Another place to look is at Lenovo laptops, I’ve had no problems installing Linux on them, and catch the right sale and you can get some really nice deals, though you have to be careful as they have a ridiculous number of variations on each model, some existing only for a single special deal.
I have a Thinkpad X1 running the latest Ubuntu desktop. Works great, suspend works, hibernate works, etc. All in all running perfectly though I haven’t tried the fingerprint reader.
That’s my current laptop since 2+ years go and I love it. Battery lasts a day no prob for regular work. If you’re constantly compiling it won’t, but then on battery it throttles a lot so it gives you good balance.
Anyway, with tlp you can tweak it a lot, I’m mostly going with the defaults, just lowered the max charge to protect the battery.
Only thing not working out of the box on Ubuntu is the fingerprint reader. I read that there are ways but I haven’t bothered.
I’ve exclusively used Thinkpads with Linux as my daily driver since 20 years now. Programming, office, general tinkering (no graphics-intensive stuff though) - had almost no issues in the whole time.
IMHO for Linux, you really can’t go wrong with any Thinkpad nowadays.
Some people mentioned Framework and I would definitely look into it, however you didn’t specify your country and they don’t sell everywhere in Europe. I was just in a market for a new laptop and really wanted it but it’s not available in my country.
Another options for an out of the box Linux laptop are Slimbook, Tuxedo Computers and Starlabs. I personally just ordered Slimbook Executive 14 yesterday.
I use my Windows work laptop as my personal laptop by booting Ubuntu off an external SSD. It is connected through the laptop’s thunderbolt USB C port, and Ubuntu runs smoothly without any issues as if it were off the internal drive. And not the most elegant solution, but I have Velcro strips on the drive and laptop, so to transform from work computer to personal, I just stick the drive on, plug it in, and boot up Linux! And the best part is that because it’s a completely different drive, there are no personal files/data actually saved on the work computer.
Most hardware works flawless in Linux, usually the worse thing that can happen is a propriatary Wifi or Bluetooth module but those are usually really easy to replace. Power managment isn’t the absolut best tho so you will probably have a little bit less battery life over all.
+1 for the Framework laptop from https://frame.work/ . It's my favorite laptop I've ever owned and the Linux support is excellent. There's a healthy Linux community surrounding this laptop and the Arch wiki even has an entire aricle dedicated to it.
I pre-ordered a 13 inch DIY Ryzen 7840u with 32 gigs and it cost me 1600€. I will spend another 50 on an SSD. Not sure you can get that kind of hardware for less, elsewhere.
A similarly specced XPS for example is easily a couple hundred more.
Edit: just checked again, at least Dell Italy only sells the 13 XPS with a 13th (or 12th) gen Intel. Fine, I don’t really mind it. But it sells for 2100€ (with 32GB, a 1TB drive and an OLED display). I guess that the OLED alone might be worth the price difference.
The point tho is that even at the same price, I’d still take framework’s repairability any day.
Funny thing is, I’m gonna replace my current XPS 13 with an 11th gen Intel just because the RAM is not upgradable and I’m stuck with 16gigs.
I’m sick and tired of having to get rid of perfectly fine hardware just because it’s not upgradable.
With framework I can spend another 100-150 down the road and bump my config’s 32 to 64.
@happyhippo@bankimu but if your not looking to spend 2000+ on a laptop then they don't offer anything. and the price for their min spec is insane a ryzen 5 8gb or ram and 250gb of storage. no ports, pretty standard display for $1,300 is insane
You can instead, for instance, get a Dell latitude with 32GB i7, for less than $1000. It comes preinstalled with an inferior “OS” (rather sales, telemetry and data harvesting avenue), Windows 11 Pro. But it begs to be wiped and installed Fedora or Arch or some other useful OS, which is easily done.
X1C gen8, been running fedora daily since 35. An update may have knocked bluetooth or hdmi power management out of balance once or twice, but the next one fixed it. Firmware updates come through beautifully. All in all, not a single complaint. Battery’s holding up great as well. I maybe get ~5-6hrs of hd video in full brightness, if that helps at all.
Currently typing this on my X1 Carbon Gen 9 with PopOS. It works great. Battery life is about 20% better than it was with Windows but Pop is optimized for laptops and most distros are a bit worse on battery.
Just stay away from anything that has a dedicated Nvidia GPU. I have tried everything, still no distro apart from popOS! that didn't massacre my battery....
I don’t mind mine. It works fine in Fedora, but I only use it for CUDA/AI stuff and no gaming. I probably could game, but haven’t cared to go down into that money pit yet.
I screwed up and followed outdated advice and guides for my initial install and config. That broke the proprietary driver after the first kernel update. After reading the official Fedora documentation, I now have the self compiling kernel driver that automatically updates itself after ever kernel change.
As far as AI, a laptop with a 3080Ti with 16GBV is quite capable. There is nothing else that comes close to that much VRAM in a mobile device.
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