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Poll: What's the best laptop for Linux these days?
345 points by killjoywashere on Dec 30, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 427 comments
So, Apple recently stopped supporting the last version of OS X that would run on a 2012 15" retina MacBook Pro. In case you missed it, this design was the last one influenced by Steve Jobs and was absolutely epic, untouchable for almost a decade, really not surpassed until the M1 MacBooks came out.

Odds of me getting away with not using OS X are slim to none. But, I do enjoy my old ThinkPads running Ubuntu and find myself wondering if there are any non-Lenovo options that are real contenders these days. Any recommended go-bys for set-up or feature selections would be especially appreciated. My quick review suggests the top choices are listed below, but of course write-ins are welcome.

ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 10
183 points
Framework
176 points
M1 MacBook Pro
82 points
Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition
73 points
Lenovo T14

Lenovo T480/490

73 points
System 76 Oryx Pro
47 points
Star Labs Starfighter
15 points
HP Dev One
8 points
2019 Intel MacBook Pro
6 points


I see very disparate use cases for these laptops, so the competition is not really that fair.

- Fastest CPU + GPU + battery life, x64 not needed, money no object: M1 MBP.

- Reliable, serviceable, upgradeable, fashion-despising: T14 / T480 / T490.

- Serviceable, upgradable, but sort of new kids on the block, and less fashion-oblivious: Star Labs Starfighter, Framework, System 76 Oryx Pro.

- Sleek-looking at the expense of everything soldered and glued down: Thinkpad X1, MBP 2019.

- Open-source loving, more things under user's control: System 76 Oryx Pro, Star Labs Starfighter, partly Framework.

Star Labs Starfighter looks incredible BTW, thanks to bringing it to my attention. I sorely miss a trackpoint though.

No idea about others. I'd like to like HP Dev One, but I don't trust HP to make reliable things any more :(

I wonder why no model from the Dell Latitude line made it here; I thought some of them have good Linux support.


Even though M1 MBP runs Linux, it has a very basic GPU driver, no hardware acceleration for video decoding/encoding. The "Fastest CPU + GPU + battery life" probably will not be true if using Linux on it. Would be great if Asahi users could provide regular benchmarks between MacOS and Linux on M1, to see how it is progressing.

When it comes to Thinkpads and other similar laptops - get one without the dedicated Nvidia GPU. That is just a nightmare on Linux.


> When it comes to Thinkpads and other similar laptops - get one without the dedicated Nvidia GPU. That is just a nightmare on Linux.

Second this. I got a Thinkpad P1 off eBay (basically the X1C with a dedicated GPU) from a similar recommendation thread on HN somewhere and actually have gotten it to work but this aspect has been difficult to sort out.


Using Oryx Pro with Nvidia, and it is a breeze. Depends on your manufacturer supporting your hardware, I guess.


P1 is based on X1 extreme, not X1 carbon, just FYI


Thirded. As an owner of Thinkpad X1 Extreme with Nvidia GPU, I'm never going to buy another laptop with Nvidia inside.


What problems have you been having?


I shared some in my comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34183088


I have 4 ThinkPads with Nvidia GPUs on my desk now and none had driver issues in Ubuntu, they all work out of the box.


They do "work", but the dynamic GPU switching is problematic, especially with Wayland. Especially when using external monitors. I could not have decent performance and heat/noise using external monitors.

You can (and really have to) stick to using X but multi-dpi monitor mixing there is problematic.

Also the KMS and tty management seems a bit buggy with Nvidia (even with early KMS).

And then even after you get all of this working "fine" with X or Wayland expect some random crashes of the desktop environment.

Then if you somehow survive the crashes, sleep mode is extremely unreliable, even when using the correct nvidia systemd hooks.

Not all of these are "driver" issues, but those are real life issues when trying to use multi-gpu laptops with Linux, when one of those GPU's come from Nvidia.

I also have Linux computers with Intel and AMD GPU's and that is a completely different story.


This is usually because the video outputs are often connected only to the discrete gpu, while the laptop screen is only connected to the integrated GPU, meaning you have to use both if you want monitors. On desktop, NVIDIA mostly works if you stick to X11 and deal with their proprietary driver. However, the hybrid graphics switching presents a lot of problems. Some ThinkPads actually can behave like desktops and disable the iGPU entirely, since they have a mux that can connect the dGPU to the laptop screen directly, without using any render offload shenanigans, though at a great cost of battery life.


Noveau or Nvidia's proprietary? How's battery life when you're not using the GPU heavily (normal desktop work)?


Nvidia proprietary. Never was interested in battery life to be honest. However my Thinkpad P1 gen3 does last coding over 4h flights, can tell you that.


I voted for the Dell XPS, but really wanted to vote for the Dell Latitude.

I recently upgraded to a refurbished 8th gen (KBL, top of the line i7 model with NVMe and Thunderbolt) Latitude 7390, and everything "just works", including BIOS updates via LVFS/fwupd with only a few days lag over the announcement on Dell's site. With this level of support I finally feel like a first class citizen running Linux.

Oh, and it has a proper selection of ports, including wired LAN.


I, meanwhile, have a Dell Precision 5570 and on the latest LTS Ubuntu it suffers from intermittent trackpad lag; crashing when moving from one docking station to another when suspended; the fans sometimes running when suspended; poor audio quality from the built-in microphone; it intermittently becomes unresponsive to mouse and keyboard; and it exclusively has USB C ports.

I very much do not feel like a first class citizen running Linux :(


I have a Dell Latitude at work and a Dell XPS at home, both running Windows and both have always and constantly had issues with docking stations and also sleep. I have to hibernate them instead of sleeping to avoid random crashes, and I power up each laptop and log in before connecting to the docking station. Kinda dumb that I have to deal with this in 2022 on flagship laptops running the vendor's chosen OS.


> crashing when moving from one docking station to another when suspended;

That is a thing? To be honest not sonething I'd expect to work reliably under any OS, the low-level complexities involved are mind-boggling.

The rest do seem like legit complaints, that's a shame.


Given the docking station is basically a USB peripheral that supplies power? Being able to unplug and replug USB peripherals while asleep seems like a reasonable expectation to me.


No it's not. Assuming the OP means something vaguely modern, it'll be a Thunderbolt dock that shares PCIe devices to the host. Try and work out the complexity of a PCIe device disappearing while you're "asleep" in your head. Trust me, you don't want to go there.


The latest LTS is 22.04, right? Maybe you'd have more luck with a newer non-LTS version; might have more driver improvements.


Update touchpad firmware to get rid of the intermittent lag.


> I'd like to like HP Dev One, but I don't trust HP to make reliable things any more :(

I second this. And even while they do work, build quality is atrocious and you can never really say they're "good". The worst offender is by far the screen. The quality is so unbelievably, absurdly, ridiculously bad for a laptop that costs the same as an MBP (32 GB RAM / 512 GB SSD).

You also better not be bothered by coil whine and an unbalanced fan fresh out of the box (but at least it doesn't spin that often).

Since the keyboard is pretty nasty, you probably won't use it that often, so you won't notice that it doesn't lay flat on the table and, therefore, it creaks.

It just feels an all-round cheap imitation of a macbook.

But, to the point of this post, Linux runs perfectly on it. Every last piece of hardware is supported, which hasn't been the case on Windows until a few weeks ago (no webcam on my amd model, and wonky dp-passhtrough through a hp (!) dock on my intel model).

These impressions are based on multiple generations of Elitebooks. The dev one seems similar, but actually cheaper, so it may be a better deal.


> - Sleek-looking at the expense of everything soldered and glued down: Thinkpad X1, MBP 2019.

Thinkpad X1 Extreme doesn't have soldered/glued down setup (well, except the battery): both RAM and SSD are user replaceable. Though one might argue that it is essentially a P-series machine...


Sorry; that was my extrapolation from other X1 Carbons.


Wow that StarFighter looks awesome! Too bad about the lack of trackpoint though.

I wonder if they'll come out with an ARM model. Open source OS's are in a good position to take advantage of alternate CPU architectures.


Has anyone actually received one yet, though? I can't seem to find any actual reviews.


If you configure a StarFighter model on their website, it says it will ship in "4-5 months" and have a production run of 1000 units. So not out yet.

They also offer a more moderately priced StarBook model which ships in "4-5 weeks". Fossbytes gave this laptop a generally positive, though not outstanding review: https://fossbytes.com/starbook-mk-v-from-star-labs-review/


I would add the System 76 Lemur for an open-source, under-user-control, thin, and light laptop.


Agree, as long as you use a v6 kernel. I have had many months of hard lockups and reboots on v5 installs, all of which disappeared on kernel upgrade.

Besides that, I love my Lemur Pro


> - Reliable, serviceable, upgradeable, fashion-despising: T14 / T480 / T490.

I got motivated to buy the T14 as my next machine until I saw that the RAM is not upgradable. Only SSD and the extra M.2 slot. :(

EDIT: At least the gen 3

EDIT 2: And the AMD version.


Another happy Dell user here. I'm actually not using a laptop any more, but I started with an Inspirion in 2007 and that ran at the time Fedora Core with no problems everything worked out of the box. I've since stuck with Dells and have been very happy.


I just wanted to add that the M1 has a limitation on the number of display outputs iirc 2 for the MBP, 1 for the MBA (but > 0 solutions exist, each with their own limitations).


> but > 0 solutions exist, each with their own limitations

What are you trying to say with this “> 0” syntax? That solutions exist?


it was meant to be > 1, indicating that it’s multiple, ie more than 1.


While the M1 MBP is indeed the most efficient CPU/GPU combo, it is not the fastest overall.


Why leave HP out of the equation? I have an EliteBook, it has two RAM slots, serviceable SSD, battery, etc. Linux works with literally 0 issues.


HP, from my experience, has a number of pretty good ideas, but I was unimpressed by the mechanical unreliability of the result :(


I'm typing this on a brand-new Lenovo (T14s gen 3 AMD), the first brand-new laptop I've bought myself in about a decade

the wifi didn't work on the 5.15 LTS kernel that NixOS defaults to, so I had to upgrade to 6.0. and there's some wonkiness with suspend, where the system will sometimes re-suspend itself a moment after opening the lid. a minor annoyance that I haven't taken the time to debug yet.

my previous Lenovos, I've always bought used ~3 year old models from eBay and local refurbishers. these slightly outdated models would always work perfectly with LTS kernels, no fiddling needed.

so if Linux compatibility is a higher priority than having the absolute newest hardware, I can definitely recommend looking at used Lenovos.

in particular, I recommend buying a model with no SSD whenever possible, and ordering a brand-new SSD separately. this way you know you're not getting an elderly drive, or one that was used for Chia mining, or whatever.


My T430s is still going strong.

The good thing is that with Linux you don’t need the latest hardware to have a snappy system.

The bad thing is that not having the latest hardware is required if you don’t want to tinker.


Not meant to be downer (as a very, very happy owner of a pocket T420s if its replacement T480s should fail me):

To anyone considering going back this far in hardware gen, my T420s (i7, 16GB memory, LUKS-encrypted SSD needed for work) on Mint + MATE DE could flat-out _not_ handle work video calls unless it was the _only_ thing that was running with everything else closed down. Even then, it was watching slideshows.

It was the sole reason I needed to buy a new (as in a secondhand T480s on eBay last year) machine.


Arte you certain your Zoom or whatever is using GPU?

I had to tweak something to make Zoom and Youtube see the GPU better (for Youtube, something in the Firefox about:config), and it lowered CPU load on my i5 CPU quite a bit, down to things becoming pretty fluid (T470, currently at 6.0.12 but it worked with 5.x, too).

While I fondly remember my T420 from 2011, its CPU was sort of... underpowered by today's standards.


I certainly tinkered around a lot with it over the years until it was blocking my work when I got my first remote job. Seeing the rebuttals here, sounds like it's worth dusting it off and giving it another shot at some point.


Not sure about T420s, but my T420 handled Zoom calls with Codium and browser running in the background (and sometimes used too) just fine. One thing it couldn't handle however is recording the call (the recording was like 1 FPS and almost no sound).

Ubuntu, Xfce, can't recall the specs right now but definitely not top of the line.


Even if the call was recorded in the cloud?


I assume he means OBS or some such running locally.


Yeah. Zoom's built in recording didn't work for some reason (and tbh I'm not sure that would be in cloud either).


That could have been a distro bug though. Ubuntu has an issue right now where some hardware configs will have a hard time with browser based video if a USB headset is plugged in; YouTube sits and spins for me on a dual Xeon Dell Workstation that’s 2 years old, with 32GB RAM and dual 2080s using any browser.

As soon as I unplug the wireless headset from its USB charging cable, smooths right out.

I’m not saying you hit the same bug I’m saying software is hard.


Zero issues with that on my T420. (Using modern gnome, afaik i5 16gb ram and no extra graphics). I can even attach it to the TV and watch in full HD (so more than the screen even has) without any compromise.


> with Linux you don’t need the latest hardware

If you work with compiled languages, having good hardware is a real quality of life improvement.


Depends strongly on the language and what you're compiling. C++ builds are glacial on any hardware. Plain C is usually just fine. I'm using a T430 and T61, and my life is great.


Rust and Haskell take time.

I haven't tried C++.

I have a 2021 M1 and a Linux laptop with a i7-11700 desktop CPU.

And compiling takes shorter on my computers than a lot of other computers.


I work mostly with C on embedded targets where build times are not really an issue. If I have to build a Linux kernel, that's a different story.


> My T430s is still going strong.

Mine too! I would say it all depends on use case. If OP has certain tasks in mind they should maybe invest in something more powerful/newer. Having said that the t430s is a solid machine.


IMHO ARM ThinkPads have a lot of potential due to their low-heat fanless design.

The X13s is nearly there in terms of Linux support, better in some regards than the M1. Next generation will be hopefully closer to the M1 in terms of performance.

However, pricing is weird in some markets. Here in EU/UK, the X13s is really expensive and makes no sense to purchase.


I had my eye on the x13s, but the lack of ports is a real bummer.


I'm using NixOS 22.11 with a Thinkpad T490s and it's basically flawless. Everything works as expected, including the fingerprint reader. My best Linux laptop experience yet.


I only recently replaced my T420 with T460s as my daily driver. M girlfriend got a T570 or 80.

There have been zero issues with Linux compatibility, just install and good to go.

I only recommend and would buy thinkpads. Also because as you said you get them very affordable after they spend 2 years in a office.


You could probably replace WiFi chip with Intel one and it would have avoided the issue. I did that with a few Lenovo laptops, but you should watch out for their WiFi chips whitelisting, which is a very annoying hidden blocker if you aren't aware of it.

> and there's some wonkiness with suspend

Check their UEFI, I think they started adding an option for Linux there specifically to handle suspend better. Set it to Linux instead of Windows.


The nixos-hardware module also upgrades your linux kernel for this model already: https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-hardware/blob/e2f9c6f7360f3e0...


I bought almost new x13 AMD 1gen and everything worked without any issues from day 1, on Debian. But it was like a year from first reviews.

So maybe getting brand new on day 1 can give some issues or it's related to NixOS (I have no experience with it)


>where the system will sometimes re-suspend itself a moment after opening the lid. a minor annoyance that I haven't taken the time to debug yet

heh, I have a similar issue on my T470 in xfce. And in my case it can sometimes even hang in this state: you see your desktop, but can't interact with it. So you have to go the terminal and kill screensaver service.

The small issues like these are the reason why I still prefer to use macbook for work: its not perfect and might be too opinionated, but at least it is predictable.


I've gotten myself a Dell Latitude 7330 Rugged Extreme laptop recently. It's what my ideal laptop is supposed to be: easily serviceable, plenty of ports, indestructible and linux-friendly. Even the onboard WLAN supports monitoring mode. Running NixOS+xmonad on it, encountered no problems whatsoever after it was configured. One major difference from an ordinary laptop experience is the old-style resistive trackpad, but I can live with it because I don't use mouse as much.

The firmware can't be replaced with Coreboot unfortunately, but it is fantastic for a laptop. I have never seen a BIOS with so many configurable settings. There's even a key combo which shuts off all radio, lights and LEDs, which of course can be configured in detail.

Don't get the rubberized keyboard because it's impossible to type a sentence on. I also suggest ordering the m.2 NVMe separately to save serious money, and the Snapdragon X55 DW5930e modem from Aliexpress at a fraction of the price.

I've also heard legends about how great Dell's Worldwide repair program is where people have had parts delivered to them next day on the island of Borneo in Indonesia, but that's yet to be tested.


> I've also heard legends about how great Dell's Worldwide repair program is where people have had parts delivered to them next day on the island of Borneo in Indonesia, but that's yet to be tested.

This was a long time ago, but I bought a Dell with Ubuntu while visiting my parents in Oregon, and took it back with me to where I was living in Innsbruck, Austria.

The hard drive (I told you this was a while back) died on me. I called up Dell, and expected some nightmare of having to ship it back to the US where I'd bought it and waiting months and who knows what.

But what actually happened was some guy showed up at my door the next day with a new drive and swapped it out.

I was so impressed.


I recently paid for Dell's next day service with a new PC purchase. The PC arrived broken, and Dell refused to send anyone out to fix it. Instead, I waited weeks for a replacement, feeling like a chump.

When I complained to Dell, none of their employees seemed to understand that they had failed to honor their warranty, or why I would be disappointed.

The replacement machine works fine, but Dell violated their agreement with me and so I can no longer recommend them.


Were they local to the area?


I'm imagining someone in the US saying, "I've always wanted to go to Austria!", hopping on a plane, and arriving the next day.


I think the guy came down from Munich, which was about a 2 hour drive, but I don't recall exactly, it was a long time ago.


I don't know if I'd describe the Rugged Extreme as ideal for anything except "most likely to survive a car accident"


You can then use the laptop to reset any vehicle error codes using the built-in RS232 port and a CAN adapter!


That’s the tough developer life for ya


I have been way less than happy with my plain 4yo Latitude 7490, although rumor says Dells should be pretty durable:

- The battery got swollen and destroyed the clips in the underneath cover when it pushed it off.

- Have had to replace both of my memory modules (Hynix something), and replace with another brand, after they broke.

- Memory modules requires re-seating at least a few times a month, especially if I run with the computer in a backpack (this is supposed to be possible to do with a durable laptop, no?)

- The NVMe SSD harddrive has needed multiple re-seatings.

- Some possible further glitches I might have forgotten.

Sad on a laptop which otherwise feels pretty great. I like the slighly rubberized coating, the keyboard, touchpad and screen, and weight is not too bad either.

Anyways, this makes me a slight bit skeptical about Dell's reputation as a durable brand in general. Others having some more hard facts on this? (I have been lately looking more towards Asus ExpertBooks, with claimed military standard durability).


Just looked it up, I see the appeal of just toting this in your hand while flying with no other baggage (assuming the battery lasts forever), but what’s the price again? The center review said it’ll cost almost 10 grand.


Yes it's pricey, though you can get one almost new from eBay at 1/3 of the retail cost.

And yeah the batteries are great, `powertop` reported 55h battery life remaining at 60% backlight with a single `st` terminal window open. And the backlight is blindingly bright at the max setting, so it's also usable in direct sunlight.

The laptop will also charge off of any USB-C power source like the weakest phone charger, makes me think that it'll take charge even from serially wired potatoes.


The slightly less rugged, but also less heavy, "Latitude 5430 Rugged" (-Extreme) looks seriously interesting.


Someone correct me if I am missing some nuance here but I think the two MacBook options aren't contenders for best laptop running Linux. The drivers simply don't support basic things like the touchpad or wifi (at least not without extensive reworking and a modified kernel). Perhaps in some years Asahi Linux will be functional as a daily driver on the newer ARM/Apple Silicon but it's definitely a hobby laptop right now, and not close to being "best laptop for Linux".


Linus himself uses Asahi over an M2 Macbook Air: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/linus-torvalds-uses-...


I mean to be fair he is the Linux power user.


You'd think so, but from his own account he's not. Pre Asahi he used Fedora because it was easy to get working and he found Debian too hard to install. Could just be dry Finnish humour.


For me personally it's much easier to install and maintain Arch based distros than Debian based ones. It is very simple and doesn't try to do everything in your place. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Ubuntu/Debian/Fedora and others are great if they work out of the box. As soon as some proprietary GPU or other driver gets involved it can get painful. I recently installed Fedora on latest Thinkpad with dedicated Nvidia GPU and could not get it to work properly on Fedora. Driver crashed and did not load during startup. After trying a bit I switched to Arch and while the initial setup took longer, everything works and I can actually update it without requiring to add some shady 3rd party repos or compiling essential packages after each update manually myself.


It's probably in his interest to run on the least stable environment possible to better identify kinks for prioritization.


He actually believes the opposite. He wants to work from a reliable system so he can focus on the important work, not fiddling with drivers for touchpads or dealing with bugs that are secondary.


I believe he also runs it in console mode and doesn't use graphics, X.org, Wayland, etc. So, keep that in mind.


I've never read that about Torvolds, who I believe uses fairly standard GNOME. Could you be confusing him with Stallman who does things like use wget for browsing the internet?


Linus' announcement is here:

https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAHk-=wgrz5BBk=rCz7W28Fj_o02s0X...

And more context (I am not sure if it's accurate):

https://twitter.com/asahilinux/status/1553968394734813184

Driver support for bare metal use on the M2 Air was really, really poor at the time. Linus mentions Asahi Linux, so he probably wasn't running virtualized Linux under macOS. Maybe he SSHed into the box, or it wasn't an M2 model after all.


They may be referring to how he uses that specific laptop.

> uses fairly standard GNOME.

Last I heard he is(was?) a Fedora user


Literally THE Gnome distro lol...


>Last I heard he is(was?) a Fedora user

Which uses GNOME.


>>Last I heard he is(was?) a Fedora user

>Which uses GNOME.

Fedora's primary distribution may have Gnome, but there are many other desktop environments that are available "out of the box", as I'm sure you know. I've been running Fedora on dozens of systems over the last decade and I've never used Gnome -- because it's annoying and supremely unintuitive.

XFCE FTW.


Sounds like if you want to be a true Linux fanboy that’s the route you should be taking anyway..


You do miss some nuance here. Touchpad and Wifi does work great. I do use Asahi since more than 6 months as daily driver on my MacBook Pro M1 Pro. It works great, and now we even have a quite ok GPU Driver since like a month or so. I even run IntelliJ for Java/Scala dev. The only things not working I am waiting for is webcam and speakers. My bet in 2023 the whole system will just work for everyone and will be the killer laptop for Linux enthusiastics.

Best Linux laptop I ever had, using ThinkPads and Dell for many many years (14 years in total now)


Did flashing it with Linux have any impact on battery life? The main reason I switched from a Thinkpad T480 (2017) to a M2 Air two months ago was the horrible battery life of the Thinkpad. The M2 has been lasting me almost two days of work, compared to only 3 hours on the Thinkpad. But I miss quite a lot from linux


15 hours idling or something like 8 hours of use. https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/109348054803945724


Asahi is surprisingly good already including GPU support and the installer script is excellent. Well worth checking out if you happen to have an M1 mac. I actually thought I would kill a few hours on a day off installing it but everything was up and running in 15 minutes.

But if Linux is a tool for your job I wouldn’t daily drive it yet.


I haven't any major issues running Linux in a VM on an M1. Not my first choice, perhaps, but it's certainly functional.


How do you do this? I'm relatively new to mac, tried UTM and everything was stuck in QEMU modes and had terrible performance.


I've been using vftool with arm64 Ubuntu server cloudimg. Directly uses the virtualization framework, easy to work with once you get it going.

https://github.com/evansm7/vftool

my command: vftool -k vmlinuz -i initrd -d disk.img -p 4 -m 2048 -a "console=hvc0 irqaffinity=0 root=/dev/vda"


Run ARM Linux in virtualization mode. Don't emulate intel linux.


You could just use the beta of vmware fusion for apple silicon. I have only used Parallels for windows but it was such a great experience it would surely be fine for linux. Ubuntu multipass is a little finicky but it works fine as a remote deskop.


UTM is working fine for me, provided I'm using an arm distro. Chip emulation is a hard no.


I would like to know as well. UTM isn't great at the moment


Parallels. I use an Ubuntu VM via Parallels on a Mac Studio M1 Max and the performance feels native.


Parallels on M1 runs Win11 arm64 and Ubuntu arm64, those are as default installed templates, included inside VM installed AddOns. They are fast, because they do not emulate full CPU like amd64. Win11 arm64 can run amd64 software, it's CPU emulation stuff included in Win11 itself. So Win11 arm64 and run amd64 versions of MS Office, AmigaForever, etc amd64 software.


parallels cost money? or am i wrong about that?

There's no qemu equivalent on mac I don't think.


Yes, Parallels costs money, and if you run Win11 arm64, buying license for that also costs money.

UTM is Qemu.

Qemu can be compiled for macOS and Linux. I just today figured out how to compile Qemu on arm64 (actually using OrangePi that has 16 GB RAM and is arm64, similar like Linux on M1) so that it can run ReactOS. OrangePi has 8 cores (shown with "nproc"), so I used "make -j8" to make compiling use all cores, compiling faster:

Networking examples for various OS: https://wiki.qemu.org/Documentation/Networking

Slirp required to be included when compiling, to have user networking: https://bugs.launchpad.net/qemu/+bug/1917161

sudo apt -y install git libglib2.0-dev libfdt-dev libpixman-1-dev zlib1g-dev ninja-build git-email libaio-dev libbluetooth-dev libcapstone-dev libbrlapi-dev libbz2-dev libcap-ng-dev libcurl4-gnutls-dev libgtk-3-dev libibverbs-dev libjpeg8-dev libncurses5-dev libnuma-dev librbd-dev librdmacm-dev libsasl2-dev libsdl2-dev libseccomp-dev libsnappy-dev libssh-dev libvde-dev libvdeplug-dev libvte-2.91-dev libxen-dev liblzo2-dev valgrind xfslibs-dev libnfs-dev libiscsi-dev meson

git clone https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu.git

cd qemu

git submodule init

git submodule update

git clone https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/slirp/libslirp

cd libslirp

meson build

ninja -C build install

cd ..

mkdir build

cd build

../configure --enable-slirp

make -j8

sudo make install

sudo apt install qemu-utils

wget reactos-32bit-bootcd-nightly.7z

7z x reactos-32bit-bootcd-nightly.7z

mv reactos*.iso ReactOS.iso

qemu-img create -f qcow2 ReactOS.qcow2 20G

qemu-system-i386 -m 3G -drive if=ide,index=0,media=disk,file=ReactOS.qcow2 -drive if=ide,index=2,media=cdrom,file=ReactOS.iso -boot order=d -serial stdio -netdev user,id=n0 -device rtl8139,netdev=n0


thanks, this is extremely helpful. Any idea if there is something like virt manager for macos. So far I'm not a fan of UTM.


Native?

Are you comparing emulated x86 to native Windows ARM via dual-boot?


Windows arm64 can not boot natively on M1/M2. There is no drivers for Windows to do that. It's just about running Win11 arm64 in Parallels in macOS.

Asahi Linux has modified kernel where is M1/M2 drivers, and remaining of Asahi is from Arch Linux. Asahi is installed like new version of macOS, notification about it goes to Apple, Apple just does not know it's actually Asahi Linux install. M1/M2 hardware has possibility for Linux by design, Apple most likely had some minimal Linux running on it for test purposes. There are also other FOSS distros for M1/M2, they use partially same packages and ways to make installing dual boot OS possible.

It's also possible to install macOS and Asahi Linux to external SSD drive and boot from there. But part of boot is still at internal drive, so it's not like boot at any computer yet.


That’s where I thought we were on the M1/M2 but got really curious about your statement “the performance feels native.”

I thought you were saying that you found a way to run Windows on bare metal and were comparing bare metal vs Parallels


Currently I'm booting M1 Air 16 GB RAM version from external 2 TB Samsung T7 Shield SSD, because it has more space for Mac software.

https://www.uubyte.com/blog/how-to-install-macos-ventura-on-...

Internal 256 GB disk has dual boot macOS and Asahi Linux.


PSA: I don't believe that Lenovo should be trusted. They sold malware infected devices in exchange for money and have a long history of subjecting their users to privacy and security problems.

With the superfish fiasco first they insisted there wasn't any risk: “We have thoroughly investigated this technology and do not find any evidence to substantiate security concerns,” (https://www.techshout.com/lenovo-denies-accusations-that-its...)

Then once they were forced to admit the truth they released uninstall instructions that still left the systems vulnerable giving users a false sense of security. After security researchers started making headlines about their flawed removal instructions the company released updated instructions that actually removed the vulnerability they introduced. (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/20/lenovo-ap...)

Other security issues that never should have happened include multiple hardcoded passwords (https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/lenovos-finge... and https://www.pcworld.com/article/419336/lenovo-fixes-hard-cod...) and shipping machines with crapware that was designed to send data back to Lenovo but also introduced a vulnerability and worse was stored in UEFI so that even after reinstalling the OS your machine just reinfects itself. (https://www.pcworld.com/article/422988/lenovos-service-engin...)

see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenovo#Security_and_privacy_in...

Who cares how good their compatibility with linux is if you can't trust the hardware its running on?


This whole post is about Linux support. All known issues, including everything you're linking here is about Windows.


Windows users were clearly the low hanging fruit. Even as a linux user the fact that Lenovo was perfectly willing to exploit and undermine the security of the vast majority of their customers should not bring you any comfort. The fact that they've demonstrated a willingness to infect their devices at the firmware level shouldn't either.

We have enough questionable hardware and binary blobs in our devices as it is. Why choose a device from a company who has repeatedly proven themselves to be undeserving of our trust? Why assume they would never target any other OS? Especially considering they've been increasingly marketing themselves to linux users?


> about Windows

It's not about Windows. Lenovo sold the privacy and security of its users by putting a malware in BIOS. This time it affected Windows systems, but who know what comes next.


Thanks for this. It was actually a motivating reason for the poll.


I kinda view these as entirely different companies and IIRC Lenovo was even thinking about splitting their computer divisions into companies with different names.

That is one thing apple really does well for their brand: only sell premium stuff under one brand (Beats not withstanding). In contrast Lenovo has a mixed reputation: Thinkstuff never had any of the issues you mentioned, but is still tarnished. Similarly, Dell has great high end stuff, but awful low-end and Samsung just has everything (and washing machines and...)


> Thinkstuff never had any of the issues you mentioned

What is "thinkstuff" in this context?


thinkPad, thinkbook, thinkstation, thinkcenter etc. Basically Lenovo's business oriented products


Thinkpads were absolutely impacted by some of them

Lenovo's SHAREit software was preloaded on ThinkPad and IdeaPad notebooks. That was one of the hardcoded password issues I mentioned (along with other problems)

for more info see:

https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=2016-1489

https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=2016-1492

https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=2016-1491

The fingerprint scanner issue also impacted thinkpads, thinkstation and thinkcentre devices:

https://www.theregister.com/2018/01/26/lenovo_thinkpad_finge...


My ThinkPad T61p suffered a different problem: It was bricked 1 month out of warranty due to the GPU, which was recalled by Nvidia but Lenovo refused to honor the recall. Instead they wanted to sell me an $800 replacement board with the same faulty GPU. There was a long thread on their support forums with hundreds of people complaining about the same thing. It has since disappeared. I've never given Lenovo another dollar.


> It was bricked 1 month out of warranty due to the GPU, which was recalled by Nvidia but Lenovo refused to honor the recall.

Did they actually issue a recall on those chips? Someone should update the wiki which still says: ...neither nVidia nor Lenovo ever admitted publicly that the chips were defective. The issue was handled as one of quality control with no "official" revisions issued, and no recalls. (https://thinkpads.com/t61/)


Hmm, I'm going by memory but I distinctly remember reading they were recalled and that Dell among others were issuing replacements for their systems with the faulty chips. Perhaps it's true that it wasn't officially recalled.

Also your link mentions Lenovo did briefly offer repairs in 2010-2011, so I guess I could have taken part, but that was about 2 years after I ejected the company from my world.


I just noticed I grabbed the wrong URL for that first link. The one for the “We have thoroughly investigated this technology and do not find any evidence to substantiate security concerns,” quote.

this one works though: https://www.zdnet.com/article/lenovo-says-superfish-not-a-se...


I used a Framework for a while, and I’d definitely give it my vote for the best Linux laptop I’ve used(Also PopOS has the best out of the box support for most laptops in my experience).

This being said, I traded my framework out for an M1 MacBook Pro, and just use OS X now. The reality is my OS X environment is functionally identical to Linux(and this includes very heavy use of Docker, I don’t know what anyone complaining about Docker on M1 are on about) and from a hardware perspective the M1/2 MacBooks just absolutely stomp every competitor for me, this is especially true if you care about battery life.

Disclaimer: I do not daily drive a laptop, and exclusively use a laptop when traveling or otherwise am incapable of using my desktop


I'm a huge Linux fan and currently run it on a Dell Latitude.

The company where I consult gave me a MacBook, so my work is on that device.

The difference in hardware is just night and day. Sound, touchpad, battery life, ... . I don't get it why any other hardware company can't even get close to what Apple is offering.

Anyway, when I need to replace my own laptop, chance is very high that it will be a MacBook. Although I still like my Linux Mint way more than MacOS, the difference between those two seems less than the hardware difference between a MacBook and anything else out there.


I’ve got a colleague who has been daily driving since he joined our company, he’s been really enjoying it as a developer machine. Looks super sleak and he most recently upgraded to the intel gen 12 with significant speed bumb and use the previous guts for a side project.

If you are a tinker this laptop is for you and the abilities are endless.


My experience with docker sucking on an M1 was based entirely around the images being non-native to ARM, and that completely destroying the entire laptop's performance.

I have recently changed teams though, my new setup doesn't require non-native images, and now it's fine again.


> I don’t know what anyone complaining about Docker on M1 are on about)

Are you using ARM-based Docker images? Never an issue with availability of your base images?

Not doubting, just interested.


Sorry for a late reply, I am generally using ARM based images and I have run into VERY few things that availability was a problem for. I’ve never seen anything based on Debian or Alpine not have ARM variants. The only base image I’ve really ever run into problems with was Cent, and I only had like one thing that used it which I switched over to Debian and it’s not caused any problem for me.

I can definitely see mileage varying depending on the specific things you need to run, but I wasn’t ever really concerned with it because I usually have enough control over the images I use that I can switch something to a different base if need be.


I have a Lenovo Thinkpad T14s Gen 3 AMD as of a few months ago. It replaced my older Thinkpad X1 Carbon 6th gen from 4 years ago, the main impetus being that I wanted 32gb of memory vs the 16gb that my X1 Carbon had. It's only a little bit bigger than the X1 Carbon, but I really like the 16:10 form factor vs the Carbon's 16:9. (Note that this year's Carbon also went to 16:10).

The Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U processor (Ryzen 5 PRO 6650U also available) is performant and the battery life is _much_ better than the current 12th gen Intel processors. The experience with Linux has generally been great. I had a sleep issue initially but it's been resolved. I ordered it with only a 256GB SSD then swapped that out with a 1TB Samsung 980 Pro before installing Ubuntu. If you want at 1TB or 2TB ssd, it's significantly cheaper to do it like this vs getting a bigger one with your order, and you will have a a faster SSD too.


What do you use the laptop for if I might ask? I am tempted to get the same one but with the Ryzen 5 PRO 6650U.


> I ordered it with only a 256GB SSD...

What make and model SSD did it come with?


They usually pack some SK Hynix OEM targeted models.

You can replace it with something better like SSK Hynix Platinum P41 or Samsung SSDs.


I'm confused. This is a really vague question. What's the best color of car these days?

What features are you looking for in a Linux laptop?

The process should be to first identify what hardware features you want, and then identify Linux support for those features. Support varies from distro to distro; they all have warty bits, and you can spend a lot of time picking a Linux.

Meanwhile, it should be the case that lots of laptops run desktop Linux pretty darn well. The typical exceptions today are graphics drivers (damn you, nvidia!) and touchpads when the vendor decides to manufacture something new. Most other stuff should work with minimal effort.

I'm typing this from the LG 17Z990 that has been running Debian (and only Debian) for over 5 years now. (Not an endorsement of that particular laptop; the keyboard is SO FRAGILE!) Before that, I had a big honkin' Dell that worked flawlessly with Debian for at least 7 years. So that's 12 years of daily-driving Linux. It hasn't been without its nuisances, but neither are Windows or MacOS. Unlike Windows or MacOS, when something does annoy me in Linux, it is -- generally -- fixable.

I really don't think you need to buy a laptop for Linux support, at this point. Like, sure, double-check that it doesn't have a known problem. You might have to pick your Linux according to the laptop, though.


My framework laptop has served me very well for the last year or so. This is one of the few pieces of open source hardware that is genuinely better (IMO) than many other larger hardware brands. The entire device is just so well built and the upgrade path is so well defined.


> This is one of the few pieces of open source hardware that is genuinely better (IMO) than many other larger hardware brands.

Is the Framework OSHW? I thought it was just very repairable, but proprietary. Have the PCB schematics and other designs been released?


(I'm not a Framework user) Checking on the website you can apply for the schematics.

https://knowledgebase.frame.work/availability-of-schematics-...


How is the weight/ mobility/ versatility?

I jumped on the System76 train initially and feel burned. I'm looking for an alternative for my next machine. Its gotta actually have functional battery life next round. I expected a firmware update at some point from system76 to resolve this and it basically has never happened.


I just got issued a System76 at work and I thought I must have configured something wrong.

On one hand, I guess I'm glad it's not me; on the other hand, I wish it was just some dumb config toggle ("terrible_battery_life enable") that I could flip back to get more than a few hours of working time, or ~48 hours in my briefcase with the lid closed (!!!), before it was dead as a brick.

It's like the early 2000s all over again, where the battery just got you from one outlet to the next.

I feel bad even saying anything, because I like the company and Pop_OS and what they're trying to do in general. But damn, that's a big flaw to just ship products with in 2022.


System76 is working on a firmware update which targets all models listed here: https://github.com/system76/firmware-open/issues/340


I love the form factor, but the battery is my second biggest gripe with my Framework (after fractional scaling still not supported by many apps). Even after tweaking settings ad nauseam, I cannot get the suspend battery life to last more than 12-16 hours.


https://community.frame.work/t/test-results-for-standby-batt... seems like those expansion cards are the main suspend battery draw. Too bad, they look very handy.


If that's for an 11th gen model, that's taking into account the problems with HDMI/displayport extensions, and either not using them, or using the beta firmware update?

The limited suspended battery life is admittedly rather annoying for me as well, but it doesn't seem as bad as it is in your case.


The killer for me is USB-A. Each draws about half a watt while the laptop is suspended, more than it usually draws when the laptop is turned on! With a 55 Wh battery, that really eats into your standby time (although I still usually get multiple days).


I don't get why so many people like the ThinkPad X1 Carbon.

They don't come with SODIMM slots, RAM is soldered directly to the board. If RAM goes bad, you have to do circuit level repair which requires a potential reball.

The X1 Extreme comes with SODIMM slots from what I hear, but that is not the X1 Carbon. It certainly won't be lasting anywhere as long as previous Thinkpad models that have replaceable parts.


The brand loyalty of sorts has continued despite ThinkPads getting worse for a while now. I have a T440p because it's the last model with a socketed CPU, coreboot support, and that doesn't need blobs for the iGPU. Beyond this gen I think you're getting the same crap from nearly everyone. x86 is on its way out as well.

I'm probably going to get an M2 Max MBP when available and max out most of the specs. I think it'll be the first laptop I'll have bought new. Lots of soldered parts, yeah, but that's the norm with ARM anyway. Hopefully the M2 Max will stay usable a good decade or so and there'll be more RISC-V options after that.


Sockets are dead. They were good when they were all pro and no cons, but now days, they’re a bottleneck in terms of power consumption and in performance.


When I got my x1c 5th a few years ago it was the best balance of power for size/weight and more rugged than others in that class. I loved it running linux the e tire time. If the Framework had not come into existence I would probably still be using it, and I still like some details better than the Framework. Soldered 16g limit and all. I would have liked more ram, but 16g was enough even for working with vms and compiling and some cad. The speed of the m.2 slot with a high end 1 or 2T nvme was more important than ram for most things for me. And full 40g tb3 ports allowing actually good docking station performance and the fact that the tb3 ports supported displayport without special drivers was just killer.

Sodimms would have been nice but it was just one factor of many, and the total package was just excellent for both linux and windows. I love that machine on linux.

And after so many years, recently I was able to replace the cpu cooler, battery, and cmos battery before giving it to a nephew. The batteries were both still working but 5 years is 5 years and there's no getting around that tbey will start crapping out soon. And the fan had started to squeal so I just got all the parts that age at once.


I'm on a 5 gen X1 Carbon and the luxurious cover has started peeling off, making it noticeably less luxurious...


This is the reason I've moved away from ASUS laptops too, the G14 has soldered RAM. If you want normal arrow keys, SODIMM/M.2 slots, and decent specs other wise the System 76 Oryx and maybe a few others fit the criteria, but the System 76 is going to be the best for Linux.


Out of all the failure domains I've dealt with as a Sysadmin, the most common I've seen across all models has been failing memory which was neck in neck with failing fans on the active cooled items.

I can't justify buying something that doesn't have replaceable memory given how common that failure is.


I would strongly advise against the 2019 Intel MBP. The design suffers from shocking thermal issues. Everyone I know who’s had one has had problems. You can pick up an M1 Air for less money, yet has better battery, better, performance, and fewer thermal issues. For more money, the M1 Pro is awesome - full size function keys, SD card, HDMI, Magsafe. I feel like Apple really brought it back with the new Pro’s.


I've used Linux on an X1 Carbon for many years now, but I just bought a 12th Gen Framework - so far it's noticeably better in every aspect, from software support to build quality to support, and of course maintainability.

The X1 generally worked, but there were always occasional teething issues & manual fiddling required. The Framework meanwhile works flawlessly, has official support and detailed setup guides for many major distros, and I've seen their customer service personally help debug & fix Linux issues in their forums (resulting in far more useful answers when googling questions, so far). It's in another league.


I've found my last 3 Thinkpads (T480, T490, T14) to all be excellent for Linux work. No real downsides, everything works as it should. If there was one thing that's let me down, it's that their webcams aren't great with occasional audio issues. My current driver though is a Flex 5i Chromebook, running ChromeOS and Linux via Crostini. Last time I had a Chromebook, I wiped it and ran straight Linux. But now Crostini is incredible, very easy to set up and seemless with ChromeOS. It runs my dev projects without problems, along with vscode and obsidian. Make sure that the device has at least 8gb of RAM though.


At Chromebook it's possible to change included Debian LXC container to other distro and version, like newest Ubuntu, and have Linux app icons at Chrome OS menus:

https://github.com/wekan/wekan/wiki/Chromebook


I don't know if this is just me, but the keys in any Lenovo are like too close to each other. There's no gap so I often end up mistyping sentences, but I just use a mechanical keyboard anyways.


Have you used any recent Lenovo?


My real opinion would be "check out Tuxedo computers*," because every device I ever bought from them worked flawlessly (must be that vaunted German engineering), but of the options you listed I guess I'd go with S76, as they are all-in on GNU/Linux and I've heard good things about pop! OS.

* https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en


Writing from my TUXEDO InfinityBook Pro 14 - Gen7 in a train (important details :D), it runs very well with a good old Arch Linux and i3. The battery is really good!


> must be that vaunted German engineering

Can't be too much German engineering in a Taiwanese (Clevo) machine


Carbon is great, but I highly recommend looking into the lenovo t14 lineup. Especially interesting is the ryzen chipped ones. You can get a base model and then easily upgrade components, I did this and upgraded the panel and SSD if I remember correctly, saved quite a bit of money that way.

It's fatter than a carbon but more performant, has more ports, and is much more extendable / repairable in my opinion.

edit: I really hope framework comes out on top here though because I really hate that lenovo has started soldering RAM and the state of consumerism and e-waste in our industry is genuinely completely out of control at this point.

I really need to go ahead and pull the trigger on buying a framework laptop... it's just so very hard to give up that lenovo keyboard!!


I'm a long-time X1 Carbon user (over the years, between personal and work laptops, I've had 1st, 4th, 5th and 6th gen models)

I recently got a Gen 3 AMD T14s and I've been very happy with it. it's a bit thicker / heavier / wider than my old Carbons, but still a very comfortable size, and has much better specs (6c/12t Ryzen 5 6650U, 32gb RAM, 1TB NVMe, Radeon 680M GPU) than comparably-priced Carbons I looked at.


I'm using a T14 for my work machine. I would not have recommended it until last week, when it got a firmware update, but since then - it just works, and I'm really happy with it.


Oh, what did the firmware update change? I need to look into grabbing it then.


Well I looked a bit, seems to be this https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/downloads/ds544977-bios-upd... but this was 14 july 2022 so idk if this is what OP meant. Notes are

<1.41> - (Fix) Fixed an issue that CPU is frequency stuck. - (Fix) Fixed out of order idle state under Linux. - (Fix) Fixed an issue that battery icon show yellow bang when system is waken up from Full Shutdown, which Wake On LAN is AC Only in BIOS Setup. - (Fix) Fixed an issue that "The connected AC adapter has a lower wattage than the recommended AC adapter which was shipped with the system..." pops up after press power button when Wake on LAN in system BIOS Setup is AC and Battery.

Ok now we're in fun linux world, make sure to do more research (sadly) before doing firmware updates, and choose your version carefully. See

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Lenovo_ThinkPad_T14_(AMD)_G...

https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/Other-Linux-Discussions/T14-AMD...

IMO this is not unique to lenovo, more just what we put up with for mushing software freedom onto hardware non-freedom. Repairable though lenovo is, the reality is there's no such thing as a GNU chip / board fabrication plant. Though maybe there should be, lol.

> In an ongoing Lenovo forums thread, there has been a discussion regarding battery drain issues in suspend/powered-off states. Presumably, laptops with AMD Renoir CPUs and relevant hardware are affected. As of now, BIOS firmware version 1.29 is suggested for use, as version 1.30 introduced significant battery drain; the battery loses up to 50% in 2-3 days while the laptop is in suspend mode.


I’m really enjoying the Framework laptop with fedora but I recently figured out how to change the display ratio scaling so my Thinkpad X1 Carbon 6th gen might be good too.

The Framework laptop may end up replacing my MacBook Pro 16, the last one before they came out with Apple Silicon.


I did some research and just purchased Thinkpad X1 Nano Gen 9 last week. My Debian Linux setup was fairly easy.

I had to drop Macbooks because it's NVMe SSD is soldered and is not upgradable.

Thinkpad X1 Carbon is a decent choice, but they all seemed to be limited to 1920x1080 screen resolution for some reason -- which is a big-no for me.


I was surprised regarding the 1920x1080 screen. I have a Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 6 from 2018 running linux, and it has a 2560x1440 screen with 500 nits of brightness. For what it's worth, the Gen 10 has an optional 2240x1400 screen, but the brightness is limited to 300 nits, and it has a thicker bezel.

My 2018 Thinkpad also has 16 GB of RAM and a 1 TB NVMe SSD. I was tempted to upgrade it since it has been 4 years, but after looking at current offerings, it seems there is not much point (the new processors are way better, though).


At work I am limited to using HP but I have to say that I have been very pleasantly surprised by the HP EliteBook 845 G7 (Ryzen 7 PRO 4750U). When I bought it new in 2020 it had initially sleeping problems but later kernels improved the situation. Other driver problems where with the finger print reader (easily fixed with LVFS firmware upgrade) and the Intel WWAN card (that still doesn't work due to a bug). The display with privacy filter works but generally, when privacy mode is off, the screen viewing angles are terrible (I will not buy a build-in privacy filter on future models).

Personally I would recommend laptops from shops that give you a Linux option right from the start. From the big manufacturers I could see that this is the case for the Dell XPS and Precision 7670, while Lenovo offers it on various Thinkpad models. I could not find that for any of the HP models (except Dev One).

Although I have not used them, I am not a big fan of the Clevo based machines that System76 and Tuxedo have. I think the Librem and Framework machines look nicer (even though I prefer 14+ inch sized machines).

A good resource to check for Linux compatibility of specific components and laptops is https://linux-hardware.org. I whish this resource was used more often by reviewers.

I would also give a laptop bonus points if its firmware is supported by easy upgrades via LVFS https://fwupd.org/lvfs/devices/.


Just got a 12th gen Framework laptop and it works great. The only thing that would be nicer is if they managed to do a touch screen. Still have my Lenovo T420i as a backup but the Framework is faster, runs longer on a charge, and generally does everything a bit smoother.


What distro are you using? I read somewhere in HN that the 12th gen is not recommended for Linux (previous gen was suggested instead).


We have updated recommendations here: https://frame.work/linux

There was a brief period of time early in Alder Lake availability when Intel pushed graphics drivers with regressions that went out in certain kernel versions, but support for 12th Gen has been stable since then.


Prior to nrp's response I was going to say "standard"? I typically start with a Ubuntu release, run a script to turn off/expunge snaps, remove any network items systemd touches, add tools I always want, and then add LXDE as the desktop environment. Anyway I didn't have any issues.


I think the Thinkpad E series might be considered cheap junk here, but my Ryzen 7 E14 with 40GB RAM runs Windows 11 and Ubuntu great.

I am using the extra SSD slot for Linux so I didn't have to partition anything. All the hardware works (though I haven't tried the fingerprint scanner yet). The only issue I've had is it doesn't love waking up the DisplayPort through the hub I bought, but that's likely a hub problem, and it actually works better in Linux than Windows.


I am quite happy with my core i7 Thinkpad E580 maxed out at 32GB of ram on Fedora. Keyboard is nice, battery life is decent, screen is mat and availability of spare parts and I am quite confident on the availability of spare parts and batteries in the future. Lots of space with the nvme + ssd drives.


I was super tempted by the E14 this year as they had one with 40GB ram and discrete graphics but the 200/300 NITs display turned me off. Ended up getting a P14s instead


Yeah I'm super unfussy about displays, but can understand why that would dissuade some.


System 76 is the first Linux laptop I’ve liked. Have had intermittent issues with the touchpad after updates. Solid machine.


I've had mine for two years. When I got it, I was in love. It felt like the linux 'it just works' machine had arrived.

As time has gone on, the experience has degraded substantially. Bluetooth audio has degraded substantially as I've kept up with updates. It basically doesn't have a battery.

Its really felt like PopOS! has gone from an 'it just works' version of linux, to yet-another-power-users-only version of linux.

I have serious hesitance about endorsing either at this point.


The last System 76 I had was great [with Linux] for about a year. But after a year or less, it started having other failures - had to replace the wifi, trackpad stopped working, half the keyboard stopped working. Wouldn't recommend based on that experience.


I'm curious if anyone is using NixOS on the Oryx Pro with acceptable results.


I have a nearly 4-year old Darter Pro. Pop OS is great on it, and the hardward has been flawless. Except that the speakers are really crappy. Otherwise, great.


My 2020 Lemur Pro is working great. I love the huge battery and light weight.


System 76 is great for Linux but the Windows support is absolutely abysmal so you can forget about having high quality Windows dual boot setup.


It took years of showstopper bugs (random lockups, horrible stability) but I feel like AMD Ryzen APU laptops are finally stable and awesome Linux machines. Be absolutely sure you're running recent kernels like in the 6.x series. They are really fantastic performers for dev work in my experience. Good multi core performance, good enough GPU for non-hardcore games/graphics, and absolutely stellar power and battery use. IMHO find a AMD APU based laptop that has a wifi card from some reputable name and you'll be all good.


I have had 0 problems with XPS Dell running Ubuntu. I've run it both as a dual boot with Windows and a standalone. Loved it so much I bought a second. The 13 in "Dell XPS 13" refers to the screen size. You can have a bigger screen. 15 & 17. My laptops are Dell XPS 17. I have heard good things about the Dell Precision as well.


I have an older XPS, the 9560, and compatibility with Linux has been pretty good, but the build quality has left a lot to be desired.

I had to replace the Killer wifi card with an Intel card, as the OEM one was flaky and this seemed to be a known issue that wasn't acknowledged by Dell.

The battery failed on me 3 times, and I eventually gave up on the warranty and bought a third party battery which I installed myself.

The power connector got loose, which required replacing the motherboard.

The case itself is not very stiff, so putting it over the edge of a knee or table means the touch pad won't click due to the flex.

Perhaps newer models have addressed these sorts of issues, but I'd be wary of buying another considering the Thinkpad I got for work has been very solid.


I also had to replace the Killer wifi card. After that there was nothing to complain about regarding Linux compatibility.

BUT I also had to replace the battery after a year or two (it was swollen to the point that I couldn't close the laptop anymore).

And finally the rubbery coating of the case degraded badly and turned into a gooey, sticky mess (apparently a known issue with this kind of material, for those living in tropical weather).

So I'm done with Dell for a while.


> BUT I also had to replace the battery after a year or two (it was swollen to the point that I couldn't close the laptop anymore

That happened to me too with the first one, but they actually on their own initiative sent me a new battery. I've had no problems with the second laptop.


Yes, my first battery failure had the battery swell up so much that the touch pad didn't work anymore.


I have a similar model and I can't stand the case flex issues. If you set the laptop on an uneven surface or try to work while holding it in your other hand, it'll flex and click the touchpad. I use this laptop while working on industrial equipment, so setting it on uneven surfaces or holding it while working is something I do pretty often. It's very annoying.


Dell only support the XPS 13 for Linux. I like mine, it's not perfect but seems pretty acceptable. Everything works out of the box including bluetooth, battery life isn't great though.

If you want a larger screened Dell for Linux you should definitely go with the Precision line that you mentioned as you can order them with Linux out of the box.

You might be OK with an XPS 15 or 17 but I've heard of issues with the GPU on the XPS 15 so might be a bit of a crap shoot. So personally I would avoid them.

My advice for buying any Linux laptop would be always get one that comes with Linux out of the box even if you're going to replace it.


> Dell only support the XPS 13 for Linux.

They won't refuse to repair it. It's identical in all ways except for the screen size, so. If something really weird happens, they might kick it back to you, but nothing really weird is going to happen.

> My advice for buying any Linux laptop would be always get one that comes with Linux out of the box even if you're going to replace it.

Or get a Dell XPS 17 and install your own ;)


It’s not the warrantee, it’s the device drivers.

All the parts of the XPS 13 are expected to work well with Linux. They've been selected specifically for that and they’ll receive firmware updates to improve that situation.

That’s not the same on the XPS17. On an XPS 17 the parts just have to work with Windows. They might work or they might not.

If something doesn’t work with Linux on the XPS 13 or Precision model it’s someone at Dell’s paid job to fix it. On an XPS 15 or XPS 17 it’s your job.

Get an XPS 17 if you want one obviously but you're not buying the same experience.


So you missed the part where I wrote that I've run Linux on 2 of them for years with no issues. I didn't mention that I use it daily.


Does it sleep? I was really happy with an earlier Dell XPS (which my daughter still uses), but my newer one is horrible. I always have to do a full shutdown, otherwise if I don't use it for a few days, the BIOS resets and once I even had to remove the CMOS battery.

Between the sleep, the bad mic, fan noise, I think my next one will be a ThinkPad (my 10 year old ThinkPad is still rocking, gave it to other family who just needed a browser).


XPS 13 has a windows sleep issue but not with Ubuntu. But windows sleep issue is with any laptop. Hybernating works perfectly with windows or ubuntu but sleep is difficult.


Sleeps, but there's a weird bug where it will not log in unless I briefly push the power button first.


My (not quite so new) laptop is a Lenovo P53 with a 4K screen. It took me several weeks to realise that it's also a touch screen. I can't remember ordering that touch capability as an option when I was customizing the basic machine.

Standard Mint Mate installation.

Previous laptop was a Lenovo T410 - it's now coming up for its 13th birthday. Still works well.


And these can be bought at really good prices secondhand from companies clearing out old IT assets. I'm typing on a maxed out P52 I bought ~ 2 years old at 20% of the original price.


I can recommend Lenovo Thinkpads as long as you're willing to live with the following restrictions: avoid any Nvidia hardware, and be willing to use a very recent kernel (Arch and friends, not Ubuntu and friends). Nvidia makes good hardware for 3D acceleration but their drivers are the absolute worst and their power consumption is unreasonable at idle. Cutting edge hardware from other manufacturers (i.e. Intel) may need a very new kernel, my laptop didn't have sound without messing with the config when I got it because Intel either forgot or failed to hit the deadline to get their drivers into the most recent stable kernel.

The build quality of the Thinkpad laptops is just generally very good, especially for the price, better than some of their more expensive competition in my opinion. I disagree with their Fn-key position, but luckily the UEFI allows you to switch it around to a more sane position (where the ctrl key is on their layout).

If you disagree and would like to try non-Lenovo laptops, any laptop that gets sold with Linux on it by default will save you a lot of working out config options. Just because the manufacturer threw Ubuntu on it doesn't mean that it'll work well (the same can be said of Windows, sadly) but the basic driver support is there. System76 laptops are the exception there, they generally work great with Linux but you pay for the privilege. I've personally also had a great experience running Linux on HP's ProBook line.

As for the macOS requirement, you can technically run macOS in a virtual machine or even make a Hackintosh if you pick the right device. Both are against Apple's TOS so I wouldn't use those in a professional context myself but they're an option if you need to build for iOS and friends.

Something to consider is to pay extra for the support contract. Dell, Lenovo, HP, and other big brands offer contracts where they will show up at your house, almost anywhere in the world, with either a replacement part or a temporary loaner laptop if something were to ever go wrong. Availability may be restricted to certain countries but the people I've spoken to were all incredibly pleased with the business support these companies offer, especially compared to Apple when the nearest Apple store is three hours away and you don't even know for sure if they'll be able to help you. Having someone come to you just adds a nice touch, I suppose.


I'm going to give an anti-recommendation to the Dell XPS 13 unless you buy their top tier support plan or are a business customer. I've had three of them in the past 5 years and all 3 had serious issues. Their customer service gives you the runaround and is a nightmare to deal with, even if it involves DOA hardware. All 3 arrived with one issue or another: 1 with a broken keyboard (9370), 1 with a power button that got stuck on the hinge and powered down randomly (9360), and the other had a battery swell up a few months into receiving it (but this was a work laptop). All three required a battery replacement. On the other hand, Linux support is quite excellent. But the hardware and customer service is pretty bad.


HP Elitebook 865 G9. Top notch Ryzen chip, up to 64GB RAM (non soldered), IPS screen, LTE WWAN modem, 75whr battery, very user serviceable, and USB 4 (charging + display). ~$1400 USD

https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop/pdp/hp-elitebook-865-g9-notebo...


I have an EliteBook 845 G7 and also that one is top notch, minus the screen and driver bug on the WWAN modem. I whish HP did not include a keypad though on the bigger screen sizes since your hands are always towards the left instead of the middle of the machine (Dell and Lenovo have 15/16 inch options for which the keyboard does not have a keypad).


My main driver is a HP Elitebook 845 G9 (so the 14" version) running Arch. I have been using it for the past six months to do mostly backend development in Python.

Pros:

- Performance is really good, I haven't run benchmarks but day to day I see no difference with my beefy Zen 3 desktop. It completely replaced my desktop computer, except for games.

- Almost everything works out of the box on Linux. I think the fingerprint reader does not work, but I wasn't going to use it anyway.

- Issues tend to be fixed via either kernel updates or BIOS updates. I used to have to reboot it daily at the beginning for one reason or another (did not wake from sleep, wifi card stopped working...), now I rarely get any problem.

- Easy to open and every component is user serviceable. They have official disassembly guides on Youtube and sell spare parts.

- Suspend works reliably (which is not a given these days, even on Windows).

- Key travel is short but the tactile feedback is strong enough that I don't feel like I'm missing too much on this front.

- The 16:10 aspect ratio of the display is a game changer. My SO has the G8 with a 16:9 ratio and the difference is night and day.

- Enough connectors to not have to carry dongles.

Cons:

- The GPU still crashes from time to time, roughly once a week. This requires a reboot.

- The only version available in my region has a 38Wh battery which gives only ~6 hours of life. I will be swapping the battery for a bigger one at some point.

- The non-LPDDR5 means that the battery life when sleeping is not amazing, it tends to lose ~10% overnight.

- Power consumption is good but not on par with the best laptops at ~5W idle.

- I chose the matte low-power display, color is good, viewing angles are good but the ghosting is atrocious. It's the first time I get a device where ghosting is distracting.

- The NVME drive the laptop shipped with died on me after a few hours of use. I swapped it with another drive I had available, no problem since.

- Firmware updates are only officially available for Windows but the Windows binary can be used on Linux with a bit of command-line-fu.

- The trackpad is large and good but the push to click only works on the bottom half as opposed to a typical Macbook where the whole surface can be pressed down.

- USB-C ports for charging only on the left side.

- Arrow keys are half-height, I hit page up/page down all the time while trying to press arrow keys. Super annoying when using the command line.


I was recently in a similar boat, as the combination of discord + twitch was really making my 11 year old i5-2520M-based T420 really show its age (WHY IS A DESKTOP CHAT CLIENT AN ELECTRON APP??!??!) even with 16 GiB RAM in Arch Linux. I settled on a 16GB X13 Gen 2 from the outlet store (which seemed like a deal at ~520 USD). Coincidentally that's where I bought the T420 in 2011. The outlet store seems like a good way to snag a bargain for Linux users if you have a bit of patience as I would be looking at a last-gen model anyway (which seems to be primarily what the store stocks) for better compatibility.


>WHY IS A DESKTOP CHAT CLIENT AN ELECTRON APP??!??!

Because the current software development approach/practices/tools used close to everywhere are fundamentally flawed driving software development cost to absurdity and making it not viable to not use electron (which allows you to reuse most of the web-client code). At best you get a specialized version for phone apps, but even that is often not worth the money.

And it's not something as simple as "just use approach X" or "tool Y" or "language Z" it a much more complex, subtle and deeply rooted problem across all of the industry, universities and other people driving the software industry.


You could use irc + mpv for twitch and an irc bridge for discord if you insist on using that.


Why are you using the electron app while you certainly already have a browser running ?


Where are you finding one at this price? That's fantastic.


https://www.lenovo.com/us/outletus/en/laptops/?visibleDatas=...

My particular deal seems to be gone now, but they come and go periodically. I also didn't bother with the (bait?) models at the top of the page that never seem to be in stock.


There is no linux drivers for MIPI camera of ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 10 yet. I struggle with it. https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/Ubuntu/Ubuntu-Mint-on-Thinkpad-...

https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/Ubuntu/Camera-not-working/m-p/5...


Writing this from my X1 Carbon (with my M1 MacBook Air also next to me). I'd be particularly interested in what experience folks have had running Linux on ThinkPad X1 Nanos.

Note on your methodology: a purely numeric vote is an automatic win for Lenovo simply based on market share, so you should ask people about problems, if any.


I use a ThinkPad X1 Nano (gen 9 I believe) with an intel CPU since it supports Thunderbolt, which I use to dock my laptop. I ended up on Fedora and am happy as can be. Everything works besides the 5G cellular modem, but I just use my phone as a hotspot.

This was my first time purchasing a laptop that isn’t a MacBook, and I really like it! My favorite aspect is probably the keyboard, which I find a lot more enjoyable to type on than my MacBook for work.

I purchased this laptop to pair with a nice desktop setup, so I wanted something lightweight (~2 lbs.) for traveling that just worked. I’m a software developer who primarily uses Firefox, kitty, and VS Code.

I was concerned about the “just works” aspect before purchasing, but after some very slight initial tweaking, I find that it does just work and never gets in my way of productivity. Gnome Extensions made that minor tweaking much simpler than setting up an Arch environment.

Overall, I’m extremely happy with this laptop and hope to use it for years to come.


Which makes the high numbers for Framework all that more significant.


I run the Nano, with 32gb, without any issues. My previous laptop was the X280, then the X220. Obviously the 220 was of a completely different philosophy, comprising almost totally user-serviceable parts. However, barring the serviceability, the Nano is an equivalent in terms of Linux support. Actually, the 280's fingerprint reader was not supported whereas the Nano's is.


Agreed about the methodology. I was going to vote for Lenovo X1 Carbon because I have a 6th gen and I love it, but there may be better options these days. Obviously Framework's approach is interesting, but that StarFighter looks really exciting. Also I'd like to see what options for ARM CPUs come out in the next few years, and possibly RISC-V after that.


LG Gram 17 is my favorite laptop. If you want a large screen (17", 2560x1600) while being ultrathin and lightweight (1.35kg), I haven't found better.

That being said I ended up uninstalling Linux for Windows because Linux turned out to be a big pain and had too many dealbreakers for me (no two-finger swipe back/forward navigation, couldn't connect Airpod Pro headphones with microphone, too much hassle to do basic everyday stuff). I know Windows isn't ideal, but with Windows Subsystem for Linux you still get your Linux terminal.


I use the Mac M1 and wouldn't suggest it for linux unless all the functionality you need is explicitly supported. Most stuff does work for me as a java dev. However, Asahi doesn't support docking to a monitor which prevents me from using it solely as a linux machine.


Yes, Asahi is working to get external monitors working. Currently external monitors work only at Mac Mini M1 where it's physically connected to DisplayPort type interface where already exists drivers. At M1/M2 laptops external displays are connected to Thunderbolt (that USB-C connector) so it requires developing more complex drivers.


I've got a Dell 7490, which works great for development, and you can upgrade the SSD and RAM, but, suspend is unreliable.

TBH, the only issue I've had with any of my laptops in Linux (Dell and IBM/Lenovo) is suspend. Which actually makes me think power management in general might be busted.

I'd be interested to know if there is a methodical way to diagnose these issues? Every howto just seems to be a mishmash of kernel flags to try, which seems chaotic, and gets frustrating when the issue is intermittent.


This [1] is the OG guide to debugging suspend/hibernate issues. Arch Linux Forum [2] is also a good source for this. That said I've spent months debugging hibernate issues without success, it really is a crapshoot of driver support.

[1]: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/power/basic-pm-debugg...

[2]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Power_management/Suspend_an...


I refuse to ever touch a dell ever again in my life time. Just way too many problems.

Lenovo has been the best linux experience I’ve had.


My daily driver for the past couple of years has been Thinkpad T480s running Debian/XFCE. However I recently acquired a Framework Chromebook for my partner, and now I'm sorely tempted to get one for myself too.

Perhaps my favourite thing about the Framework is the 3:2 aspect ratio screen. That is, aside from the flagship characteristics of running Linux well and being user-serviceable. ChromeOS is really great at keeping itself stable and updated with minimal fuss.

The Linux dev mode runs Bullseye by default and is surprisingly well-integrated with the host OS given that fact that it runs in a VM. For example, after I apt installed GIMP in the dev VM, the launcher icon showed up in the ChromeOS launcher menu automatically, and it mostly "just works." You have to use the "Linux" folder from ChromeOS to transfer files between the host and guest, which is a little wonky, and things like screen capture from GIMP don't work by default. But for my partner, they are willing to put up with things like that to have a bulletproof host OS that seamlessly auto-updates.


I have a Dell Latitude 5420 and while it's probably not "the best", it's very decent. I'm happy with it. Battery life is ok and everything works.

Both HDMI and usb-c ports are options for external displays. USB-C for charging which will hopefully hold up long term (maybe that's a weak point that I'm dreading, don't know yet.)


No trolling: I never considered USB-C for charging as a physical weak point. I have an older Xiaomi Mi Laptop Air 12 that uses USB-C for charging. My port still seems pretty strong. What is your guess for how long we can expect the port to last?


I don't know. It's one of those based on hearing concerns (and now I'm spreading them, I'm sorry..), can't quantify


Try a Lemur Pro https://system76.com/laptops/lemp11/configure


I've got a last-gen Lemur that I really like. (lemp10 / 11th-gen Core i7-1165G7, one generation older than jart's link.) I'd recommend their new one on that basis. I'm pretty happy with Pop OS.

However, I'd say the decision between it and the Oryx (which OP has on their poll) is about OP's needs and preferences, rather than one strictly beating the other.

It has a long battery life even after a few years of use, compared to other laptops I've used (higher rated capacity, and probably lower power consumption than the Oryx). It's very thin and light, but still fast and doesn't get very hot.

One caveat though: it's got no discrete GPU, which may or may not matter for you. (Probably that accounts for a good part of the battery life.) If the Lemur were my only computer I'd probably regret it on that basis. Its specs, even setting aside the GPU, are also going to be less impressive than the Oryx.

But the Lemur is about half the weight - I would happily trade the performance for battery life and mobility. I also like the ability to charge with USB-C - a non-power-hungry laptop means you don't require a special power connector (or more advanced USB power delivery that IIUC isn't really widespread yet).


Does Discrete Graphics work in Linux somehow? Does it require some drivers? At ZBook I needed to change to UMA Graphics because it uses much less CPU and works better.


Yes, it works, and yes, it requires drivers, but those are readily available as I understand it. Some of the Linux laptops the OP mentioned do have discrete graphics cards (Oryx, for example, has an Nvidia card; for clarity, like all of System76's computers it comes with Linux).

As I understand it, if you are willing to run proprietary code you can sometimes get better drivers. I would be fine with that, personally, but not everyone agrees. ("Proprietary" refers to availability of source code - some drivers are free-as-in-cost but not open source, and you might have worse performance with open source drivers. This might just be Nvidia, or it might be AMD/Intel too.)


I miss Dell Latitude and HP Elitebook in this list. Both are vastly superior to their consumer-focused products. Especially the Latitude’s I’ve had were absolutely indestructible.


As someone who has been using a Thinkpad X1 with Linux on it since 2014, I'd probably strongly consider getting another one.

Framework is the only other tempting choice, but some people voiced concerns about Linux compability with the latest revision. Might be worth messing around with it though.


Hi, my name is Matt Hartley. I'm the new Linux Lead for Framework. Our laptops have great support for both Ubuntu and Fedora. I'm typing this from Fedora right now. We also have community support for other distros as well.


Thank you for your reply. Have all the issues outlined in [1] been ironed out by now? If so, that'd be very nice.

1. https://ruscur.au/framework/


Hi Matt, thanks for contributing to the thread. Do you have any progress on Coreboot support yet? I've been holding off buying until this is available - the presence of bootguard makes me nervous and as far as I can tell, it's not possible to buy with bootguard explicitly disabled - but progress seems to have crawled to a stop.


Any specific notes for Fedora? I just bought one yesterday.


We have a detailed Fedora guide on your website, under support.


Framework were extraordinarily responsive and thorough working through the display flickering and Wayland-related suspend issues I had right after I got my 12th-gen Intel version. By far the best tech support response I've ever gotten for an issue. (Kernel updates fixed both issues.)


Interesting that x1 gets much more love than the canonical T series thinkpads. Myself, I am buying up the t480 laptops as they are I believe last generation to have easily user replaceable external batteries. Laptops with internal battery only make me claustrophobic :-/


My x240 had hot swappable batteries, I could get almost 16 hours of hardcore usage even after years of use. Those were the days


Yup; I've had an x250 once upon the time which was similar: lovely form factor, and I got the extended battery for it which made for slightly better cooling, longer battery life, and it felt easy/good to carry around.

(the 40 series, I personally avoided like the plague - I'm a trackpoint user, and the removal of the buttons for that series alone, made many an IT architect slam the poor machine onto desk in frustration; but with 50 they brought it back and haven't dared to mess with us since:)


Yes the soft buttons were awful! I remember the first time I installed Linux, the soft right click wasn't even supported. WHAT were Lenovo thinking... /facepalm

I have seen that people actually modded the x250 trackpad (with hard buttons for trackpoint) but I never had the motivation to do so after I moved to using the external trackpoint keyboard


Need to know more about Intel Management Engine and ability to disable it before I could vote.

Most importantly, the two bits showing whether or not one can have:

* Intel ME Region Write Access as enable-able

* Intel ME Region Read Access is enabled

Both are useful for MEBx/IME to be cleaned out or disabled.

https://github.com/corna/me_cleaner/wiki/Internal-flashing-w...

https://github.com/corna/me_cleaner/wiki/Internal-flashing-w...


Still love my Pursim Librem 14. It's not my everyday laptop, yet still like to use it for several private projects (doing some rust, erlang and elexir programming on it). Trying to learn a new programming language each year ...


I would like to just put a warning out to others to avoid nvidia+laptop+linux. I got an X1E several years ago with the idea it would be my daily driver and thought problems would eventually get ironed out, but that was wrong.

Issues include lack of nightlight on wayland, random boot/cpu lockups where OS won't load probably 30% of the time, obsidian(electron?) has weird issues typing where keystrokes undo and then re-do, lack of thunderbolt dock support for wired ether-net. That's all I can recall for the moment, there are others.


Currently using a T14 gen2 amd with 5850U and 32g of ram. Performance is excellent. The battery life is also excellent, unless you get the 4k screen in which case it's not good (I have both). I'm waiting for newer amd options really: I'm extremely satisfied with the vega performance, and stability has been excellent under linux. Compared to the issues I had with the intel xe drivers under linux I'm not willing to go back really.

I would consider the M1 Pro if it had complete linux support. However I do prefer the lenovo keyboard, and I also generally like the "boring" chassis of the lenovo as well. The x1/thinkpad chassis is extremely durable and forgiving. If you travel with your laptop you don't need to worry about handling it like it's made of glass. I cannot count the amount of dinged or bent macbooks I've seen due to the alu chassis.

System 76 is not really competitive in EU last time I checked due to customs.

I know framework only recently has opened resellers in germany/france so it wasn't an option when I was looking at the time. However I don't see much appeal at the "upgradability", aside from the battery and ssd (which is easily serviceable on all lenovos). I always bought the laptop maxed out to avoid upgrading/incompatibility issues and used the laptop until it finished it's service life (5+ years).


I stopped buying Lenovos because they are a chinese company. Sure, almost everything is made in China, but I will at least choose not to support a company operating from a communist country.


China is terrible and one should avoid buying from China at all costs, but doing so because they're "Communist" is ridiculous, the only "Communist" part in China is that it has a tyrannical dictatorship they is cosplaying as "Communist", otherwise they're as capitalist as it gets when it suits party interests.


Good point. Still, one could say that party interests is a feature of every communist state, so it fits in practice.


strictly speaking, party has nothing to do with communism, in fact its singular goal is to aid the society on the path to communism, which once achieved is global, stateless and most importantly classless.

In short, the only feature of party is to make itself redundant.

Of course, that's the utopia, which has never happened (and never will), just like pure capitalism, however.

It is important to understand the underlying ideas rather than dismiss them by throwing cold-war-esque "communist" labels on everyone you disagree with / dislike.


When translating these ideals to real life:

- global means imperialistic

- stateless means only one party

- classless means only one class

In other words, utterly oppressive and regressive.

It's important that theoretical goals are noble, but the real world results should be good as well.


Such is human nature, any system when not sufficiently balanced and controlled leads to suffering and exploitation, there's nothing inherent to communist ideas that makes it any more prone to that.


I'm on a Framework running Manjaro and i3. Love it. Very lightweight, love the keyboard, very snappy.


I'm in the market for a new linux laptop again too. I primarily use a 2019 Macbook Pro which I like, but would like to be back on linux on laptop.

I bought a Framework (11th gen intel) when it was first announced but ended up returning it:

  - small battery, despite heavily tweaking and running a very barebones setup I was running out of battery very quickly
  - though I loved 3:2, 13.5" was too small for my preference
  - macbook trackpads are still better
After returning that I ended up buying a Dell Precision 5560 (also 11th gen intel), but ended up selling that as well:

  - I made a mistake and got the 1920x1200 screen and it's awful
  - trackpad, again
Otherwise the Dell is pretty good. Decent battery life, great linux compatibility, good performance and build quality.

I'm leaning towards trying out the X1 Carbon Gen 10 but I'm unsure if I'll like the 14" screen. I've also looked at the X1 Extreme but unsure about battery life (I don't need the Nvidia graphics, though I guess I could just disable that and use Intel). The Star Labs Starfighter looks great on paper but there are no videos or reviews of the production units yet and I'd like to wait and see a hands-on first.


Thinkpad X1 Extreme Gen 2. Everything works but endless Nvidia driver issues with multi-monitor setup causing screen to blank out and all windows to shift to one monitor - rearranging the windows multiple times gets tiring pretty soon. Performance is slightly above mediocre and runs pretty hot too (if you have issues with fan noise, this machine is NOT for you). Has turned up with flat battery multiple times even when the battery was showing 60%/70% prior to last shutdown (not sleep or hibernate).

The two saving graces are its upgradability (two RAM slots + two SSD slots) and its port selection (1 TB/1 USB-C/2 USB-A/1 HDMI/1 Mini DP) which means I can drive three monitors without a dock (have stopped trusting them after a bad experience).

Had Dells in the past but the battery starts to bloat and miscellaneous issues crop up so I have given up on them.

Framework would be the choice for my next laptop assuming I can get off the Nvidia train and get on AMD with decent port selection (or if they can't have that many ports, would be good if they come out with a decent dock that is guaranteed with work with Linux in a multi-monitor (3 atleast) setup - that is a another area they can win a bunch of customers).


Hands down DELL XPS 13. Get a TB16 dock and you are good to do full desk or mobile work. Long battery life and nice dell external batteries you can carry with you too.


Had a very recent XPS and it is a hard no. I've seen worse and it was some Acer from 15 years ago.


I have a Dell Latitude 1234 something or other. I can look up the model later. It has 16 cores and 32 GB of RAM. Runs NixOS flawlessly for almost a year now.


Update: it's a Dell Latitude 5421


Asus Vivobook/Zenbook OLEDs without dGPU seem to be good choices as well.


They also have the ProArt if you want more power/RAM and the Zepharys G14 if you want AMD GPUs.

If I could get the G14 with OLED screen it would be perfect.


I'm typing this on the latest Lenovo P53, running Manjaro. Literally every single piece of hardware works out of the box with the default installer - down to the NVidia GPU. This is by far, the best Linux laptop I've owned since I started trying this in the 90s on a Compaq Presario. I'm pleasantly shocked that Linux is finally this stable.


If you're in the tech industry then you may want to strongly consider what keyboard does a laptop have. ThinkPads still win IMO despite Lenovo making keyboards thinner in the recent years.

One absolute killer feature of ThinkPads for me is that you can remap the trackpad keys under the spacebar to any other key, e.g. to SUPER or ALT key for superb ergonomics.


I appreciate the effort to actually ask around which hardware works well with a given software, rather then buying on price/spec/style and later complaining that some feature or other isn't working.

I haven't bought a laptop in years, both my Chromebook Pixel, my Dell M6800 (desktop replacement -- you wouldn't want to lug it around) and a cheap Lenovo ThinkPad 11e still work fine (the Pixel is EOL'ed so I might debianize it soonish, but the highly reflective screen and the mediocre keyboard make it unsuitable as workstation). Can't think of a Linux problem with either (the Dell was actually listed as supported by Ubuntu). I use the Dell with a mouse, as the touchpad experience is poor (regardless of OS).

The ThinkPad has a surprisingly good keyboard, unfortunately the screen is rather underwhelming, else it would be an awesome network terminal. Good value in any case.


I've used Arch on a MBA (2015), System76 (Galago Pro), and a Dell XPS 13 as well.

Planning to upgrade to a M1 Air with Asahi soon, with my Steam Deck as a secondary linux portable machine. Once you fix the keyboard layout on Macbooks, it is quite pleasant. I would upgrade to Framework, but its impossible to get where I live, so M1 it is.


How did you fix keyboard layout?


https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Apple_Keyboard#hid_apple_mo...

The hid_apple module supports swapping the alt/cmd and the fn/cntrl keys to match standard keyboard layouts. It's quite helpful if you use multiple devices and keyboards.


I like my Lenovo Legion 5 Pro gaming laptop with Ryzen 5, Nvidia RTX, 4k display on PopOS with CUDA and everything working.


Oh I wonder how much difference there is from Linux Mint (it's also Debian-based, and a lot like Ubuntu.) Currently have KDE Plasma 5, working at 125%, but have issues with brightness controls. With Cinnamon (GNOME) and 125% fractional scaling, Steam renders super tiny with those settings, and I had games have resolution issues. (Legion 5, 1080p/144, Ryzen 7 4800H, RTX 2060)

Do you use native resolution at 100%? Or fractional scaling? Brightness controls?


I'm currently typing this on my second Dell XPS 15, and I'm looking for a new Linux-based SDE Laptop for my day job.

My first Dell XPS (Dell XPS 15 9560-NGG9X) literally exploded after overloading the USB bus with an external camera. It's completely dead...

My current Dell XPS (Dell XPS 15 9500 (FGHDC)) has startup problems, it keeps rebooting until it is warm enough to operate normally. This happened just a month outside the 1-year warranty. I am not the only one with this problem, the internet is littered with the same issue: https://www.google.com/search?channel=fs&client=ubuntu&q=del...

I've had enough from Dell, I will never buy from Dell again. The quality is just so bad...


Agreed, I have a XPS 17 for work and don't like it.

The screen is very vibrant and the build feels solid but that's all the good things I can say about it.

Every two months it randomly reboots, which breaks the virtualbox install. The keyboard sucks, the touchpad is too big and 4x usb-c is not enough for serious computer users (welcome to dongle/dock hell), and what in the world was the thinking behind the flaky carbon fiber...


Love my Thinkpad T15G: - No major issues in Manjaro

- discrete graphics (3080 mobile). Using the proprietary driver, graphics switching seems to work pretty well.

- 128gb ECC ram (has xeon 11xxxm)

- durable; survived around 45 flights; runs 120 hours a week.

- trackpoint!

- fits into a normal backpack

- the hulking mass builds core strength while traveling

Cons: - Battery "life" is more like insurance against yoinking the charger.

- don't leave on lap under heavy load if you're a male hoping to maintain fertility

- not really easy to clean and keep clean; something about the rubberized finish gets noticeably dirty after a few hours of use following a thorough scrub, but I might also be a bit oilier than the average duck.

Aesthetically it's just the right amount of boring, but I know most like something a little sleeker.

Edit: formatting and additional con: Lenovo pricing is obscene without playing games using coupons, corporate portals, etc.


I'm very happy with my Purism Librem 15. Even suspend is 100% reliable, and one can replace RAM, WiFi card, and it even has a camera/microphone hardware kill switch. Their new model Librem 14 looks even better, but its screen size 14" is too small for me.

Why is Librem 14 not in the poll?


I was wondering the same thing. I have been considering the Librem 14 and it looks like a great option. Would be useful to hear thoughts on it relative to the other models in the poll.


Some reviews are here: https://forums.puri.sm/t/are-you-happy-with-your-librem-14/1....


Also interested in Framework.

I would love to see a machine with the repairability and upgradability of Framework combined with the security focus of Purism.


I am only missing a replaceable keyboard in my Librem 15 (but it did not break yet). What else would you actually need to replace?


I was super happy with my Purism Librem 15 for 2 years. (Weird freezing issues after that. Replacing the memory didn't help. Maybe the mainboard went bad?)

Have been tempted to try the Librem 14.

I bought a Framework, but couldn't find the right distro to use it as a daily driver. Maybe I'll find time to try again.


Currently using a first-generation Lambda Tensorbook / Razer Blade 15" Advanced (2021) - this is the Intel Tiger Lake-H variant (no P/E cores in this device) with a 15" QHD screen and an NVIDIA RTX 30-Series discrete graphics processor (see https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/04/razer-designed-linux...).

My other Linux laptop is a Dell Precision m5520, which shipped with Ubuntu 14.04 IIRC and has a 4K touchscreen. It remains the me the best-integrated Linux developer device I've used.

Beyond that, I'm an Intel NUC guy.


+1 for Razer Blade here with Linux. Great maintainability. For example, there's an extra M2 slot for another SSD


I've just bought the 2022 Asus X13 Flow with a Ryzen 9 6900HS and a 3050Ti. I wanted an ultra portable 2-in-1 so I didn't need a tablet and a laptop and because I wanted to travel in 2023.

Fedora works very well. I used the instructions on https:///www.asus-linux.com and everything except the fingerprint reader works. I used a ThinkPad T14s AMD Gen 2 before this, and while I loved it, Lenovo is becoming increasingly difficult to order from. I couldn't custom build a 32GB laptop any more, and I found it harder to identify which of their thinkpads I wanted to buy. I love the X13 Flow.


> So, Apple recently stopped supporting the last version of OS X that would run on a 2012 15" retina MacBook Pro.

You probably can still run the latest version of macos on that model using OpenCore Legacy Patcher [1]. My only issue is while GPU works for UI, macos video decoding service (VTDecoderXPCService) seem to stop supporting the gpu on my model and do all video decoding with software decoder, which leads to increased cpu load whenever any app display any video (e.g. when the settings app show some video preview in the trackpad section).

[1] https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/


My 2014's Acer Aspire V3-772G (16GM RAM, 2.5TB SSD) was running Windows 10, and started to show notification about no possibility to upgrade to Windows 11 due to hardware. Later on it went even worse... after some broken Windows Update in August'22, it started to restart infinitely and there was no consistent fix for this. AS a result I switched to latest & greatest Ubuntu. Switch ran very smoothly for me because Ubuntu now has no need to install any drivers, it has great UI for its Apps store and there are many of software available. Now my laptop is living its 2nd live and actually runs more smoothly (less tempreture on CPU, less noise from coolers).


I use (and roll out at my work) Lenovo's with AMD chips, going back to the T495, then T14 Gen 1 and T14 Gen 2, not had a need to get any new laptops for a while, but would get T14 Gen 3 if we did.

They have all been really good, although did need to run Ubuntu interim releases until 22.04 LTS to get the latest kernels which helped with a number of things. Also, make sure to change the BIOS sleep setting. It'll default to Windows which can cause sleep and resume to not work properly in Linux.

Upgraded RAM where possible to 32GB and 512GB SSDs. Unfortunately they only ship the laptops with Windows in Australia, so need to wipe and install a fresh Ubuntu when they arrive.


I've had three Dells. Two 15s and a 13. All have worked fantastically with Linux (Ubuntu). I'm using a 13" now. It even hibernates perfectly when I close the lid.

However... All were purchased within a few months of them being released, and all had hardware issues within a few months after that. Got replacements under warranty, and the replacement units would then work flawlessly for years.

(Dead speaker, dead battery, dead wifi chip)

Leaves me wondering if the first few batches of Dells tend to have more manufacturing defects? And it's therefore advisable to wait ~6 months for them to sort these issues out?

Does anyone know if this is a thing, or just bad luck?


The answer problably depends on whether one interprets "for Linux" as general purpose laptop use, as a development environment or even for specialized pursuits such as creative/artistic work. These alternative use patterns place sufficiently different demands that it is unlikely there is a single "winner".

Traditionally the linux-on-laptop pain point was full and problem-free use of hardware and in my experience linux on laptops can still serve nasty surprises. E.g the laptop I am typing this has the touchpad disabled as I've had enough trying to reduce its jerkiness.


The one with the best hardware.

As Linux runs any laptop I happen to be buying without any glitch.


Ha I wonder about that. How many laptops have you bought, over what timespan?

What versions/variations of Linux have you run?

What are your use cases?

I put Linux Mint (Cinnamon) on a Lenovo Legion 5. It's really pretty good, but has glitches. With Cinnamon (X11 + GNOME) there's weird issues with fractional scaling. (1080p laptop; I have bad eyesight and prefer 125%.) Added KDE Plasma 5 which fixed the scaling issue, but I lost the ability to control brightness from the laptop buttons.

So I'm 0 for 1 on "any laptop" and "no glitches" :)


Fedora. Last 6 laptops. Since 2016.

Started with Lenovo. Second one was MSI. And now have moved to cheaper ones as Linux, at least Fedora, runs on anything I buy.


Do you run Steam?

Do you utilize fractional scaling?

My only known issue with Linux Mint (GNOME) was fractional scaling issues, which mostly affected Steam / games.

"Runs on" is a bit low of a bar! But I'm glad you don't run into any glitches.

Thanks for responding!


Generally the best laptops for Linux are popular models from popular companies and are at least a year or so old. Very few vendors go out of their way to ensure that all their devices and peripherals work AND ensure the appropriate userspace packages to use them are in the appropriate places when the laptop makes its debut. All of that has to be done by the folks actually trying to install Linux on the laptop, and that takes some time.

You will generally never go wrong with a popular Thinkpad (X/T/P series) that was released a year or more ago.


I own both a Framework and a Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 10. I bought them both a few months ago, and I've been using the Thinkpad X1 Carbon line for years.

Between the two of these, it's the Thinkpad hands down that I'd rather use. It's designed for Linux and has thousands of hours more R&D put into it.

I really love what the Framework folks are doing, but their laptop feels like a Raspberry Pi when stacked against a Thinkpad. Hobbyist, toyish. It's going to need a lot more work to feel comparable. A higher budget, more premium option would be great too.


Free plug for http://emperorlinux.com/

I've owned two of their units (both Dells), and will doubtless be a repeat offender again at some point.


Nobody has tried the Lenovo Z13? I have one and it's way better than the ThinkPad I had before. It does get warm, and you can't play games on it, but it feels more premium and has a stronger CPU.


I have it and it's definitely a powerful and solid laptop with a great screen.

But out-of-the-box linux support was not great at all. I am usually a debian user, but since it shipped with Ubuntu I thought I'd give it a try (there were other distro choices when ordering the laptop, but Ubuntu was the only debian-based one).

The laptop came a couple of months ago with Ubuntu 20.04. I upgraded to Ubuntu 22.04, which was tricky enough as the system updater would tell me that I had incompatible packages installed (I had not added anything); it took a long while but I finally managed to unblock it.

After the upgrade, the laptop started getting completely unusable after suspend - a deadlock in the ath11k kernel module. Upgrading to 22.10 did not help, so for two months I just disabled suspend altogether, turning the computer off any time I had to close it. Fortunately last week a new kernel came in the proposed-updates channel which backports the fix for the deadlock, so now that works.

I still have some occasional kernel deadlock, and I have yet to figure out why, but it is kind of bearable right now.

The speaker volume is really, really low, though I am not sure if this is a problem with the linux drivers, or it is just a hardware limitation.

I am completely confident that all the remaining annoyances will get solved in a couple of months; probably they would be already if I had wiped the laptop clean as it arrived and installed debian unstable as I usually do. I am satisfied with my purchase as it ticks all the boxes I had (particularly the combination of size, screen, cpu and memory was not matched by almost anything else). But to be a premium (in quality and price) laptop that ships with an "officially supported" linux distribution, it sure had way more issues than I expected.


Just to confirm: are we talking about the same laptop? Can’t seem to find on Lenovo’s website that any distro is officially supported (although I may be missing something obvious).

Someone who has been interacting with their support a lot is reporting good compatibility with some workarounds: http://null.rip/2022/09/linux-on-the-thinkpad-z13-all-amd-al...


When you order a Thinkpad Z13 from Lenovo you get the option to get it with Ubuntu preinstalled. To me that's "officially supported".


Is this in the US store or elsewhere? I swear I can’t find that option. :(

Thanks.


That's very strange and unfortunate. I haven't rebooted it in a while and I use it every day. So far it's just been a really good laptop. Maybe you can send it back and get a new one?


+1 and flawless out of box Linux support.


Port selection seems abysmal on it - two TB(?)/USB-C ports and an audio jack.


Yeah, I think it's meant to connect to a hub. Both sides charge which is something I really like. You are right though, very few ports.


I prefer System76, because it ensures that hardware and software work together flawlessly. Most threads here seem to complain about that, but I never had an issue on that front with my Oryx Pro.

Only hardware complaints are that it can become noisy with (Nvidia!) GPU use and that the battery life is short (at least if you are used to MBPs…) But for example, I have had no serious headache with the Nvidia GPU, only some driver update juggling.


From an outside, global, point of view, the laptop you already have.


I’m sporting the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 with AMD Ryzen 7 4800U.

Amazing value for money (< €900) and everything worked out of the box immediately when I bought it new 3 years ago using the latest Linux kernel (via Arch). Had a MacBook Pro before and it blows my mind how much cheaper this set-up is, and how much more I enjoy using it because of decent window managers.

In general, if you go for a distro like Debian or Ubuntu I don’t think you can go wrong with a Lenovo that’s been out for a few years.


I have it's cheaper cousin, the IdeaPad S540 with Ryzen 4800U - running Fedora 37 and it works great.


IdeaPad 3 (AMD Ryzen 5 5500U) on Alpine Linux 3.17 here.


I got a Framework Intel Gen 12 a couple of months ago. Running Debian with sway window manager. Its the best laptop I ever had apart from bad battery performance.


I would have blindly have voted for Lenovo. Until this year, when (out of technical curiosity) I got an M1 powered Macbook. I use MacOS, but I also need Linux all the time. So I installed Ubuntu on Parallels - and it is amazingly fast, capable and integrated with MacOS. So - my heart wants to have a pure Open Source powered computer. But in practice, this little machine with its infinite battery and mind blowing speed does it all.


As someone who has been on the Linux camp all along, what will I lose, software-wise, if I change to using M1-based Macbook Pro, if a) I just use MacOS b) I use Ubuntu or Debian on Parallels, say, compared to running Ubuntu on a Thinkpad?

Hardware-wise, I think the biggest hurdle for me would be the anemic lack of ports compared to most non-Apple laptops.


I see no mention of Asus ExpertBook B9, which is the one that looks most interesting to me as a next work laptop, due to:

- Very low weight (around 1kg)

- Claimed extreme durability, to military standard

- Options for 32 GB memory

I sometimes run-commute to work with the laptop in a backpack, and so want a laptop that can stand some wear and gear, and is as light as possible, while being a worthy work tool.

Of course, interested to hear if anyone has real-world experience of one! Only seen it IRL once, as a friend got one.


All ours run Ubuntu. My 2010 Dell Inspiron became our living room TV computer using an air mouse, my 2016 Dell Inspiron runs my web sites, email, MySQL and Postgress servers and my K3S cluster and we got 2 $200 Lenovo low end laptops recently, one for the bedroom and one is a foyer ambiance computer running relaxing YT videos all day.

They all work great, I'd say any Dell and any Lenovo should work great.


You could also completely replace your Linux Laptop with a Simula One.[1] :]

[1] https://simulavr.com


Does it run Linux? What distros are available? How much RAM and what CPU ? URLs ?


It runs Linux using our custom VR Linux distro. The core of this distro is our VR window manager (https://github.com/SimulaVR/Simula). It comes with 16GB-32GB of RAM and an Intel 12th Gen i7 processor. RE URLs:

  - Hacker News discussion[1]
  - More detailed spec overview [2]
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?q=simulavr.com [2] https://simulavr.com/blog/why-is-the-simula-one-so-expensive...


Very happy with my T14 (Gen 3) but I think the new X1 Extreme (?) has a significantly larger battery (91 Wh vs. 50 Wh for the T14) so if you plan to travel a lot it might be worth the upgrade. For me the T14 is a good compromise between cost and performance, the 4k display is also great. With any Lenovo laptop make sure to get the premium coverage as the low-tier coverage has gotten really bad.


How do I down vote one?

I'm on a System76.

I gave it a shot.

No.


Interesting I had the opposite reaction. Had an oryx pro at home for three years. It's a beast, plays games. Battery life wasn't great but I use it plugged in most of the the time. Has the Nvidia graphics which use a lot of power.

Liked it so much I got the pangolin all Amd laptop for work. Its been my daily driver for 4 months now and I really like it. Much better battery life than the oryx pro (integrated graphics). It's fast enough And has enough cores I did some long genomic software runs on it. It's much quieter under load the the oryx. This machine is great but they don't seem to sell it anymore. I'm pretty happy with the Amd notebook cpu and if I have to get another I probably would be looking for that.


Can you tell us what problems you ran into?


Oh man. So many. I don't want it to just be bagging on System76 and PopOS! though. I really bought in because I believed in the partnership, but I really believe that PopOS! has kinda 'lost track' of what they were trying to do.

System76 issues:

Battery life is basically a joke. I can't use the machine without it being plugged in.

For the price, the trackpad/ keypad/ keyboard experience is not great. I've had dells with better trackpads. At the price point I paid ($2200 in 2020), they are not a premium experience.

There have been no firmware updates to address issues like bluetooth or battery life.

Considering its built hand in glove with PopOS, depending on what update you are on, various things just break every-time, like audio or the popshop, or bluetooth.

That all being said, I'm an abusive owner, and its been a workhorse. I just can't recommend it based on its price-point. Everything just needs to be 'better', but mostly the hardware/firmware/OS relationship.

I still want an 'it just works' linux machine. The System76/PopOS! combo isn't there yet.


not OP but...

the trackpad sucks, it seldom works. the material feels cheap. the builtin speakers are a joke. the machine is very fast but the fan goes off like an airplane during compute-intensive tasks. the custom OS is annoying (but that's on me, i should have picked Ubuntu). the OS is annoying because you solve most of your issues with solutions, blogs, etc. written for Ubuntu. or Debian.

i have 5 laptops. the system76 is the worst.


Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that I literally get made fun of for how loud my fans are, and that they are CONSTANTLY running.

This machine would be unusable without over the ear headphones.


I'd recommend my XPS-15 9510 (no issues with hybrid graphics on ubuntu), but Dell managed to screw up the goddamn touchpad. How? I have no idea. The solution seems to involve soldering an extra ground wire from the bottom of the touchpad to a nearby piece of frame. Hillarous failure. Seems to not be a problem on Windows, so Dell knows a workaround but still lets it cause problems in Linux.


I've used XPS 13's for years, and have had good luck.

The most recent one has a weird 'no edges' touchpad that I don't love.

One of the things that's really important to me is that they are configurable with 4K (or thereabouts) screens. If I'm going to be staring at it all day long, I want the highest quality screen possible, not some 1920x1080 screen that reminds me of chunky Atari pixels.


The Lambda Labs Tensorbook looks pretty sweet: https://lambdalabs.com/deep-learning/laptops/tensorbook

I think it's mostly a rebranded Razer, but it seems to target Linux at least, which is nice, and it has support and such.


I had a good experience with the Huawei D15, which is my main machine presently (I live in Asia).

I installed Ubuntu. Everything worked. I've had exactly zero issues. Even battery life is decent.

I realize it might not be the most popular company in some parts of the world, but truth be told it's been pretty fantastic for the sticker price of almost USD 750.


+1 for Huawei, I have a MateBook X and it's almost perfect (the camera placement is the one annoyance, other than that it's just never in my way - unlike my AMD ThinkPad). Never thought about Huawei before buying this thing, and I keep getting asked if it's a MacBook.

Depending on where you live, Huawei also has pretty decent support and - something that I value - the ability to look at products in a shop before buying them! In Moscow they have a few shops for that, and even in more "chaotic" cities (like Cairo, where I bought it) they have decent resellers.


I've been using a Huawei Matebook D14 for 3 years now and it's still a fantastic little machine. Only $400 at the time and it's just as well built and nice as an old MacBook Pro with aluminum body, great screen and trackpad, etc.


In general, Intel-based business laptops (Dell Latitude, HP ProBook/EliteBook, Lenovo Thinkpad) work incredibly well with Linux. I have an EliteBook 830 G8 that has zero issues running Linux. Everything works, no "buts". I do primarily use Windows though, but that's a personal choice :).


Not on list but my Asus TUF 17" is consistently beating my expectations on driver compat and overall build quality


I love mine also, very impressive. My only issue is the audio needs tweaks, between the last 2 POPos updates the audio slider does not work, it is basicly on or off. Everything else works perfectly.


Mine is happily dual-booting Win11 and running Steam when it isn't being a real NixOS computer.

Everything works, including nvidia proprietary driver and mode switching.

It's honestly the best linux laptop since I got my XPS 13


Does Google use the X1 because it’s so good with Linux, or is it so good with Linux because of companies like Google?


Red Hat employees use mostly Thinkpad hardware, at least that is what the story was a few years back.


Slightly off topic but what hardware do googlers use? I imagine the answer is "it depends" given how wide the remit of their engineering force is but for rank and file is there even choice for picking hardware?


I've used Ubuntu on a Dell XPS 15 and a T480 in the last 12 months. The XPS is a much better laptop, but there was less fiddling around with the T480, and everything worked more smoothly than on the Dell. Could potentially be related to using 18.04 on the T480, and 20.04 on the Dell. My experience, anyway.


Apple silicon MacBook is not a good choice. Love what the Asahi people are doing but come on. Terrible idea.


Yes, still I mostly use Ubuntu 22.10 amd64 where compiling all software works.

I still have not ported some of those to macOS M1 and Asahi Linux arm64. And I still have not leaned Mac keyboard layout, I have trouble finding keys how to type, and trouble to find settings how to fix layout.


None of these even deserve to be in the running. HN has a serious Apple bias.


I'd love to see the Agent headers of the poll votes. ;)


HP Elitebook 840 has a pretty good Linux support (except the fingerprint drivers of course). My previous employer gave me a 840 G7 when it was just released. Worked pretty well with Arch/Ubuntu. Superb build quality, lightweight and overall satisfaction was pretty good.


I'm typing on a Star LabTop. It Just Works, No problems with drivers, no difficult set up; I unboxed it, turned it on, and had a functional Linux laptop. It's very easy to type on, the battery life is great, and I strongly prefer it to my 2016 MacBook Pro.


I use a Dell and it’s been great. I think I’d hate the new 13, though, so can’t vote for it.


I’ve bought new Lenovo and Dell laptops in the last years. Both required an unstable Linux kernel and worked fine then. So, the most important IMO is whether you use a distribution which can easily switch kernels like NixOS or, I think, Arch.


The Dell Latitude 7330 Rugged Extreme laptop is easily serviceable, has plenty of ports, is indestructible, and is Linux-friendly, with a BIOS that has many configurable settings and a key combo that can shut off all radio, lights, and LEDs.


I've used ThinkPad X1 Carbons since Gen 4 (perhaps earlier), and basically love them.


I can't imagine buying anything Intel - s3 sleep is wrecked on all latest generations, and s1e is just asking you to cook your hardware, sooner or later, coupled with horrendous idle battery life, all for your money.


I got a used Precision 5540 (equivalent to XPS 15) after someone recommended it here on Hacker News and I've been pretty pleased with it. Newer versions (Precision 5560/70 etc) should be good as well.


Framework if your driven by Libre Software ideals.

My personal vote is for the Lenovo. My last 5 laptops have all been various Lenovo T and P series. They're easy to upgrade, they don't break, and Linux is well supported.


I bought a System76 Serval WS a few years ago and I have been happy with it. Battery life is not wonderful, but I knew that before the purchase. I will be buying another System76 next time around too.


Thank you for this poll, I am planning to get Linux machine next month since I'm getting tired of macOS. Unfortunately, I'm an iOS developer so I don't really have that much of a choice.


How about patching it? https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/


X1 carbon is both bombproof (10 yesrs running in the marine environment) and Ubuntu installs with zero driver issues. They are also very good at what they do, specifically ergonomics, keyboard.


I will note that I've essentially stopped bothering to even have a laptop these days. Whoever I work for will issue me whatever machine I'm going to have to deal with, and my phone takes care of things like media browsing on the go.

It's been a while since I've been able to tolerate dealing with working on a laptop screen.

I've been considering the Framework quite a bit, but reports of the experience are pretty inconsistent (which suggests, there's annoying issues still).

EDIT: Oh and the other problem - all laptop keyboards suck nowadays. Apple has ruined the entire market with it's flat, no definition keys that everyone (including framework) are emulating (or cramming a numpad onto 15" models, meaning you have to type off-center).


I have had a couple of System76 machines. Apart from the low battery life others mention, the build quality is very low. The machines feel flimsy and fall apart quickly. Cannot recommend.


Always Dell Precision, although I'd love it if there were non-Intel CPU options (or if Intel got their act together and produced a rival for Apple's latest and greatest chips).


M1/2 air. Battery life and build quality absolutely dunk on the competition. The touchpad makes not using a mouse actually feel good. Best buy had some deals recently.


I've read about more than a few issues running Linux on a 10th gen Thinkpad X1 Carbon. So, I'd recommend a 9th gen. My 9th gen has been running amazingly.


I have the HP Dev One and it's pretty darn good and inexpensive.


I don't have an HP Dev One, but I bought the HP Aero 13 for my S.O. last year as a Christmas gift, and am silently jealous of it anytime I see her using it. It's crazy lightweight (under 1kg!!!) and portable, and the keyboard and display are surprisingly nice. HP have really stepped up their game.


I still can't believe they gave it a nipple mouse without a middle button.


What are a few of the things you like about it? Besides price ($1099, btw)

https://hpdevone.com/


Is the screen too reflective?


I've had the HP Dev One now since shortly after introduction. It has been rock-solid and everything just worked. Also the memory and SSD are upgradable easily enough.


Look at XPS15. I think the 13 makes too many compromises to make it tiny. 15 is pretty small itself. It works with Linux flawlessly, but I'm still jealous of M1.


I'm very happy with my Lenovo L14 Gen1 AMD.

It's not a compute beast (although Gen2 versions are obviously faster) but it is repairable and has neither soldered RAM nor SSD.


Very boring here on the T480 series... I would suggest t series


I use arch wih a 6th gen thinkpad X1 Carbon, it's the best system I ever used. I had some wear of the charging cable and the audio port in 4 years.


HP. Both Elitebook and Probook lines with Intel CPUs have served faithfully for many years. Latest been i5 11th gen and 40GB RAM, NVMe PCIe 3x4, FHD.


X1 Nano is an extremely strong option for those looking for a compact, Linux-friendly laptop: 32gb with a 13" display. Lacks USB-A ports however.


Check out Lenovo's lineup. You can save some money with IdeaPads - some of them are quite good quality, and run Linux almost flawlessly.


I'd choose one that the OEM ships with Linux, then I'd search for other people's experiences with them, especially the bad ones.


> Odds of me getting away with not using OS X are slim to none

Why? I have a 13" version of that laptop and installed Linux on it, it works great.


I recently bought a Thinkpad X1 Yoga Gen 6 with a 11th gen i7 and 32 GB of RAM. Even as a convertible, it plays very well with Linux.


I went for the T15 lenovo thinkpad. Great compatibility. Everything works using Ubuntu or arch Linux. Even finger print reader.


I would also consider Dell Precision laptops.


Running debian on a Lenovo P14s flawlessly


P14s Gen 2 and Gen 3 both work very well. The latter needed firmware upgrades in order to get HDMI to work, but other than that, it's been a smooth experience on Fedora.


Idk if the series is still going strong but my old HP EliteBook 840 G1 was quite impressive with Linux support.


I've used G7 and it has a pretty good Linux support. Superb build quality, lightweight. My only sore point was missing fingerprint drivers.


https://slimbook.es/


Still using Lenovo Thinkpad T540p, purchased it in 2015. Works like a charm, powerful machine.


I had a Dell xps 13” with cool whine so mad it was unusable. Take a negate vote on that one.


For me, battery life is most important in a laptop. I would go with any of apples offerings.


I'm quite happy with my HP Spectre X360 running LinuxMint 20. Everything works fine.


Thinkpads have a good market for selling later if you ever decide to upgrade or sell your.


I’m considering a purism laptop for my next machine. My last xps was disappointing


Why non-Lenovo? I do my best work on ThinkPads. I tend to buy them 3-5 years old.


If only one (other than MacBook) of them was built with security in mind...


Which of those support ECC?


Same. I would really love to see a laptop like the Latitude 5430, but just with ECC added.


I don't there is a particular laptop for linux. Linux can be anywhere


Using Ubuntu on Carbon X1 Gen 5

I only wish replacement batteries were good/not fake.


Personally I would say the Lenovo X1 Extreme rather than the Carbon.


Tuxedo Infinity Book S/Pro


wth these laptops are even more expensive than MacBooks man… this is insane


Lenovo with recent AMD APU.


TUXEDO InfinityBook Pro


ThinkPad P Series.


M2 MacBook Air


Dell XPS 15


Slimbook


Dell xps 15


Sorry to hijack, but I have a somewhat similar question: any recommendations for a SFF or Mini PC that can adequately run the latest Fedora for home productivity purposes? Web browsing mainly and light gaming.


As far as Mini PCs go, I'd consider Intel NUCs (currently NUC 12 Pro line), primarily because they have great firmware lifecycle support. A lot of cheaper brands in the NUC-like Mini PC space don't consistently release firmware updates (if at all), e.g. to fix security vulns, which is a deal breaker for me. Intel NUCs are validated for Ubuntu and RHEL. The main downside is that you'd be relying on an iGPU for gaming, so do some research on whether the Core i5-1240P's Xe iGPU would be able to handle the games you're interested in.


I've been very happy with the Asus PN 50/51 which I use to run my not smart TV. They run very cool and quiet despite having a fan. Choose the level of AMD processor that suits your needs. All that and a fair bit cheaper than the Intel NUC's.


I've been using the Beelink SER5 with Manjaro Linux since a month. It also comes preinstalled with Linux, but I got the Windows version. Runs smooth and perfect, no issues at all except for WIFI after suspend that had a small patch. Definitely recommend it. Much better than a laptop since portability isn't the main goal as I prefer a big monitor and use it as a daily use PC. For around $400, glad to have this little beast with 32GB RAM and Ryzen 5600H.

Beats buying a laptop for double the price and likely worse linux compatibility.


I have run Fedora on ThinkPads for years but just got a Mini PC this summer to be a TV and audio/Roon server- ThinkCentre M80q. It's great, drives a 4k display, all the things work.


Almost any machine should do okay for this general purpose.


Almost any machine should do okay unless the user is easily annoyed by fan noises.

The DeskMini is slightly larger and heavier than most mini PCs, but it is the only one I know whose cooling fan can be a high-quality quiet Noctua fan.


There's a "HP EliteDesk 800 G2 Tiny i7-6700 3.4GHz" that can be had on ebay for around $200, that's a pretty powerful little box. My son had no problems using it for light gaming. Note that these can get a little toasty under long, heavy use and throttle, just because of the size. My one that does camera processing seems to need to run without the case on.


You could consider getting a steam deck and using it docked. (nvm just reread and don't know how well Fedora would work, but it would satisfy the power and smallness factors pretty well and be portable to boot)


look into geekom, they seem to have a good price to specs ratio


None of above probably. Just buy a laptop which is known not to deviate from reference designs (from intel)


"Just"...

"Just build a retaining wall" my wife said. 13,000 lb of concrete block and 10,000 of dirt later, we had a retaining wall.

"Just buy a laptop which is known not to deviate from reference designs" ... how does one do that?


Which ones are those?


For what it’s worth, I’ve been on MacOS for 7 years, 2 of which have been on an M1. It’s been fabulous.

The corner cases of M1 support have mostly disappeared. I left a review here several months ago that was edging towards negative, but I have to admit, the ecosystem has matured substantially. Even pytorch has a native M1 mode now.

The best part is, when something does require a recompile, it zips by — compiling is almost fun again just for the sheer joy of watching a big build finish in ~30 minutes when it used to take hours.


> I’ve been on MacOS

The OP asked about a laptop to run Linux, and you suggest running MacOS? Or did you forget mentioning the part about running Linux on it?!

I respect you, but weird post tbh.


I was confused since the post mentions they’re “unlikely to escape MacOS,” and there’s also a poll option for M1. I thought the poll was asking whether it’s worth it to just skip Linux altogether and jump ship to an M1. Sorry. Definitely didn’t mean to go on a tangent about MacOS when nobody was asking.

I didn’t know an M1 could even run Linux. Does anyone use it that way? I’d be curious to know if it works well.

EDIT: Looks like Asahi Linux is designed for it: https://asahilinux.org/about/


7 hours later, the M1 is pretty high up in the poll.

System 76 Oryx Pro; 29 points

Framework; 111 points

Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition; 44 points

2019 Intel MacBook Pro; 4 points

M1 MacBook Pro; 54 points

ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 10; 119 points

Star Labs Starfighter; 7 points

HP Dev One; 7 points

Lenovo T14 Lenovo T480/490; 27 points

If anyone has theories about why the M1 is polling so well, I’d be curious to hear. It seems unlikely that the M1 is a popular choice for Linux, yet that’s what the polls seem to indicate.


It's probably out of scope but running Linux as Lima/Docker/Parallels under MacOS should be a serious consideration.


Working at Acquia we had a bunch of devops who preferred Linux/thinkpads/things with docks.

They never worked correctly, and these folks spent a non trivial amount of time diagnosing them, even taking up meeting time to explain the latest arcane fix that was needed so $whatever would come up properly after sleep.

They would also complain that dev tooling wouldn’t work for them when they were maybe a handful out of hundreds with MacBooks.

When the day came they were forced to migrate to Macs, they grumbled as expected, but their productivity went way up.


Dev tooling is about what OS most of your devs use - if most of your devs are on linux, then, the tooling will work well there. I saw this happen to a dev that preferred osx when they came to the one dearly missed linux house I worked at. My point is that tooling working or not is not really a relevant criticism of an entire OS or platform.

I will say that what happened to your linux people at Acquia has happened to me when I was forced to switch to OSX for some kind of vague security reasoning at a job once. My productivity plummeted, I can't believe the defaults in OSX people just... live with for the most part. Sure, a tiled window manager isn't for everyone, but truly, people just accept a new window opening and flying off to some apparently arbitrary portion of the screen, at a completely random seeming width and height? People truly just have a massive dock taking up a significant portion of the bottom of their screen? Eck.

I know you can customize all that but that took me a long time to wrangle OSX into an acceptable dev environment, and that's before I get into all the issues I had with various packages. Lord forbid you want to use emacs. This as well is arbitrary, maybe I should "just be a vscode guy" cause that's what everyone uses, but they already spent the money on hiring me so it's like, consider the economics of "forcing" devs to switch just because you think they'll be more productive on the shiny aluminum slab you prefer to use.

And... if people messing with their docks is actually causing a productivity issue, bring it up in performance review lol. Spend less time fiddling with your 2x4k monitor dock and more time just coding, on the laptop screen if necessary, oh woe. I'm guessing the true productivity issue is less that the hardware isn't working and more that the fiddling is fun! If I wasn't fiddling with my docks, I was fiddling with emacs, or, my personally built keyboard config, or, whatever else!


Conversely I've had the opposite experience with devs who wanted Macbooks: because they weren't Windows, they kept doing things which were "Unix-enough" in the Mac OS BSD environment, which then didn't work as expected on our fleets of RedHat and Ubuntu servers.

Rather then get their brew/GNU environments in order, I was constantly having to modify build scripts to try and detect and account for yet another dev who would complain "it's broken" because they weren't in a GNU environment, or what worked with BSD tools didn't work in the GNU environment.

Of course I simply ran a Linux desktop, so that worked great but it was very noticeable how much more reliable and how much quicker I could be interacting with our environment then the people living through multiple layers of indirection and abstraction or VMs.

It would have been much easier if they'd been locked into the corporate Windows environment, since then they would've been forced to actually run VMs in the platform they were targeting (but of course that environment was much worse for everyone).


Linux on Thinkpad with Lenovo dock working just fine for my colleagues. Not that I'm a fan of Lenovo's but I coincidentally happen to know multiple people with that setup and no dock/linux/thinkpad-related issues. Since you say they were since "forced" onto a nonfree platform, perhaps this was years ago?


3 years ago. Apparently I struck a nerve here? My daily driver is Linux and I’m by no means a Mac fanboy, but I do think consistency is good when the alternative is a distraction from real work.


> when the alternative is a distraction from real work

When, then I certainly agree, presuming of course that the alternative is not worse in that regard




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