually $100 cheaper

