Linux has always worked great if you choose your hardware wisely, and for a long time in the 90's it was perfectly viable to put a Linux machine against an SGI, Sun or DEC system as a workstation. Really, Linux had traction even before the 21st century cloud and 'droid reality came along.
For most of the 90's I was using Linux in some capacity, professionally as well as personally.
I also had a Linux laptop (Winbook, Sony, and then Sceptre..) on which I did a lot of development and for which my carefully selected hardware did in fact work, just fine - it was certainly viable as a dev platform, and for us Unix programmers at the time, a small and light Linux laptop was far more preferable to the pizzaboxes that had to be carried in the trunk .. or more, bigger iron that you would stay at the office to use, instead of having at home.
The point is Linux really did okay in the 90's, in terms of providing Unix devs a way of working away from the computer room. I think this is an underappreciated mechanism behind Linux' success over the years .. you could carry Linux with you pretty easily, but this was not the case for Solaris, Irix, etc.
What Linux laptops? It hardly worked properly in most desktops.
The first laptop I managed to get Linux working at all was a Toshiba in 1999, while these systems were being sold since 1992.